InfoWorld articles from January 2004

InfoWorld archives from January 2004

2005: The year ahead.(information technology)
January 3, 2004... The coming 12 months will bring a continued focus on security, app dev tools, on-demand, storage, and desktop search By InfoWorld news staff 2004 closed with a veritable blizzard of mergers and a downpour of desktop search offerings --...

CAN-SPAM Act struggles to make a difference - Rising tide of spam confounds attempts to set effective sanctions.(Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act)
January 3, 2004... A year after the U.S. Congress passed the first federal anti-spam law, observers see little evidence that the law has cut the amount of unwanted commercial e-mail arriving in U.S. residents' inboxes. Most vendors of anti-spam products charted...

Cognos aligns with Composite - Composite launches Version 3.0 of its information integration software.
January 3, 2004... Cognos and Composite Software on Monday joined forces to combine BI reporting with EII (enterprise information integration) software. The partnership is the latest in an increasingly important blending of the two software types, which...

Sun to sweeten storage - Project Honeycomb will allow users to 'Google' their data.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
January 3, 2004... Sun Microsystems has quietly moved a team of approximately 20 of its research engineers into its network storage product group, assigning them the task of developing a storage appliance designed for massive data archives. At the heart of the...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Cut from the same cloth - Often, no-name systems match the first-tier stuff spec for spec -- and that's a good thing.
January 3, 2004... If you doubt that PC desktops, notebooks, and servers have hit the commodity phase, grab the specs for your favorite box. Let's say it's a dual-processor Xeon. Do a Web search on your server's CPU speed. Of the systems that pop up, choose a few...

REALITY CHECK: PeopleSoft customers: Where do we go from here? Apps customers see uncertain future following impending merger with Oracle.(Column)
January 3, 2004... It looks like Oracle/PeopleSoft is a done deal. But why would Larry Ellison spend $10.3 billion for overlapping technology? For me, the answer comes in two parts. In the short term, Oracle wants PeopleSoft's customer-support business....

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: Unsung heroes of open source - Independent developers play a vital role in computing progress.
January 3, 2004... When it comes to cell phones, I'm a trailing-edge guy. Fancy, new smartphones are appealing, but small-town New Hampshire lacks the network to support them. So when I dunked my phone into a pond this fall while reporting a loon sighting from my...

CTO CONNECTION: Your shiny new wreck - Ultra-custom cars and made-to-order IT projects have something in common.(Column)
January 3, 2004... One of my favorite TV shows at the moment is MTV's Pimp My Ride. The premise of each episode is the same: An MTV viewer with an incredibly broken-down car is surprised with a complete car makeover from the crew of West Coast Customs . We're not...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: I'm not jokin', Target's still smokin' - My resolutions: No Microsoft, no PeopleSoft.(Column)
January 3, 2004... Although some readers say I'm already perfect in every way (thanks, Mom), I know better. Here are my resolutions for the year: - Spend more quality time with Apache. He's getting to be an old dog, not unlike yours truly. - Live a pure...

EDITOR'S LETTER: New Year, New Scores - Looking back at 33 technologies that made a difference -- and what's next.(Editorial)
January 3, 2004... Let's hope your new year's carousing didn't burn you out on festivities, because this issue -- our first of the new year -- is a celebration in its own right. With our fifth annual Technology of the Year awards, we honor the most enterprising...

Four CPUs aren't always greater than two - Appro's speedy, quad-Opteron 1U server has limited uses.(Product/Service Evaluation)
January 3, 2004... Yeah, it's got a Hemi. Four of them, in fact. Appro recently unveiled its 1U, quad-Opteron, 848-based 1142H server and I put it through its paces. The short story is this server moves like a much larger system. Although the server is packed...

HyperIP boosts data-replication efficiency - NetEx appliance speeds storage transfers across noisy WAN links.(Product/Service Evaluation)
January 3, 2004... Remote replication of storage is more popular today than ever, and it promises to become even more important, thanks to government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley that require data replication. To transport the data, some organizations lease...

SQL backup battle has clear winner: LiteSpeed 2005 - Imceda's SQL LiteSpeed 2005 gets nod over Idera's SQLsafe 1.2 and its potential for security holes.
January 3, 2004... Two major factors drive database backups these days: compliance and disk space. Some compliance controls now ask for backup encryption to protect against off-site tape theft, while the size of current databases make it more difficult than ever...

Backups at warp speed - HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 LTO-3 tape drive satisfies the need for speed.(Brief Article)(Product/Service Evaluation)
January 3, 2004... Think tape drives are boring? Take a look at Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks Ultrium 960, a single-drive unit based on LTO (Linear Tape Open)-3. HP was second to Certance in the year-end rush to launch faster, more capacious LTO-3 devices, but...

Desperately seeking SOA - Enterprise apps look beyond the Web services specs.(service- oriented architecture)
January 3, 2004... The enterprise software acronym of the year must be SOA (service- oriented architecture). The concept behind SOA -- that applications should expose their functionality as "services" in a way that can be accessed by any authorized external...

The best products of 2004.
January 3, 2004... The most innovative and effective solutions among the nearly 300 products we tested during the year, the following 33 products are our Technology of the Year Award winners. Hardware and Software Platforms Best Server Hardware ...

Better quality through software - Dev tools address the challenges of evolving architectures.
January 3, 2004... SOA (service-oriented architecture) edged out Web services in 2004 as the preferred label for decentralized systems woven together by the exchange of XML messages. Whatever you call this approach to application development, it presents new...

Data under lock and key - Database management vendors aim to assist compliance.
January 3, 2004... The year in databases saw its share of technology advances. The rise of commodity 64-bit hardware, native XML storage in relational databases, configuration wizards, auto-tuning... all these developments are making databases more powerful,...

Hands across the enterprise - Management tools continue to extend their reach.
January 3, 2004... Viewed as a pipe dream only a few years ago, the "autonomous datacenter" gained momentum in 2004, leading some to claim IT as we know it will be dead within a decade. But that's obvious, isn't it? In 1994, Usenet was still useful, and Spam...

VoIP rings in the new year - Internet telephony has finally come into its own.(Column)
January 3, 2004... I really blew it last year when I wrote about networking in the 2004 Technology of the Year Awards. It appears that I read the landscape the same way the Democratic National Committee read the hearts of the American people. At the end of...

Year of the enterprise Wiki - Lightweight Web collaboration gets down to business.
January 3, 2004... Ward Cunningman created the first Wiki site in 1995 to collaborate with a band of like-minded programmers on the elucidation of common software patterns. That work continues today at Microsoft, where he works in the patterns and practices...

Fibre Channel still rules the SAN - In a red hot year for storage networks, iSCSI still simmered.
January 3, 2004... If you were expecting breathtaking new storage technologies to appear, 2004 was probably a disappointment. But if you were looking for better storage solutions at lower prices, then it was your kind of year. We saw many of the technologies...

Innovation trumps commoditization - Worthwhile platform and architecture choices abound.
January 3, 2004... In 2004, we started seeing the products of engineering that went on underground during the recession. Whereas the market as a whole is doing the wait-and-see, early adopters are partying their butts off over true competition in operating...

On the road to prevention - Networking and security vendors steer toward granular control.
January 3, 2004... Even though it happened late in the year, 2004 will probably be remembered as the year that Microsoft's Internet Explorer slipped. Mozilla's Firefox browser finally reached release status in early November, and by early December had made a...

Product Previews.(Buyers Guide)
January 3, 2004... CrownPeak details on-demand search, Foundry forges Web accelerators, FineGround unveils dashboard, and Automation Centre releases Tracker Suite 7.0 By InfoWorld staff CrownPeaklaunches on-demand site search Hosted content...

Security: The year ahead.
January 5, 2004... 2003 started with the Slammer Internet worm and went downhill from there. It has been labeled the Year of the Worm and called "the worst year ever" by more than one security expert. Will 2004 bring more of the same, or will it be remembered as...

Software acquisitions spawn EMC 2.0.
January 5, 2004... EMC bought itself a $3.6 billion extreme makeover last year. Beginning in July, the storage titan began an aggressive campaign of software company acquisitions that within six months saw it acquire backup vendor Legato Systems, content...

SCO steps up licensing battle.(Brief Article)
January 5, 2004... SCO sent out letters to selected large Linux users, claiming that they violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The letter outlines what SCO claims are copyright violations related to Linux. It lists 71 files from the Linux 2.4.21...

Fujitsu teams with Sumitomo.(Brief Article)
January 5, 2004... Fujitsu is consolidating its compound semiconductor operations with those of Sumitomo Electric Industries in a joint venture aimed at creating devices for the telecommunications infrastructure and the enterprise and digital home-application...

Microsoft to pay SPX $60 million.(Brief Article)
January 5, 2004... Microsoft will pay $60 million for violating a patent held by a division of SPX, a manufacturing and technology company. A jury found that Microsoft had willfully infringed a technology patent held by Imagexpo, with the Whiteboard feature of...

Macromedia backs JavaScript in Director tool.
January 5, 2004... Macromedia on Monday announced Macromedia Director MX 2004, an upgraded version of the multimedia authoring tool that adds support for JavaScript, Flash MX 2004 content, and DVD-Video. The product also develops projector files for Windows...

Security regroups and rebuilds.
January 5, 2004... Perhaps it was the flood of viruses and worms distributed via spam techniques that kept catching everyone off guard. Perhaps it was the abysmal budgets that kept development money out of the industry. Whatever the cause or combination of...

Collaboration makes its presence felt.
January 5, 2004... Ordinarily, I find the phrase "collaboration technology" to be almost as oxymoronic as "automotive linen." But 2003 was a funny year. For one thing, in an odd sort of harmonic convergence, all three major integrated collaboration vendors --...

Storage technologies lay groundwork for expansion.
January 5, 2004... Following the storage market is like watching a three-ring circus: It's never boring, but there's so much happening, it's easy to miss part of the action. Despite a lackluster economy, storage vendors offered an impressive number of...

Networking plumbing needs repair.
January 5, 2004... Networking is the plumbing of information technology. Like conventional plumbing, most people take it for granted until a pipe bursts or a faucet starts dripping. But unlike the pipes in houses and offices, networking technology is evolving at...

NAS vendors add enterprise connections - StorageTek allies with BlueArc and ONStor.
January 10, 2004... NAS systems are branching out into new areas, as vendors expand the reach of the technology in order to simplify management and boost scalability. BlueArc, for instance, has been certified to work with StorageTek's FlexLine online storage...

Apple unveils server, storage - Company looks at lower price points for server products.
January 10, 2004... Apple Computer will come out with product guns blazing at this week's Macworld Conference & Expo, armed with several business and consumer offerings aimed at both the server and storage markets. Presaging the event, Apple announced an...

Product Previews.
January 10, 2004... HP adds to Edge device lineup, Groove issues templates, Gupta boosts 4GL, and Inter-Tel announces two new collaboration products By InfoWorld staff HP Pushes the Edge Hewlett-Packard has announced its ProCurve Edge Architecture,...

McAfee tool identifies exposed data - SiteDigger checks Google for information on the Web.(Brief Article)
January 10, 2004... Recognizing that Google's search engine can become a repository for far too much information, McAfee this week released an updated version of its Foundstone SiteDigger security tool that helps enterprises identify damaging information that may...

Oracle Unveils Database Lite.(Brief Article)
January 10, 2004... Oracle is shipping Oracle Database Lite 10g, a small-footprint mobile database for laptops and PDAs. The company is positioning the database as a participant in grid environments, because of its ability to simultaneously have both application...

Microsoft Rolls Out Anti-Spyware.(Brief Article)
January 10, 2004... Microsoft released a free trial copy of anti-spyware software it purchased last month, marking the company's entry into the fast-growing market for products that block surreptitious snooping programs, and promised monthly releases of tools to...

Adobe Touts Policy Server.(Adobe Systems Inc. new server software)(Brief Article)
January 10, 2004... Adobe Systems rolled out its LiveCycle Policy Server, which lets enterprise users apply policies to PDF documents to improve regulatory compliance and information privacy efforts. Adobe's new J2EE-based Policy Server lets a PDF document's...

Microsoft nixes XP for Itanium - Move seen as final nail in Itanium 2 for workstations coffin.
January 10, 2004... Marking the death of Itanium within workstations, Microsoft has said it will cease offering a version of Windows XP for Intel's Itanium 2 processor. The move comes after several hardware providers ceased producing workstations with the...

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: Open source documentation - Collaborative technologies are supplanting traditional channels for product tech support.
January 10, 2004... On Christmas day, after the potlatch subsided, I headed out for a run. When I flicked on my MP3 player, however, I heard... nothing. Glancing down at the display of my Creative Nomad MuVo TX I saw an unwelcome message: "File system error."...

CTO CONNECTION: A heyday for open source? This may be the year when enterprise apps go fully mainstream, even if small fees are attached.
January 10, 2004... As I begin to execute InfoWorld's initiatives for 2005, I'm finding that open source is still central to my overall IT strategy. My view of open source in the enterprise, however, is changing as open source matures. When I first rolled...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Try as I might, I can't wreck a Mac - I'm determined to push the envelope in my Mac lab, but everything withstands nicely.
January 10, 2004... The press and a skeptical market have lined up one flaming hoop after another to ensure that Apple always has one more thing to do before it's taken seriously. Financial publications have finally had their epiphanies, and I hope the Mac-shy see...

REALITY CHECK: Hubba hubba: Get ready for data hubs - Data hubs promise real-time connections between data updates and application workflow events.
January 10, 2004... Data hubs -- also called data repositories or master data records -- are the next evolutionary step in solving the problem of data integration. The idea stems from the fact that traditional ways of parsing data are no longer competitive....

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Columnist rambles, gambles, leave CES in shambles - Was that Bill Gates or Samuel L. Jackson?
January 10, 2004... In what has become an annual tradition, last week I staged a one-man "sick out" from my day job to visit the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. And I'd like to correct a few wild rumors before they get out of hand. First, I did not walk off...

EDITOR'S LETTER: One week in IT history - Here are some specific articles worth noting -- and the larger trends in IT that they symbolize.(Editorial)
January 10, 2004... When journalists are in a self-congratulatory mood (or perhaps after a few mojitos, which may be the same thing), they sometimes claim they get the first crack at writing history. That's certainly true for journalists who cover wars,...

Corporate dashboards, easy as PiiE - Digital Harbor's deep-diving visual toolkit builds ontologies for maximum data linkage.(Professional Interactive Information Environment)
January 10, 2004... When my brother, the TV ad writer, worked for one of the major burger chains, he complained that the success or failure of each advertisement would be decided immediately by the next morning's sales reports. It didn't matter if his 15-second...

LISA smiles on J2EE app testers - iTKO's regression and load testing tool makes steep learning curve worth the effort.(Interactive TKO's Load-bearing Internet-based Simulator Application)
January 10, 2004... Capable of prying into just about any nook or cranny where one might apply J2EE technology, Interactive TKO's (iTKO) LISA (Load-bearing Internet-based Simulator Application) is a QA engineer's dream. This pure-Java tool for regression- and...

V-Secure closes the loop on worms - V-Secure IPS Version 7.0 adds bi- directional, behavior-based protection, taking aim at internal networks.(V-Secure Technologies)
January 10, 2004... In an effort to thwart never-before-seen attacks, anomaly-based intrusion prevention systems shun the use of signatures and instead apply fancy algorithms to distinguishing illegitimate network traffic from legitimate activity. In the case of...

BizSpeak for the geek - With tongue firmly in cheek, here's a handy glossary/survival guide for those dreaded meetings with the CFO.
January 10, 2004... Back in the go-go '90s, business meetings were awhirl with arcane buzzwords clearly inspired by last-minute visits to Dack.com's Web Economy B.S. Generator. IT workers were often left to raise a brow and wonder just how much commitment was...

Shape up your WAN traffic - Packeteer and 8e6 traffic managers offer choice between luxury and thrift.
January 10, 2004... Traffic across WAN connections always seems to grow faster than available bandwidth. Tools to help optimize application usage of available bandwidth continue to increase in capability and sophistication. Both 8e6 Technologies' TurboPipe NP T100...

CRM meets business intelligence - Once, all CRM systems had to do was offer a 360-degree view of the customer. Now they need to predict what a customer will want before the customer knows it.
January 10, 2004... Effective CRM means improved sales, support, and marketing efficiency. With more real-time channels streaming into the enterprise than ever before, unifying the customer view has become imperative to successful relationship management, both...

Four-way CRM shootout - We fire up the top hosted CRM solutions from RightNow, NetSuite, Salesnet, and Salesforce.com and put them through their paces.
January 10, 2004... Hosted CRM solutions, which deliver SFA and more through the browser as a service, were once considered upstarts. But the failure of first- generation, server-based CRM software -- and the stunning success of Salesforce.com -- has ushered CRM...

Apple bolsters Xserve platform.
January 12, 2004... Apple next month will offer the Mac business market much-anticipated hardware upgrades to its Xserve platform. Forthcoming will be a 2GHz dual-processor G5 server in a 1U form factor and Xserve RAID with 3.5TB of storage capacity. ...

Microsoft drops Mira support.(Smart Display technology)
January 12, 2004... Only about a year after the first Smart Displays shipped, Microsoft is dropping further development of software for the displays that connect wirelessly to a PC. "After evaluating current market trends, Microsoft is not at this time...

Engaging in worm warfare.
January 12, 2004... Last summer, it seemed the onslaught would never end. One after another, a progression of worms and other malware threatened to bring down systems as enterprises floundered in a morass of unpatched vulnerabilities and malicious e-mails opened...

Venali's faux fax over IP may be better than real FoIP.(Venali's Total Desktop Fax Solution)
January 12, 2004... Venali may not be true FoIP (fax over IP), which uses specific protocols over an IP network, but the bottom line is: Who cares? What I want is an integrated network faxing solution that won't cost me a bundle in new hardware and an even...

What, me vulnerable? Check your OS for surprises.
January 12, 2004... Anyone who has ever run Windows update is well-aware of the frequent security issues with Microsoft's OS. Some of those issues make Windows more open to hackers, others simply make DoS attacks easier. Fortunately, Microsoft provides patches for...

Web services management benefits from Flamenco's VAN roots.(Flamenco Networks' WSM (Web Services Management) product)
January 12, 2004... Designing a Web service for a few dozen participants is one thing. Designing a system for thousands of clients with hundreds added weekly is a different story. In the latter scenario, there is a high premium on service provisioning, customer...

Slammer: One year later.(the Slammer worm [computer virus])
January 19, 2004... Cash machines froze. Airlines and hospitals dusted off paper forms to schedule reservations and track patients. This was the scene on Jan. 25, 2003, shortly after the Slammer worm appeared and quickly began spreading around the world, flooding...

E-mail gets context.(ePeople introduces Teamwork 5.1; and Kubi Software plans to release a beta version of its Kubi Connector for salesforce.com)
January 19, 2004... Collaboration vendors ePeople and Kubi Software are attempting to transform e-mail communications into reusable and trackable corporate knowledge. ePeople this week will introduce Teamwork 5.1, featuring native integration with Microsoft...

Dell switch takes aim at network core.(Dell PowerConnect 6024)
January 19, 2004... Long a purveyor of server solutions, Dell is branching out into the world of network switching. With the brand-new Dell PowerConnect 6024, the company is leaping from their previous layer 2 edge switches to the center of the network: layer 3...

Spirent scopes out network testing's next frontier.(Spirent Communications' SmartMetrics traffic analyzers )
January 19, 2004... In our last 10-Gig roundup, we used Spirent Communications' SmartMetrics traffic analyzers within a beefy SmartBits 6000B chassis to generate 10-Gig traffic streams and manage our QoS and advanced routing protocol benchmarks. This time around,...

Tandberg makes enterprise HDTV easy.(Tandberg Television's high-definition solutions )
January 19, 2004... An initial question we asked when adding HDTV to the 10GbE switch test platform was whether or not such technology would be useful in the enterprise. Actually, HDTV is making huge enterprise strides because it produces images that are...

10-Gig switches duke it out.
January 19, 2004... The idea to test 10GbE (10-Gigabit Ethernet) switches again only six months after InfoWorld's first 10-Gig test surprised some people. Why so soon? Well, when we performed our first test, most vendors weren't completely ready to ship...

Dell Puts Out Smoking Servers.(Dell PowerEdge 1650's motherboards)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Dell said a defect in its PowerEdge 1650 servers can cause the systems to overheat, emit smoke, and shut down. The motherboards of all PowerEdge 1650 servers sold worldwide between January and early May last year could be problematic and should...

Sun Buys Nauticus.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Sun Microsystems has agreed to acquire Nauticus Networks. The privately held company makes a family of datacenter switches called the N2000 Series, designed to help companies ensure the security and availability of Web-based applications. The...

MS Details Licensing Changes.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Microsoft announced changes to the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program) licensing program for software communications protocols it created as part of its landmark antitrust settlement with the U.S. government. The changes include a...

Big guns take Linux higher.
January 26, 2004... IBM, Novell, and Sun Microsystems bolstered Linux's enterprise appeal last week by detailing present and future products at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York. Hoping to accelerate acceptance for grid computing among commercial...

Ashish Kumar finds customers' survival in new technologies.(CTO of Avenade)
January 26, 2004... To Ashish Kumar, it's all about eating his own dog food. As CTO of Avanade, the joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft that offers systems integration, he realizes that no customer wants to be the first to use a technology, so his...

Barry West makes waves with innovative features.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2004... Differentiation in the mobile phone market is hard to come by, but Nextel's Communications' Direct Connect feature sets the company apart. CTO and Executive Vice President Barry J. West, a 25-year veteran of British Telecom, in 2003 led Nextel...

IBM serves up Opteron.(IBM eServer 325)
January 26, 2004... The IBM eServer 325 is the first major-brand server to use AMD's new 64-bit Opteron processor. Introduced in July 2003 and having first shipped in October, this is the only mainstream Opteron server that I'm aware of. The Opteron...

Access data anywhere with Everyplace.(IBM's DB2 Everyplace)
January 26, 2004... A typical PDA's limited memory, storage, and computing power might tempt one to conclude that such devices can't accommodate databases beyond elementary phone and to-do lists. But as PDA power improves, higher mobile-database-tools will...