Information Age (London, UK) articles from October 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from October 2005

The blog clog.
October 10, 2005... The brave new world of corporate collaboration makes a blog absolutely de rigeur if some industry commentators are to be believed. In September 2005, Forrester Research analyst Mark Dixon Bunger listed his 10 top technologies for anyone in the...

Culturing IT within business.
October 10, 2005... During my fledgling - and ultimately short-lived - career as a trainee consultant for Coopers & Lybrand (CICS, Cobol, DL/I analyst programmer to be accurate), the chasm between IT and the business could not have been wider. On one assignment,...

What is IT worth?(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... If talk from the party conference season is to be believed, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has set his heart on the revitalisation of public services being his enduring legacy - and IT is to play a leading role in delivering this programme....

Viral infection.
October 10, 2005... Campaigns that warn users of the business impact of downloading MP3 music files, or tuning into streaming audio files over the Internet (irrespective of how well the England cricket team may be doing in the Ashes) are normally welcomed by CIOs....

Softening the blow.
October 10, 2005... In an editorial some 15 months ago, Information Age gave its opinion on the latest development in the European Commission's legal battle with software giant Microsoft: "All the historical precedents suggest that the EU's judgement on Microsoft...

Fond farewell.
October 10, 2005... It is our sad duty to report that in September 2005, former Hewlett-Packard (HP) CEO and chairman Lew Platt passed away. Platt worked for HP for over 33 years from 1966 until 1999, when he retired. Current HP CEO Mark Hurd described how...

Mobile and fixed services.
October 10, 2005... It is a staggering statistic. According to John Wright, general manager of mobility at BT Retail, four out of ten mobile calls are made from inside offices. Forget the cost - the modern day business executive rates convenience above everything;...

Faster, smarter, cheaper.
October 10, 2005... The year before last they were thinking about it. Last year, they thought about it some more. This year, according to a growing body of indicators, European businesses are throwing away their private branch exchanges (PBXs) and buying into the...

Life after POTS.
October 10, 2005... The vision...and the reality Vision The post-POTS public network will bring broadband dial-tone to the masses, significantly reduce telco operating costs, and provide a flexible and more responsive platform on which to develop and...

The unified foundations.(communications protocols)
October 10, 2005... For most CIOs (chief information officers), the goal of putting all their organisation's applications, including voice and video, onto one big, simple and intelligent Internet protocol (IP) backbone is a top priority. Many have already done so,...

From vision to reality.
October 10, 2005... The computing and the telecommunications industries have been talking about their imminent marriage for a long, long time. But somehow, the dream has never quite been realised. The two worlds of two-way, real-time voice calls on the one hand,...

Powerful connections.
October 10, 2005... When converged networks uniting data and voice traffic were first developed, the 'carrot' that vendors used to lure customers to invest in the technology was the saving they would make in reduced phone bills. Although there are still some...

Helping hands.(voice and data systems)
October 10, 2005... The days of separate enterprise voice and data systems are numbered: unifying voice and data onto a single IP-based network not only offers compelling cost savings, but it can power radical improvements to business processes. Integrated...

Voicing concerns.
October 10, 2005... Today's network security managers spend little time worrying about telephones. Most are too busy trying to protect their data network from hacking, viruses, spam and a myriad of other threats that have become part of day-to-day business. ...

Readers' letters: September 2005.(Letter to the Editor)
October 10, 2005... Personal touch Your article on the state of ecommerce (Information Age July 2005), rang a number of bells. I particularly agreed that this technology is all about re-writing the fundamental relationship with customers. As a consequence,...

Getting the message across.
October 10, 2005... Most businesses now recognise that they would struggle to operate without their messaging systems - email, instant messaging, mobile messaging and other collaborative tools. But they also understand that, like any other business tool, messaging...

IP telephony.
October 10, 2005... The early caution with which many enterprises treated voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony, involving years of piloting and evaluating the new technology, has turned into a rapid adoption. A new report from analyst group Forrester Research shows...

Let's work together.
October 10, 2005... The promise of a revolution in communications seems to be always just around the corner. In recent years the hype for collaborative tools has far outweighed any large scale practical implementations. But a number of simultaneous advances in...

Month in review: August 2005.
October 10, 2005... Chinese hardware maker Lenovo released its first set of financial results following its acquisition of IBM's historically loss-making PC business. While the acquisition dramatically increased Lenovo's global market share, the company...

Lawson responds to shock therapy.
October 10, 2005... The survival instinct finally kicked in at Lawson Software in early 2005 when its Stockholm-based rival Intentia called Richard Lawson and the board of the business applications software company with an acquisition proposal. The Lawson team had...

Data protection.
October 10, 2005... In May 2005, financial services giant UBS joined a growing list of companies that have suffered the highly public embarrassment of having to admit to losing customer data. In this case, a hard disk containing customer records had gone missing...

Skype's the limit.
October 10, 2005... The rising popularity of cheap telephone calls made over the Internet threatens to wipe millions off the value of incumbent telecoms providers across the globe. But can a company that offers such technology also create value? The executives at...

Stats entertainment: Salaries.
October 10, 2005... Switzerland is probably most famous for its watches, cheeses and international reputation for non-partisanship. But it could also be on the cusp of earning a reputation for being the choice place to work for IT professionals. According to...

Open sores?
October 10, 2005... There is no shortage of open source enthusiasts willing to expound the virtues of software that is developed by a global community and is made available for free. But could it be that the corporate appetite for open source is beginning to wane?...

Extreme IT: Out in the cold.
October 10, 2005... When choosing a location for a data centre, it is a brave manager that would select a spot on a 200 metre-thick ice sheet, where the summer temperatures peak at -5C before dropping to -30C in winter, and where there is no daylight for 55 days...

Off the shelf CIOs.
October 10, 2005... Where is the best place to work for a CIO? If recent appointments are anything to go by, heading up the IT systems at US retailer Wal-Mart appears to be a safe bet as a stopping off point on the road to landing a plum executive job and a great...

"The worst thing an IT company can do is to keep its security flaws secret.".
October 10, 2005... At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas in July 2005, one presentation caused unprecedented excitement. A technical researcher promised to reveal details of a vulnerability in Cisco's Internet Operating System (IOS) - the software...

An issue of price...
October 10, 2005... Ask British Airways' CIO Paul Coby which industry figures he admires most, and two names come to the fore. The first is perhaps predictable: that hero of the frictionless supply chain, Michael Dell. The second is more of a wildcard: Marc...

M&A activity - August 2005.
October 10, 2005... E.piphany, which now prefers to drop the dot from its official name, was famed for trying to put the 'e' into eCRM, and thereby snatch the online CRM prize from under the nose of market goliath Siebel. To a certain degree it succeeded: it built...

Key financial performances in August 2005.
October 10, 2005... That has created some pretty lumpy financial performances. Having reported a weak first quarter - and been forced to lay off 12% of its workforce as a result - business service management software vendor BMC bounced back in its latest period to...

ERP market growth falls back.
October 10, 2005... Demand for enterprise resource planning software (ERP) in Europe will slow dramatically over 2005, although the weakness will be disguised at some larger vendors by acquisitions. According to AMR Research, ERP licence revenues will rise by...

Survey highlights lack of project control.
October 10, 2005... A survey of 400 European CIOs, CTOs and IT directors has highlighted a worrying trend - the majority of IT departments approach the management of their portfolio of projects in an uncoordinated and seemingly reckless fashion. Out of the...

The disappearing security budget.
October 10, 2005... It was a black day at credit card services provider CardSystems when it became apparent that breaches of its IT security had exposed 40 million Visa and MasterCard customers' details. The attack threatened to destroy its reputation as a trusted...

Remote risk.
October 10, 2005... Lightweight, portable computer equipment such as laptops, mobile phones, removable storage media and PDAs has transformed working life. Employees can work from home without missing out on daily developments; information can be retrieved...

Safety in numbers.
October 10, 2005... Handing over responsibility for an enterprise's welfare to an outsider may seem counter-intuitive to some IT directors, but the sheer complexity of keeping up to date with threats is persuading many that precious resources are better focussed...

Security by the book.
October 10, 2005... In many ways compliance and security hold similar positions within the IT industry: both make wide and varied demands that defy simplistic solutions; both are consistently among the top priorities for the board; both require considerable...

Voicing new security fears.
October 10, 2005... Veteran IT managers charged with securing a new implementation of voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology - the cheaper and more flexible way to make phone calls - could be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu. The old PSTN (public switched...

The wide angle.
October 10, 2005... Survey after survey confirms it. Security has become the single most important issue for IT and communications management, as companies struggle to deal with an ever-broader range of threats and the associated cost and complexity. To meet...

Reports and supplier listings.
October 10, 2005... Mobile Messaging Forecast Europe: 2005 to 2010 Forrester Research March 2005 www.forrester.com How to Get Started on Collaboration Services Gartner July 2005 www.gartner.com Identity Management: Time for Action Ovum July 2005...

Lost for words.
October 10, 2005... A $1.45 billion fine, imposed on investment bank Morgan Stanley in May 2005, has done much to highlight the importance of a robust message archiving system. The award was imposed not because the judge had found conclusively against the company,...

Smooth talking.
October 10, 2005... The underlying technology to handle text messages, faxes, voice, email and instant messages as objects in a single mailbox and to convert these messages into alternative formats to facilitate communication on the move has been around since the...

Mail domination.
October 10, 2005... The popularity of the BlackBerry is testament to the corporate love affair with email: in meetings, on commuter trains, in conference sessions, the now familiar buzz of the mobile device's incoming email alert sends a flurry of hands towards...

Legal documents.
October 10, 2005... There is a degree of panic at the executive level within many organisations over the numerous new pieces of legislation governing record keeping, says Andy Mulholland, global CTO at IT services company Capgemini. "It is almost as if people...

Closing the gate.
October 10, 2005... When the first emails were sent over the ARPAnet - the forefather of the Internet - they were intended for a limited, trusted audience of academics and researchers. Convenience of communication to them outweighed security considerations. Today...

Infoconomy Index in August 2005: Downward pressure.(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Growth in the IT sector in August continued the gradual decline that has been evident for the past 10 months. The Infoconomy Global Index, which charts the rate of revenue growth at the world's 200 largest IT companies, dropped by 0.3% during...

Lenovo moves out from IBM's shadow.
October 10, 2005... Thomas Watson Jr, CEO of IBM from 1956 to 1971, encouraged his employees to put on their office walls posters of "Think", the company motto coined by his father and IBM's founder, Thomas Watson Sr. Today, the word is associated with tens of...

Watching brief.
October 10, 2005... We are living in a 'maximum surveillance society', says Clive Norris, professor of sociology at the University of Sheffield. From the moment we step outside of our homes, he writes in his book of the same name, our activities are monitored by a...

Who's who?
October 10, 2005... Identity management (IdM) was born out of the complexity of modern IT application stacks. Employees in all sectors need access to an ever-increasing number of applications, databases and networks, with each requiring a separate username and...

Tech leisure pleasure.
October 10, 2005... Any gadget lover will be acutely aware of the problem of multiple remote controls, as they try to change TV channels with the air conditioner handset and zap the DVD player with the CD selector. Guests at the luxurious Emirates Palace in Abu...

Open source defection.
October 10, 2005... Like all public sector bodies, the Central Scotland Police (CSP) force is acutely aware of the need to balance service provision with budget constraints. In the early part of this decade, managers at the organisation decided that the use of...

Performance monitors.(website not working properly)
October 10, 2005... As the deadline for submitting online tax returns to the UK's Inland Revenue approached in January 2005, users of the web site were the first to notice a problem: some were given error messages; others a helpline number; in the worst cases no...

Insinger de Beaufort.
October 10, 2005... Information Age (IA): What made you choose to upgrade your PC equipment en masse? John Bryant (JB): We were using some fairly archaic Gateway tower PCs. We were hitting up against software vendors' minimum hardware requirements quite hard...

The extended enterprise.
October 10, 2005... For much of the last decade it was a tactic viewed with great suspicion by many IT professionals - a management 'get out clause' favoured by business executives who doubted the strategic value of IT and who were mostly concerned about its...

Charging crisis.
October 10, 2005... Eric Rudder is sitting in a briefing room in London talking to a group of business journalists, when he is asked a question about software licensing. He buries his head in his hands: "My head hurts...my head hurts a lot when I think about that...