Outsourcing
Gartner, 4/12/03: Business Process Outsourcing Needs Integration Services
Businesses need application integration services to link internal and outsourced processes. Gartner identifies a new class of services that will become the key to coordination between clients and outsourced suppliers.
The relationship between sourcing and application integration is growing. For decades, IT sourcing was based on technically layered, horizontal decisions. The outsourcing of networks, data centers or desktops posed no challenge to existing applications links.
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IT Management
Information Week, 4/15/03: Business Technology Central: Don't Push The Reset Button
InformationWeek publisher Michael Friedenberg highlights the business gap between companies focused on cost-cutting and those looking to IT for ways to boost revenue.
By Michael Friedenberg
While traveling on a plane ride across the country and reading about Larry Ellison's recent predictions of the demise of the IT industry, I happened to sit next to a rather overly caffeinated fellow who wanted to engage me in immediate conversation. As I quickly looked for another possible aisle seat, I knew that I was hooked. Not because of a lack of room to jump into another seat but because this frustrated man blurted out a statement that made me pause and reflect. For in his tirade, he shouted, "I bet that if I were to do nothing from now till Jan. 1, 2004, my company would still end up at the same point we're at today. It seems that 2003 is just one big RESET button."
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Giga, 4/16/03: Market Overview 2003: Infrastructure Performance Management
Jean-Pierre Garbani
The infrastructure performance management market declined in 2002 and will probably continue to do so in 2003. However, a better economic market combined with major progress in the way intelligence is applied to infrastructure problem resolution could improve the climate. Besides continued lackluster investment from the major telecommunications companies, which has hit a number of network fault and performance smanagement vendors hard, the current depressed market has several origins.
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Disaster Recovery – Not
Fortune, 4/14/03: When It Comes to My PC, I Can't Love It or Leave It.
What keeps me wedded to my laptop are little convenient programs. Why should gaining freedom be so hard?
By Stewart Alsop
It's impossible for me to live without a computer. But it shouldn't be impossible for me to live without my computer.
I had the unfortunate opportunity to coin that little maxim--and still have plenty of time left over to ponder its meaning for the computer industry--when the hard disk in my permanent computer failed recently. For more than a month, I used temporary computers as I waited for it to be replaced. And in doing so, I learned all over again what I depend on and what just makes computing fun (or not). The most annoying part of living on a temporary computer, it turns out, isn't losing access to the stuff critical to working. It's losing the little, everyday programs that make computing really useful and personal.
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Governement Market
Giga, 4/16/03: Performance-Based Contracts Transform Government Spending
Craig Symons
What are performance-based or benefits-based contracts, and how can they be used effectively to manage information technology spending?
Government entities, unlike commercial establishments, have very different funding mechanisms. Often, these funding mechanisms are out of step with the investment needs of information technology projects. The project life cycle is out of synch with funding life cycles. For governments, spending either comes from annual appropriations (budgets) or, in the case of capital projects, long-term bonding. Most IT projects fall somewhere in between.
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Security
Giga, 4/15/03: Antivirus Vendors Enhance Antispam Capabilities
Jan Sundgren
What are the antivirus vendors doing about spam?
New partnerships and acquisitions, as well as products and services, indicate that the major antivirus vendors are getting serious about offering antispam capabilities. These efforts make a great deal of sense, and they mean that customers will increasingly be able to deploy integrated antivirus/antispam solutions from a set of viable vendors with whom they probably already have relationships.
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Computerworld, 4/17/03: Sometimes, it's not nice to share
By Douglas Schweitzer
We all know the drill. Install antivirus software on workstations, servers and gateways, and update them on a regular basis.
Many of us also implement antivirus policies to provide users with a basic understanding of how viruses spread and to illustrate how users can help thwart virus attacks. Despite these measures, many organizations have spent long hours recovering from the aftermath of network-aware worms—such as Sircam, Magistr and FunLove—unleashed into the wild. Network-aware worms simply use network connections, such as shared or mapped drives, to quickly spread themselves to other computers on your LAN.
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Mobile
Business Week, 4/28/03: Wi-Fi Means Business
The up-from-the-streets movement is catching on in the corporate world. Will the new wireless networks pay off?
Engineers on runways in Seattle and Frankfurt are tinkering with antennas and satellite links. This isn't the usual avionics, though. Instead, Boeing Co. (BA ) is preparing a brand new business: flying cybercafés. By early next year, more than 100 Boeing jets are scheduled to be equipped with speedy wireless technology known as Wi-Fi. For $25 or so per flight, laptop-luggers will be able to log on to the Net while soaring above the clouds -- shopping on eBay Inc. (EBAY ), restocking their companies' inventories, perhaps even making voice calls over the Web. Boeing is so gung-ho on the new technology that over the next decade it hopes to outfit nearly 4,000 planes with Wi-Fi service. Says Scott E. Carson, president of the company's Connexion by Boeing unit: "Wi-Fi is on an explosive growth path."
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Microsoft
ZDNet, 4/18/03: Office 2000 flaw keeps repeating itself
By Robert Lemos
A software slipup in Microsoft's latest update to Office 2000 results in the application repeatedly asking some customers to register the program.
The glitch apparently affects only Office 2000 users who don't have administrative rights on their computer, a Microsoft representative said Thursday.
"They are experiencing unexpected registration prompts, but it doesn't interfere with product functionality," he said.
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Social Capital
C|net, 4/17/03: An old boys network of 0s and 1s?
By Alorie Gilbert
Let's say you're a salesperson trying to land a big account. Wouldn't it be nice to know if the prospective customer was, by chance, an office mate's tennis partner or neighbor?
Sussing out such social and professional connections among employees to help clinch a sale is the mission of Spoke Software. The Palo Alto, Calif., start-up recently closed a $5 million round of venture capital financing, bringing the total it has raised since opening its doors in July to $9.2 million. Lead investors include US Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures and Partech International.
Spoke plans to release the first version of its product this fall, joining numerous software companies, including big names like Siebel Systems and SAP, in the business of selling applications designed to make salespeople more productive.
The Spoke software "discovers" relationships that could come in handy in a sales situation, according to Spoke cofounder Chris Tolles. A key feature is that although the system requires very little effort on the part of employees entering data, it's able to gather detailed information about how well people know each other and in what context, Tolles said.
"There is a huge amount of social capital that is not utilized by businesses," Tolles said.
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