Outsourcing
Gartner, 3/10/04: Forecast for IT Outsourcing Segments Shows Strong Growth
Greater granularity is now available in the Gartner Dataquest IT outsourcing (ITO) forecast through a segmentation of the forecast into four major components: enterprise applications, data center, desktop and network. This segmented view is critical for insight into today's outsourcing market, a buyer's market that is driving toward increasingly selective, multisourced and flexible contracting practices.
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Gartner, 2/13/04: Enterprises Optimistic About Spending More on Internal Staff
Surprisingly, staffing ranks high on the list of priorities for increased investment in 2004.
Gartner routinely surveys IT managers about their buying intentions. We do this on an ongoing basis as part of our IT Watch Demand Index. IT Watch is derived from ongoing data collection with IT decision makers within North American businesses, resulting in an average of 300 completed interviews per month. Respondents in the IT Watch panel are asked to rank their buying intentions in the areas of hardware, software, networking/telecom, services and internal staffing. A score of 100 means that respondents in the group predict that 2004 IT budgets will be on par with 2003 levels — higher numbers mean higher growth in spending.
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IT Management
Gartner, 3/04: Preparing for the Upswing: The 2004 CIO Agenda
An economic recovery is under way, and enterprises are looking to grow. IT is a catalyst for growth, enhancing business effectiveness, business efficiency and operational integrity.
The challenge for CIOs is to balance their resources so that their enterprise survives and thrives.
CIOs have become disciplined cost managers in the face of the economic downturn. As the economy begins to recover, CIOs are broadening their scope to support growth while keeping a tight handle on costs. To succeed, CIOs must be focused.
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Gartner, 3/3/04: Management Update: Improving Service-Level Agreements in Contracts
Almost every contract that is written could be improved by including or enhancing a section on expected performance or service-level agreements (SLAs) covering the performance of the vendor and its product or service. Expectations should be quantifiable and specific, and penalties or rewards must be included to ensure effectiveness.
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Asset Management
Infoworld, 3/15/04: IT asset management gains steam
PeopleSoft, Niku tailor IT portfolio wares
By Ephraim Schwartz
Known as IT portfolio management or enterprise service automation, the movement to track both the cost and business value of IT assets is off to a roaring start in 2004. This week Niku unwrapped a portfolio management suite, and last week PeopleSoft upgraded its Enterprise Service Automation for IT product.
A principal analyst at Forrester Research, Margo Visitacion said, “We saw early adopters last year. Now it is hot because companies can’t afford to waste money and IT has to show value. There is not a lot of wiggle room in budgets anymore.”
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Security
Infoworld, 3/15/04: Interview: Securing Windows
Amy Carroll, a director in Microsoft's Security unit, discusses the company's commitment to improving security
By Wayne Rash
As director of product management in the Security Business and Technology Unit at Microsoft, Amy Carroll is responsible for making sure that new enhancements to Windows and new versions of Windows are very secure. Carroll spoke to InfoWorld Senior Analyst Wayne Rash about the company's approach to security and commitment to improving the overall security of its operating system.
InfoWorld: How does the current atmosphere of dueling worm creators affect the problems that you are dealing with?
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Infoworld, 3/15/04: IronPort caters to SMBs
Company introduces e-mail gateway appliance to block threats
By Scott Tyler Shafer
The courting of the SMB market continues with the arrival of a new e-mail gateway appliance from IronPort Systems.
On Monday, IronPort introduced the C10 -- the newest and smallest version of its C-Series family of appliances that block spam, viruses, and other content security threats.
Jim Hyman, director of channels at IronPort, said the C10 has the same functionality as found on its C60 gateway but is designed for a lower volume of messages. He said the C10 can handle approximately 20 messages per second, compared to the C60 which processes 140 messages per second.
"We had initially seen a demand at the high end, but now we see a need at the low end too," said Hyman.
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eWeek, 3/15/04: Report: Number of Security Flaws Stabilizes, but Ease of Exploit Worsens
By Dennis Fisher
While the number of vulnerabilities found in software essentially has stabilized, the flaws are increasingly easy to exploit—and more often than not, quite severe—according to a new report released on Monday.
Furthermore, as bad as the vulnerability problem is, the virus plague currently tormenting Internet users may well be worse. In the second half of 2003, there were 250 percent more new Windows viruses discovered than in the same period in 2002, the report shows. A total of 1,702 new Win32 viruses were found in the last six months of the year. Worms, however, beat out their virus cousins as the most common source of attack activity, according to the Internet Security Threat Report, released by Symantec Corp.
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Computerworld, 3/15/04: Experts publish 'how to' book for software exploits
It includes 'zero day' techniques for exploiting vulnerable computer systems
News Story by Paul Roberts
A new book by leading security researchers on writing code to exploit security flaws in software, including Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, has raised some eyebrows in the technical community for its publishing of "zero day," or previously unknown, techniques for exploiting vulnerable systems.
The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes is an advanced guide to writing software exploits. The book is intended as a resource for network administrators who are interested in closing security holes. However, the book also contains working examples of code for exploiting vulnerable systems and previously unpublished techniques for launching attacks such as heap overflows and kernel attacks, according to two of the book's authors.
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Networking Technology
C|net, 3/15/04: 10-Gigabit Ethernet comes alive
By Marguerite Reardon
The market for 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet switching got off to a slow start, but now that corporate customers are looking for more speed on their networks, the technology seems to be hitting its stride.
Few applications currently require the full bandwidth provided by 10-Gigabit Ethernet. But demand is picking up amid sharp price cuts fuelled by new designs and higher-density products. In addition, a new standard to run 10-Gigabit Ethernet over copper cable could help reduce costs and spur adoption later this year.
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Collaborative Technologies
C|net, 3/15/04: Life on the edge
By Martin LaMonica
After billions of dollars invested in PC "productivity applications" and a marketplace dominated by Microsoft, does the world need more software for so-called knowledge workers?
Ray Ozzie thinks so and, he says, macroeconomic forces are on his side.
The founder of Groove Networks argues that organizations are becoming increasingly decentralized. Instead of being tightly bound to corporate centers, workers are being unleashed, laptop in hand, to work in different locations or out of their homes. A globally connected economy allows corporations to outsource tasks from manufacturing to software programming. Independent contractors who work for several companies at once are on the rise as well.
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Technology Industry
Business Week, 3/16/04: America's Enduring Tech Edge
Although outsourcing and global competition are weakening the country's grip, it has the brains, money, and culture to keep winning
Is U.S. dominance in science and technology staring to wane? It's actually not a new question. So let's begin by flashing back to the early 1990s. Remember then how mighty America seemed to be stumbling? Remember all the hand-wringing about technologies like the VCR -- invented in the U.S. but commercialized by Japan? To the gloom-and-doomers, the handwriting was on the wall. U.S. inventors would make brilliant breakthroughs, but other countries would be the first to market. U.S. consumers would then be forced to buy these home-grown technologies from Japanese and European competitors. Advertisement
And the VCR was just the beginning. Worried U.S. politicians and agency officials drew up lists of critical technologies that foreign competitors were going to control. Flat-panel displays. Semiconductors. Supercomputers. The list was long and depressing.
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Otherwise
Fast Company, 3/04: Wealth Creation, 21st-Century Style
Glimpses of the building blocks of wealth creation, 21st-century style.
By: Shoshana Zuboff
For more than three centuries, consumers' needs have evolved from the concrete (food, clothing) to the abstract (insurance policies, health care, travel). Consumption is now becoming even more abstract, as people seek control over the quality of their lives, not just the quantity of their stuff. This new consumption has gathered force at the margins of the economy and is now poised to redefine business. Hidden in the unmet needs of millions yearning for self-determination, voice, and trust lies a vast new world of economic and social value (I call it "relationship value"). Today's corporations are ill-suited for this world: They have perfected an inward-focused model based on efficiency and cost reduction that's designed to boost transaction value. That model has led to a downward spiral of undifferentiated goods and services, consumer mistrust, and employee resentment. But two successes in different arenas--the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and eBay--provide clues to a new inside-out model.
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