Outsourcing
CFO, 9/10/02: Outsourcing: Where's the Big Deal?
Increasingly, outsourcing clients are parsing out smaller tech assignments -- and keeping the jobs short.
Scott Leibs, CFO Magazine
Outsourcing, so often presented as a cure-all for companies that signaon for it, may not be so healthy for companies that offer it. In July, Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS) announced that it was withdrawing from consideration for a massive outsourcing contract being dangled by The Procter & Gamble Co. EDS said that the risk and accounting issues associated with long-term contracts were its main concerns, and that its simultaneous plan to lay off 2,000 workers was not a factor.
The company stated further that those layoffs were part of the normal course of business, and were not connected with the bankruptcy of WorldCom, which is both a major EDS client and a supplier of telecom services to the company. EDS took a $101 million hit in its most recent quarter for write-downs and the creation of reserves due to WorldCom's bankruptcy.
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Reuters, 9/30/02: HP Says Services Demand Not Deteriorating
By Jean Yoon
LONDON (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co., the number one personal computer and printer maker, on Monday soothed investor fears over the fate of the technology services business by saying the market appeared to have stabilized.
"We haven't seen demand change much over the last six to nine months," Ann Livermore, HP's executive vice president and the head of HP Services, told Reuters in London. "We haven't seen it get worse."
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Office Applications
Infoworld, 8/27/02: IM tools expand presence
September 27, 2002 1:01 pm PT
TYPICALLY REGARDED as a consumer-oriented text chat tool, instant messaging, as well as presence-awareness technology, are making strong inroads into enterprises, emerging as critical collaboration and productivity tools.
Heavyweight infrastructure vendors, including IBM and Microsoft, are accelerating expansive strategies to leverage real-time communications throughout the infrastructure stack, while a crop of smaller players have emerged in recent years to address corporate IM concerns.
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Microsoft
Computerworld, 8/27/02: Microsoft VPN flaw may leave intranets open to attack
By David Legard, IDG News Service
A flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) used to secure virtual private networks (VPN) leaves corporate intranets open to attack from outside, according to German IT security company Phion Information Technologies GmbH.
In a security advisory yesterday, Phion said the Microsoft PPTP Service shipping with Windows 2000 and Windows XP contains a remotely exploitable preauthentication buffer overflow. This enables a specially crafted PPTP packet to overwrite kernel memory, such that a denial-of-service attack can lock up the server.
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