Information Age (London, UK) articles from September 2003

Information Age (London, UK) archives from September 2003

Leading Geeks.
September 10, 2003... Everyone knows the stereotype: pizza-eating, coke-swilling, socially inept, hygiene-challenged, sci-fi loving geeks; they cannot and will not fit in with corporate culture, will laugh at a manager that tries to pull rank, use their technology...

Management gurus.
September 10, 2003... Some will say it all started with Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of the past 100 years; some think Michel Porter was pivotal; others go back further, perhaps to the spark provided by Edwardian Frederick Winslow Taylor. No...

IT industry returns <BR>to growth.(overall growth rate of largest IT companies)
September 10, 2003... After a two year recession - the longest and deepest in its 40-year history - the IT industry has returned to growth. Figures for the Infoconomy Global Index - a measure of the overall growth rate of the world's 200 largest IT companies -...

Executive Briefing on Enterprise Storage.(storage overcapacity )
September 10, 2003... In the opening three months of 2003, in the midst of an economic slowdown, organisations as a whole increased their storage capacity by a stunning 49%, buying in that quarter an additional 175.6 petabytes of free space. In any other...

Scaling the data mountain.(data storage market)
September 10, 2003... The data storage market likes to deal in big numbers. Never more so than in October 2000, when the University of California at Berkeley declared that as much information was being stored magnetically every five years or so as was accumulated...

MicroStrategy's tenacity pays off.(business intelligence software company)
September 10, 2003... Throughout the turbo-charged growth years of the 1990s, Mike Saylor, CEO of business intelligence (BI) software company MicroStrategy, wore a gold ring featuring a beaver motif. He would often draw attention to it, highlighting how much he...

Low cost, high value.(Linux distributors' Web site)
September 10, 2003... Like a free lunch, there is really no such a thing as a free operating system. The code is free to download from any Linux distributors' web site, and it is 'maintained' by a loose knit community of programmers, but the overall cost of moving...

Data assurance.(back up and business continuity plans)(Brief Article)
September 10, 2003... Even a back-up policy that looks sound on paper can be found wanting in practice. CTD, a German call centre operator working for the likes of Deutsche Telekom and Computer Associates, suffered a fire in its air conditioning system in...

Taking control.(storage systems vendors shift strategy)
September 10, 2003... The centre of the storage universe has shifted. In the last three years, storage systems vendors have moved their emphasis away from the hardware platforms that have provided their main differentiation, and they have embraced the software...

Preventative medicine.(Web hosting services provider)
September 10, 2003... Web hosting services provider TDM Group does not bother with intrusion detection software, the watchdog software that tries to identify potentially rogue data within the corporate network. It is not that co-founder and technical manager Tarek...

ObjectStar pitches panacea for process problems.(enterprise software)
September 10, 2003... There have been some strange and wonderful software products targeted at the enterprise software customer over the years, but few have been quite as intriguing as Huron, an ambitious, multifunctional and much misunderstood development tool...

The <em>Information Age</em> Interview: Opodo.(real-time e-commerce Web site)
September 10, 2003... Information Age: As an organisation founded by nine of Europe's largest airlines, Opodo clearly has an unusual corporate structure. It must be quite a challenge bringing all those companies systems together. What are you key priorities? ...

Hackney cleans house.(outsourcing deals)
September 10, 2003... Despite all the focus on multi-billion pound outsourcing deals, sometimes smaller IT orders provide the most illuminating lessons. In its review of local authority efficiency in 2000/1, the UK government's Audit Commission identified...

Executive Briefing on Linux.(Linux accepted as platform for mission-critical applications)
September 10, 2003... For something that was originally conceived in a bored Finnish student's bedroom one summer, Linux has made surprisingly deep inroads into the enterprise. Today, the Unix-like operating system helps power more than one-third of all web servers...

The Innovator's Solution.(innovations of small firms not equaled by big competitors)
September 10, 2003... In 1997, a Harvard Professor and student of the disk drive industry, Clayton Christensen, wrote a book called The Innovator's Dilemma, coined the phrase 'disruptive innovation', and instantly joined the elite rank of US business gurus. The...

Global thinker.(real-time data warehousing)
September 10, 2003... In IT circles, the name Randy Mott calls to mind two things - beer and nappies. In the 1990s, Mott, then CIO of retail giant Wal-Mart, pioneered the creation of a vast, near real-time data warehouse. Not only did the system enable...

Supply side.(customer demand for Linux rising)
September 10, 2003... The majority of IT vendors used to be very wary of Linux. Server vendors were worried about the effect on their own operating system businesses, while software suppliers feared that a raft of free products would undermine sales of commercial...

Revivalist movement.(world's second biggest IT services company)
September 10, 2003... Electronic Data Systems (EDS) has always had a split personality. Both rigidly conservative and yet daringly aggressive, the world's second biggest IT services company has always seemed something of an enigma to outsiders. For years, the...

The information toddlers.(information technology)
September 10, 2003... During the summer, a visitor who came into Information Age's offices posed a question: To what extent has information technology penetrated the world of business? We quickly agreed it was probably as low as 5% - meaning 95% of business...

Who are these SCO guys, anyway?(Linux operating system)
September 10, 2003... "Those guys in Utah are no dummies." That is how a recent article in Forbes magazine described the management team behind SCO, the company that has outraged the open source community by claiming that it owns key components of the Linux...

Open invitation.(major Linux conferences)
September 10, 2003... For years, senior IT management did not care for Linux advocates: they were highly suspicious of the collective programming effort; they couldn't see how the software could be adequately supported; they didn't want the 'ponytail brigade'...

Sun hopes Orion will belt the opposition.
September 10, 2003... Guests at St Andrews' Old Course Hotel who looked out over the golf course one morning in July were greeted with an amazing sight: golf legend Gary Player joined in a breakfast-time round by Scott McNealy, chairman, president and CEO of Sun...

Beating the blackout.(IT business continuity, disaster recovery systems)
September 10, 2003... At 4.11pm on 14 August 2003, the lights flickered briefly but kept burning at IBM's huge data centre 40 miles outside New York City. At the same moment, millions of homes and offices across seven US states and provinces were plunged into...

Peregrine flies out of bankruptcy protection.
September 10, 2003... Not many software companies go through Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and come out unscathed. Fewer still thrive and prosper if and when they do emerge: customers melt away and suppliers are reluctant to extend credit. Not so Peregrine...

Rules of engagement.(high-value IT projects)
September 10, 2003... Gore Vidal once said that, "in middle age, litigation replaces sex". For most of those involved in managing IT contracts, litigation - or indeed any level of dispute - does not hold such appeal. With high-value IT projects, disputes are,...

Lessons from a distant shore.(India's call centers)
September 10, 2003... It is early evening in Bangalore and several thousand minibuses and 'corporate taxis' are navigating the crowded streets - as they do every night - collecting young graduates from their homes and ferrying them to the start of their working day....

End to end, step by step.(enterprise application integration issues)
September 10, 2003... Eddie Page, the purchasing manager of Eastman Chemicals, had a process problem. When people ordered materials or parts through the company's e-procurement system, the price agreed with suppliers did not always agree with those that had been...

Readers' letters.(traditional IT strategies)
September 10, 2003... Not dead, just metamorphosing I enjoyed your article, On the death of IT strategy (Information Age, July 2003). Your conclusion echoes my experience of working with leading companies around the world - IT strategy has not died, but it is...

The SAN challenge.(disk storage usage)
September 10, 2003... The web sites of technology industry analysts and consultants are awash with surveys of disk storage usage. All tell the same story: most businesses barely make use of half their disk storage capacity; in some cases it's as low as 10% to 20%....

Mission critical?(IT departments in business and government)
September 10, 2003... Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has described it as one of the most serious competitive threats to his business. Computer companies as diverse as Sun Microsystems and Dell, Oracle and SAP, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and IBM are either selling...

Wireless disconnect.(quality of service issues)
September 10, 2003... The mobile data revolution has hit a snag. And the stumbling block comes in the form of so-called 'quality of service' (QoS) techniques - or rather the lack of them. QoS is meant to allow mobile operators, such as Vodafone or Orange, to...

The cost of data.(end-user storage demand)
September 10, 2003... Ask the representatives of almost any software or hardware vendor why they think organisations' storage infrastructures are in such disarray and they will proclaim in unison: because they haven't tackled ballooning end-user storage demand by...