Information Age (London, UK) articles from November 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from November 2005

Life in the M&A fast lane.(mergers and Acquisitions )
November 10, 2005... There is a lot to be said for the way that high street banking giant the Royal Bank of Scotland orchestrates its IT integration following a major acquisition - even though for those caught up in the maelstrom, its 'take no prisoners' approach...

"The Internet is a global medium and should not be in the control of one nation.".
November 10, 2005... Among the most contentious proposals being debated at the United Nations-led World Summit on the Information Society will be suggestions that US organisations should relinquish control over fundamental parts of the Internet. Currently, the...

Broadband in the sky.
November 10, 2005... The quest to expand global broadband coverage reached new heights this month when a team of scientists established an 11Mbit/s data link with an air-balloon 15 miles above the ground. Scientists from the international Capanina project...

Opening factions?
November 10, 2005... The open source community likes to portray itself as one happy family, diligently co-operating to produce software capable of rivalling that produced by large software houses, but given away for free. But scratch beneath the surface, and like...

Dateline - 2011.(reports of Gartner)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2005... "A new organisation type is emerging," announces John Mahoney, chief of research at IT sector advisory group Gartner. And it will be one that spells the end for the traditional IT department. At its Symposium events, Gartner's senior...

Source material.(Company Profile)
November 10, 2005... Cut through the partisan politics, the ponytails and the free-flowing anti-Microsoft vitriol, and the open source community has a lot to say for itself, both politically and practically. Enthusiasts emphasise that the open source approach to...

Lean times for online gambling.
November 10, 2005... Swedish online gaming company, Ongame, not only hosts poker games for the masses, it holds regular tournaments for its staff, making sure their skills at Texas Hold 'Em are up to scratch. This is just one example of Ongame's culture of...

Identity crisis.
November 10, 2005... The evolution of the connected enterprise has opened up swathes of hitherto hidden back-office applications to the outside world. While benefiting all manner of trusted associates, this has also increased the risks businesses face from...

Out with the old.
November 10, 2005... After extensive consultation, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations are due to be introduced in the UK in stages over the coming months. And businesses need to be aware of the implications for the management of their...

Reuters.
November 10, 2005... Information Age (IA): Reuters recently moved into a new building at Canary Wharf. What were your information management goals for the 'greenfield' site and what are your major ongoing projects? Keith Mitchell (KM): We're pushing the concept...

The grand acquisitor.
November 10, 2005... After 27 years at IBM, where he had risen to be general manager of the industry giant's Americas division, John Thompson took a bold step. As the 1990s closed, he left to join a company less than 1% the size of IBM and, at that time, a...

Chasing the long tail.
November 10, 2005... Experience suggests that pinning down the economics of the Internet is no easy task. Even as momentum builds around the so-called 'Web 2.0', the next generation of dot coms still has a worrying propensity to think technology first and business...

The birth of cool.
November 10, 2005... In the world of servers, blades are hot - perhaps too hot. For while analyst group Forrester Research reports that more and more businesses are viewing blade servers as an attractive platform for running core applications, getting rid of the...

Goodbye, world wide wait.(Google Maps based on Ajax set of technologies )
November 10, 2005... For many people, the draw came from zooming in on their photos of their homes from the space. But when Google Maps was launched in February 2005, it caused a different kind of excitement among web designers. They saw how users could navigate...

Master plan.(enterprise recourse planning and enterprise data model)
November 10, 2005... It was not meant to be this way. Back in the late 1990s, two watershed developments promised to eradicate the chaos being caused by so-called 'data silos' as these had grown up in departments and subsidiaries. One was enterprise recourse...

Regulatory response.
November 10, 2005... The need to invest in technology to help alleviate the burden imposed by regulators, requiring organisations to demonstrate both data integrity and business efficiency, has led some industry commentators to predict a wave of increased spending...

Compliance perceptions.
November 10, 2005... It has come as a shock to many senior managers who have taken the time to pour over the details of the wealth of new legislation impacting their corporate behavior. But the message - whether it appears in the small print of Europe's data...

New rules of engagement.
November 10, 2005... Ensuring compliance with the continuous stream of new regulations that has appeared over the past four years has proved both complex and onerous for most organisations. But, while burdensome, such requirements are having a broad payback in...

Room with a view.
November 10, 2005... With approximately 536,000 guest rooms across nearly 100 countries, InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (IHG) has the largest number of rooms in the hotel industry. It has more than 3,500 owned, leased, managed and franchised hotels, including...

Desperate measures.
November 10, 2005... After a short-lived pilot in 2004, electronics manufacturer Hitachi Europe decided offshore outsourcing of IT was not appropriate - until it lost its biggest customer. Hitachi Europe had run its highly skilled in-house IT team on a shared...

Life partners.(Pearl Group outsourcing information technology services)
November 10, 2005... Life insurance conglomerate Pearl Group is not going to get any new customers, ever again. But this is not the result of some disastrous management strategy, but because of the idiosyncratic business in which it operates: it manages closed...

Merging IT.
November 10, 2005... There can be few greater challenges for today's IT management than helping the business successfully navigate a course through a major acquisition. The board will want the deal completing as quickly, smoothly and as cheaply as possible. The...

Equal rights.
November 10, 2005... Grappling with technology licensing is becoming a common occurrence for today's CIOs. But few can say such issues have delayed major product launches. That is what happened to mobile handset maker Nokia. It's N91 'music phone' was meant to...

Month in review.
November 10, 2005... Swedish telecoms group Ericsson said it would acquire most of the assets of beleaguer-ed rival Marconi in a [pounds sterling]1.2 billion deal. Marconi, once a major force in telecoms equipment, has struggled ever since making a series of grave...

A hard sell.
November 10, 2005... Spend management first entered the executive lexicon back in 1983, following a seminal article in the Harvard Business Review. In it, management consultant Peter Kraljic argued that corporate purchasing should become a strategic function,...

Hyperion scales up.(Hyperion Solutions captures intelligence market with acquisition)
November 10, 2005... Until a few years ago, Hyperion Solutions was a non-participant in the mainstream business intelligence (BI) market. Its analytical applications and multi-dimensional database system were largely targeted at financial management tasks -...

Real-time Progress.
November 10, 2005... Since its foundation in the semi-converted surgery of a Massachusetts dentist 24 years ago, Progress Software has made a virtue out of being a technology leader without ever quite mastering the skill of also achieving market leadership....

RSA's token gesture.
November 10, 2005... In October 2005, Lloyds TSB became the first UK bank to undertake a large-scale trial of security tokens to its online banking customers. For many familiar with the technology, strong second-factor authentication systems are synonymous with RSA...

BEA reinforces independent streak.
November 10, 2005... Alfred Chuang, CEO of business middleware maker BEA Systems is probably not alone in having problems with his new iPod Nano. When he received email confirmation of his order from Apple.com, he noticed that the personalised inscription he had...

Shipments of smart mobile devices increase.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2005... Demand for 'smart' mobile devices that combine wireless application capabilities such as email with voice and PDA-like functionality continues to accelerate. Research by industry analyst group Canalys shows that shipments in the EMEA region...

Salaries on the rise.
November 10, 2005... An increased awareness in the scale of threat that organisations face from hackers, viruses, spyware and other computer-related attacks has prompted a boom in demand - and payrates - for IT security staff. Research by the Association of...

Resources.
November 10, 2005... How collaboration software works Ovum October 2005 www.ovum.com Culture and security are the leading barriers to team collaboration adoption Forrester Research October 2005 www.forrester.com Six key activities for measuring the value...

Collaboration on demand.
November 10, 2005... To their evangelists, on-demand applications herald a new era of software. Their centrally hosted functionality, delivered over the web as a service, will free IT departments from some of the burden of managing central servers and local...

The e-meeting mindset.
November 10, 2005... Measuring the effect of web-based collaborative environments on work practices, productivity and employee satisfaction is no simple task. There is no universally agreed terminology to describe the way people work together, nor are there...

The march of video.
November 10, 2005... Why has video conferencing never take off in the way it should have?" ponders Geoff Seabrook, CEO and founder of online meeting solutions provider Visual Nexus. It is a good question. For half a decade, the vendors have tried to convince...

Meeting points.
November 10, 2005... Collaboration technologies - albeit in a disjointed and embryonic form - have been part of the corporate fabric for over a decade. Teleconferencing, email, groupware and instant messaging have established an appetite and demonstrated the...

Distance earning.(digital platforms brings nations closer)
November 10, 2005... Working together over digital platforms removes the geographical constraints of business - and is revolutionising the global economy. But not only does online collaboration technology liberate work from national borders, it also liberates...

Making the connection.
November 10, 2005... It is one thing to encourage employees to interact more flexibly by giving them a collection of collaboration tools; it is another challenge altogether to provide a set of tools that talk to each other seamlessly. Much of that stems from...

High-octane interaction.
November 10, 2005... When it comes to collaboration technology, the different levels of buy-in can be extreme. For some, web conferencing and team collaboration tools are simply a means of eliminating business travel. Others, like Boeing though, are betting on...

On the edge.(business books )
November 10, 2005... There are many business books which discuss the application of technology as the route to corporate glory. Too few put the boot on the other foot and discuss how technological progress is reshaping the business landscape - often to the...

Security appliance investments.
November 10, 2005... Increasingly sophisticated network attacks are prompting companies to invest further in separate security appliances rather than implement and manage security tools on existing servers. That pattern was highlighted by a 17% rise in security...

Disaster recovery plans inadequate.
November 10, 2005... The majority of mid-sized companies are failing to put in place adequate business continuity measures, risking major disruption to their operations or even bankruptcy when staff cannot get into the office. Polling 100 IT managers at...

IT in the public sector.
November 10, 2005... IT in the public sector is less well integrated and resourced than in the private sector, according to a survey of 100 UK-based IT professionals from both sides of the divide by research group Vanson Bourne. The research, sponsored by...

Mergers and acquisitions in October.
November 10, 2005... The long-rumoured amalgamation of the UK's two major cable broadband providers, NTL and TeleWest Global, was finally agreed as NTL announced a $6 billion deal to acquire its rival. M&A activity, elsewhere though, was dominated by big players...

Month in Review: October 2005.
November 10, 2005... Online auction giant eBay bought Internet phone service provider Skype Technologies for $2.6 billion in cash and stock. The surprise acquisition scooped the business from under the nose of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and ended months of...

Wide area acceleration.
November 10, 2005... There are many reasons for organisations embarking on IT consolidation. Some need to bring control to a sprawling IT infrastructure that has grown through serial M&A activity; others see the centralisation of IT as a means of reducing support...

Mergers and acquisitions in September.
November 10, 2005... Ecommerce giant eBay paid $2.6 billion for Luxembourg-based Skype, promising a further $1.5 billion if performance targets are met. Skype was founded two years ago by the team behind KaZaA, which provided peer-to-peer filesharing software....

Financial results.
November 10, 2005... It is perhaps unsurprising that of the companies that published financial results in September (mainly non-US companies, as many North American businesses are in a quiet period) it is the IT support and services providers that lead the pack in...

Thin client shipments surge.
November 10, 2005... Annual shipments of thin client devices are expected to top the 1 million mark in EMEA during 2005, according to IDC, after robust growth in the first half of the year. The IT market watcher says that thin client hardware shipments...

Storage painpoints highlighted.
November 10, 2005... IT executives expect the volume of data they have under management to grow by 30% over the next two years, even though IT budgets are only likely to rise by 10% during the same period. According to the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Storage...

Infoconomy Index: New base level.
November 10, 2005... The steady decline in IT sector growth during the past year seems to have come to an end - with the industry settling around 8% to 9%. The Infoconomy Global Index, which charts the rate of revenue picture at the world's 200 largest IT...

Cognos raises its standard.
November 10, 2005... If business intelligence (BI) is going to provide a single, accurate picture of corporate performance for the executive board, having a whole suite of different analysis and reporting tools is the wrong way to go about it, says Rob Ashe, CEO of...

Novell plays a waiting game.
November 10, 2005... For the past few months, IT infrastructure software maker Novell has been under attack from its own shareholders. Following a series of lacklustre quarterly results, the investors have been demanding that Novell's management team takes urgent...

Oracle fuses with Siebel.
November 10, 2005... When the often-rumoured acquisition of customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Siebel by software giant Oracle, announced in September 2005, is finally complete, the CRM market will have been turned upside down. Oracle, once a...

Business service management.
November 10, 2005... European IT departments are embracing and investing in business service management (BSM), according to a new survey by the Help Desk Institute Europe. The research shows that the concept of BSM - a systems management technology that...

Shake up in enterprise telephony.
November 10, 2005... After a slow start to the year in EMEA, shipments of enterprise telephones and associated line equipment grew by 3.6% in the second quarter of 2005 to 5.05 million 'lines', up from 4.88 million in the corresponding period a year ago. The...

Voice over wireless LAN take-up to soar.
November 10, 2005... Take-up of voice over wireless local area network (VoWLAN) technology, which uses WiFi to hook mobile phones into voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks, is set to surge over the next few years. According to analyst group, Frost & Sullivan, revenues...

Server revenue slow down.
November 10, 2005... European demand for servers is slowing, with the spend in the mature Western European market trending towards zero. Research by market watcher IDC shows that server revenue in the EMEA region grew by just 2.4% to $4.0 billion in the second...

Scanning intelligence.
November 10, 2005... The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips is still in its infancy; many businesses struggle to justify the investment. But those companies brave enough to push ahead with deployments are finding some unexpected benefits. For...

Data decontamination.
November 10, 2005... Poor data quality - and a lack of ability to integrate data from multiple sources - is hurting organisations at all levels. While an absence of information may be frustrating, providing users with access to information that is simply wrong can...

Transmission pressures.
November 10, 2005... Radio broadcasters everywhere have welcomed the opportunity that the Internet presents to increase their audience size and geographical reach. But for the managers charged with providing the infrastructure to support Internet broadcasting, the...

The platform in the cloud.
November 10, 2005... In the five years since he left database and applications heavyweight Oracle to set up his own software company, Salesforce.com's CEO Mark Benioff has been the champion of the application-as-a-service market. Salesforce's popular applications...

Business feels the fear.
November 10, 2005... 'Business continuity' is always an entertaining subject for any lunch debate. Give the diners a few minutes and the stories start to pour out: the Internet pipe into Canary Wharf that is a single point of failure; the 'secure' tape backups...

Flights of fancy.
November 10, 2005... The British Airways (BA) London Eye is now a familiar part of the London skyline. It is also the most popular tourist attraction in the UK, carrying up to 20,000 passengers a day in its capsules. Before the attraction first opened, BA...

Trading information.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2005... The world of financial trading can seem frenzied and chaotic to the outsider, but the flurry of activity is all about the fast and accurate communication of information - a transfer that can make the difference between huge losses and gains....

Hasbro's compliance game plan.
November 10, 2005... Famous for its traditional board games Scrabble and Monopoly, as well as a range of children's toys that includes Action Man and Transformers, games manufacturer Hasbro is a international leader in the entertainment market with a primary focus...

BMI.
November 10, 2005... About the company With roots stretching back over 70 years, BMI (formerly British Midland) is the UK's second largest full-service scheduled airline. Its 41 jets make 1,700 flights every week to 40 destinations. The company employs over...

Back-up's dirty little secret.
November 10, 2005... The first the CTO knew about it was when his chief executive's BlackBerry abruptly stopped getting email. The CEO of the London-based travel company came screaming down the phone from a meeting room in New York demanding his email was restored....

Embedded IT.(Company Profile)
November 10, 2005... During a recent recruitment campaign for the head of IT delivery at a leading retail bank, one of the nine shortlisted applicants, George Stantin, stood out from the rest of the candidates for what might have been perceived as the wrong reason:...