Outsourcing
The New York Times, 4/23/02: E.D.S. Cites Lag in Orders for Decline in Earnings
By CHRIS GAITHER
Electronic Data Systems reported first-quarter earnings yesterday that declined 21 percent, as the company felt a sharp slowdown in corporate spending and changed its accounting methods.
E.D.S., the second-largest computer services company behind I.B.M., said its corporate customers had delayed purchases, especially for its A. T. Kearney consulting services. Sales increased 7 percent from the period last year, to $5.3 billion, but fell $400 million shy of Wall Street analysts' estimates.
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Reuters, 4/23/02: Chip industry sees orders jump
Orders for semiconductor capital equipment in North America rose 14 percent from February to March, a trade group said Monday, topping the value of shipments for the first time in 16 months and suggesting that the ailing industry may be recovering.
A preliminary measure of March orders released by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International showed orders of $838.8 million and shipments of $808.1 million. Revised February numbers showed orders of $737.2 million and shipments of $818.0 million.
The figures established that the ratio of orders to shipments, also known as book-to-bill, rose to 1.04, from a February book-to-bill value of 0.90. A higher ratio suggests to some analysts that the industry has performed better.
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Financial Times, 4/22/02: Silicon Valley Watch: More IT buying deferrals
By Tom Foremski in San Francisco
There were some very worrying signs coming out of the first week of earnings reports for technology companies, which included IBM, Intel, Siebel Systems, EMC, Compaq Computer and Sun Microsystems. The numbers weren't that encouraging and where there were some improvements in numbers, they were largely driven by cost cuts rather than an underlying rise in demand.
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Gartner, 4/16/02: Mobility and Business-to-Employee Applications
The first step to applications for a mobile workforce is to recognize the challenges this transformation will present.
Vendors and service providers expect that an increasingly mobile workforce will generate great opportunities for mobile applications, infrastructures, devices and services. A growing number of enterprises have also realized that they need to support a mobile and distributed workforce and are deploying mobile initiatives.
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ZDNet, 4/22/02: Online storage: Risky move for your files
By Lisa M. Bowman
Until late last year, Debbie Lander was a big fan of online storage.
Lander paid $19.95 a year to keep photos of her custom embroidery at PhotoPoint.com. But shortly before Christmas, the North Prairie, Wis., resident ran into what she thought was a server snag: She was repeatedly unable to access the PhotoPoint site.
Only after searching Internet message boards did Lander discover that PhotoPoint had shut down without notifying its 1.5 million customers.
"I basically had to start over from scratch," said Lander, who used the site for years to help sell her embroidery online. She became doubly mad when PhotoPoint later said it would release files--if the owner paid $25. "To me, that's really deceitful," Lander said.
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Network World, 4/22/02: Back-up alternatives for laptops
Picking the best product depends on how much control you want over the process.
By Paul Ferrill
Protecting data stored on corporate computers is standard operating procedure. But the proliferation of laptops has added a new wrinkle to this network task. Important data is being kept on laptops, and it needs to be backed up with some regularity. In our review of enterprise laptop back-up software packages, we found that four vendors are making progress in automating this arduous task for network professionals and end users alike.
We looked at Computer Associates' BrightStor Mobile Backup, NovaStor's NovaNet Web, Novell's iFolder and Storactive's LiveBackup. NovaStor also offers its product as an online service called NovaStor Online Backup, which we also used (See story, "Backup: In-house or outsource?" page 56). We tested a Hewlett-Packard CD-RW drive on our test laptop using software from Roxio,
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InfoWorld, 4/22/02: Nokia, IBM set sights on public WLANs
By Laura Rohde
April 22, 2002 7:40 am PT
IBM AND NOKIA, the world's largest mobile-phone maker, have agreed to jointly pursue the public wireless LAN market with the hope that in combining their strengths, they can add extra momentum to the spread of WLAN networks, the companies announced Monday.
"It is a ready service concept that Nokia and IBM are jointly offering to wireless operators and independent operators. This cooperation with IBM will open new business opportunities for us in terms of the corporate customer while our work with wireless LAN technology and the fact that we are contributing to WLAN standard specifics all of the time is good for IBM," said Nokia spokeswoman, Riitta Mard.
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Internet Week, 4/22/02: Wireless LAN Gear Delivers Manageability, Security Features
By Tom Smith
Startup Vernier Networks on Monday announced new wireless local-area network (WLAN) products with some interesting manageability features.
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Network World, 04/22/02: Microsoft users tired of patch mgmt. headaches
By John Fontana
IT executives are fed up with Microsoft's kludge of tools to manage and install the numerous patches and hotfixes it issues and say the company must deliver one management tool that works reliably and consistently, or companies will never have secure systems.
Frustrations are running high after two incidents showed Microsoft's patch-management tools sometimes offer conflicting data that could leave systems vulnerable to security breaches. That riles IT executives who often hear from Microsoft that certain security breaches can be avoided if systems are properly patched.
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