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Microsoft lends a tech hand to U.K. startups Microsoft will assist U.K. startups in using its software technology under a program launched on Monday by CEO Steve Ballmer. Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology.  August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Intuit to expand into emerging markets Intuit, which derives almost all of its revenue from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., is attempting to tap new markets. The California financial software company is evaluating new markets in India, China, Russia, and Brazil, said Nilesh Thakker, Intuit's director of product development, and country manager for India, on Tuesday. July 25, 3:05 a.m. PDT IBM shakes up sales organization to target SMBs IBM is revamping part of its sales organization to better target the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) market. July 19, 5:48 a.m. PDT Reap the rewards of hardware recycling In late 2000, Union Bank of California concluded that it was time to refresh its desktop PCs every four years, based on findings from a PC Total Cost of Ownership Study. This meant that 200 PCs would have to be retired every month. Unfortunately, there was no strategy in place for the task, or even a designated person or department to manage the systems. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT More Mac mania You may have thought that last week was InfoWorld's official "Week of Apple" -- what with all the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) coverage, reviews of Parallels Desktop 3.0, VMware Fusion Beta 4, Apple TV, Tom Yager's iPhone analysis, plus his Mac OS X Leopard developer preview. But we're not done with Apple just yet. Tomorrow we're posting part 3 of our extended Leopard preview. Also on that day, keep your eye out for a preview of the new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. June 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT EBay to broker radio ads EBay is getting into the radio advertising business, becoming a broker of ad spots and on its way to competing with Google, which provides a similar service. June 6, 6:19 a.m. PDT Report: China's Alibaba plans IPO Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com is planning an initial public offering (IPO) for one of its business units, the Wall Street Journal newspaper reported Monday. April 30, 6:54 a.m. PDT It's a Print-Free (Info)World Welcome to the first all-electronic version of the Editor's Letter. Not to get all Garrison Keillor on you, but it's been a busy week at InfoWorld.com, my homepage. As many of you know, we published the last hard-copy paper edition of InfoWorld magazine on April 2; from now on, it's all Web, all the time (plus RSS, newsletters, and conferences, natch) for us. With any luck, the transition will look smooth from the outside. From the inside, we're changing the tires while the vehicle is still moving: overhauling workflows, remaking columns as blogs, revamping our editorial calendar, reworking our deals with writers and illustrators, and so on. Hence that earlier reference to a "busy week." April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Oracle's SAP attack, old media fights back As you surely have surmised by now, this is the last Notes From the Field that will ever bleed ink. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be slinking off into the sunset with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red under one arm and a redhead on the other. Cringeville is merely getting a new ZIP code in the blogosphere. Look for the same bad puns and snarky commentary in tasty snack-sized pieces starting next week on InfoWorld.com. March 29, 3:00 a.m. PST IT as a service: taking care of business More and more organizations are transforming their IT departments into self-sustaining business units, treating internal users as if they were external customers. And for good reason, says Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Enterprise Management Associates, an IT management consultancy. March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Free software is nothing to fear Nat Torkington stirred up some controversy when he asked, "Is 'Open Source' Now Completely Meaningless?" He has a good point, however. With so many companies claiming to be "open source" -- despite seemingly disparate business models and licensing schemes -- it's getting hard to tell what is legitimate open source and what isn't. The mere fact that so many voices have begun to weigh in on the issue is proof of how murky these waters have become. March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST At 25, Sun struggles to reinvent itself Developers by the thousands flocked to the International Convention Center in Hyderabad, India last week as Sun Microsystems kicked off the second leg of its world-spanning series of Tech Days conferences. The theme of the event was "shape your future" -- and indeed, no slogan could be more appropriate for Sun, its developers, and its partners. February 26, 3:05 a.m. PST Dell seeks a clue, will LG sue? Apparently Dell is too big for even Michael D. to run by himself. So the company has created the Digg-like Dell Idea Storm, where would-be CEOs can offer their 2 cents on how to run the show. At press time, more than 800 ideas had been submitted, with the most popular being: 1) preload less crapware, 2) offer more open source software, and 3) no more support calls with “Billie Jo from Bangalore,” please. The worst suggestion? Having Michael Dell deliver his PCs in person, kind of like a Domino’s pizza. And if the PC crashes or blows up within the first 30 minutes, it’s free. February 22, 3:00 a.m. PST NetSuite ramps up e-commerce capabilities NetSuite, a provider of hosted applications for midsize businesses, will announce Thursday that it has beefed up the electronic commerce capabilities of its software suite and has teamed up with online auction giant eBay Inc. in order to attract larger electronic retail (e-tail) customers. February 15, 4:51 a.m. PST Oracle-branded MySQL seems unlikely In October, Oracle sent Red Hat's stock plummeting on the announcement that the database vendor would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the "Unbreakable Linux" brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with "Unbreakable MySQL"? February 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Foundation proves Linux is big business What do you get if you cross an open source development consortium with an organization that promotes free standards? Answer: You get a Linux advocacy group. Or so it seems. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Even in IT, sex sells Attention all IT marketers: There’s no limit to how sexy you can make technology sound, if you put some creativity into it. January 18, 3:00 a.m. PST LinkedIn previews Q&A feature LinkedIn Corp. has added a question-and-answer service to its business-oriented networking site, the latest Internet company to unveil this type of increasingly popular feature. January 12, 8:54 a.m. PST U.S. trails in technology exports to China China purchased a record amount of technology in 2006, with Europe accounting for almost 40 percent of total imports, China's Ministry of Commerce said Thursday. January 12, 4:11 a.m. PST All aboard: Galloping to CES As you contemplate all the hot product announcements that came out of CES last week, consider this: In 1855, just more than 150 years ago, nobody had any devices whatsoever. January 12, 3:00 a.m. PST CIOs should resolve to change Well, we’re one week into 2007, which means it’s time to revisit those New Year’s resolutions from 2006 and delete them (or pretend they never existed). Or we could drag them forward into 2007, as part of our ongoing guilt list with no specific deadline. January 3, 3:00 a.m. PST Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Payback time for Novell SCO group is going down. Microsoft, Sun, and the greedy investors that abetted SCO in its campaign to loot Unix and Linux vendors and their customers have abandoned ship. Microsoft’s public endorsement of SCO’s legal action against, effectively, Microsoft’s enterprise competitors and their customers, gave SCO the leverage to mug said vendors’ customers for license fees when vendors refused to drop their wallets in court. Sun and Microsoft animated SCO as the prototypical litigious IP boogeyman in order to terrorize competitors’ customers into switching to Windows or Solaris to avoid being hauled to court. That’s how I laid it out in 2003, and I stand by it now. December 13, 3:00 a.m. PST IT as a revenue center When the Security Benefit Group’s IT department hit the streets in 2004 to try selling a homegrown service to external customers, there was skepticism in the ranks. “I can’t say anybody believed we would actually make a sale,” CTO Brent Littleton says. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Distribution/Supply Chain Avnet www.avnet.com Rebate Management System for SOA Environment Project Lead: Bill Chapman, CTO Project Description: Rebate Management System was conceived as a part of Avnet's enterprisewide SOA. The solution was developed using Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor business rules management solution, with Avnet creating Java EJB services to attach it to Avnet's SOA. Avnet used Web services, Oracle Stored Procedures, and JMS messages to call the business rules engine and to process massive amounts of Oracle-based data. This provided the latest rebate information and real-time monitoring for customers against dynamic sales goals. Avnet created the rules framework with reusable components, establishing the scope of knowledge and logic foundation. It used WebMethodsand Informatica software as the middleware layers to integrate ARMS with more than 10 systems, including order management, invoicing, CRM, ERP, and HR. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Sports Arizona Cardinals www.azcardinals.com Fully Integrated IP Voice-Data-Video Network Project Lead: Mark Feller, Technical Director Project Description: Implemented one of the biggest, successful plays in NFL history this year. Through a combination of teamwork, timing, and bold strategy, Technology Director Mark Feller helped facilitate one of the most highly sophisticated converged IP networks anywhere by teaming up with Insight, an IT solutions provider, and Cisco Systems. Nearly 800 Cisco IP Phones running Cisco’s call management and contact center software do the heavy lifting required for enterprise-class call routing, voice mail, and other office phone functions. What’s more, the network hosts the organization’s digital video system designed to serve several purposes. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Transportation BNSF Railway Co. www.bnsf.com Data Consolidation and Business Forecasting Project Lead: Charla Moore, Manager Business Intelligence Project Description: Following a merger, BNSF implemented the OnTrack forecasting and budgeting project to build a multiplatform tool custom-designed for use with BNSF's Teradata enterprise data warehouse. OnTrack uses multiple technologies, including Teradata, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Master Data Management, IBM DB2 Alphablox, and Java. OnTrack replaced departmental data silos with a single, integrated and automated platform for all BNSF forecast and plan data. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Redefining innovation Innovative ideas are a dime a dozen, according to Jim Andrew, senior partner at big-time consultancy BCG. In fact, at most companies, coming up with great concepts for a product, service, or process isn’t even an issue. But turning those ideas into money … ah, there’s the rub. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Google-YouTube deal is a new low for the Net Google’s purchase of YouTubehas set off a flurry of analysts asking questions like, “Is this the bad old days of dot-com returning?” Or, “Why would anyone pay $1.65 billion for a year-old company that hasn’t made a dime?” I am afraid these gurus are missing the point. You see, they don’t realize that the Internet has finally sunk to its own level -- and that level, my friend, isn’t too high. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Is IT on the rise again? When I read the press release that IBM was “helping” the computer science department at Georgetown University develop an SOA (service-oriented architecture) curriculum, and that the courses would use WebSphere integration middleware, I raised an eyebrow. Wouldn’t that be like a pharmaceutical company developing a curriculum for a medical school on how to treat depression, I wondered? October 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Committed to China? Prove it "I have sent my wife across there because she understands the language," The Financial Times reported News Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch saying. "There" is China, and he sent Wendi Deng "across" to try to avoid the pitfalls that have ensnared other Western Internet ventures, including News Corp.'s. September 28, 7:29 a.m. PDT Microsoft aligns ad strategy across company In a move aimed at making it easier for customers to purchase advertising, Microsoft unveiled on Monday an organization that aligns all of its advertising sales, research and planning efforts. September 25, 12:36 p.m. PDT Alibaba ready to ride Internet's 'third wave' One of Jack Ma's companies has 27 million registered users, but the Alibaba.com chief executive officer can only think of the people not using his site. September 11, 6:41 a.m. PDT SAP works to improve e-government Numerous public-sector organizations are interested in using IT to improve operational efficiency and customer service but struggle to define and measure the economic, social and political returns of government-funded technology programs, according to SAP executives. August 7, 8:47 a.m. PDT Gleaning truth from earnings reports Once every three months, the business press goes into a tunnel and can write about only one thing: quarterly earnings reports. This big company earned so much per share, that company lowered its guidance for next year, and so on. July 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT Appian puts polish into BPM I look at four key elements when gauging the potential ROI and success of a BPM package: adaptability to existing platforms and applications, process insight and activity monitoring, usability, and the strength of the rules engine. On all counts, Appian Enterprise 5.1 fills the bill with its full-featured, people-centric, process-management suite. July 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Experts debate merits of tiered Net traffic Should Congress enact a law that prevents telecommunications companies from charging more based on the kind of traffic they are distributing? What is at stake for enterprises that rely on the Internet? InfoWorld asked folks on either side of the debate. July 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Battle lines drawn over net neutrality As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. July 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Support your local whistle-blower When Section 301 of Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that publicly traded companies have whistle-blower systems in place, interest in hotline systems for reporting policy violations or employee misconduct received a big push. Prior to that, most companies considered having a hotline number a check-box kind of item, without giving it much thought. June 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Patent 'trolls' are elusive, experts say A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee, seeking to reduce legal claims by owners of illegitimate patents, heard Thursday that it's difficult to define just what is a bogus patent claim. June 15, 9:57 a.m. PDT FedEx seeks innovation in IT overhaul From the outside, FedEx Corp. looks like a simple shipping company, relying on its orange and purple-painted airplanes to deliver 6 million packages around the world every day. June 14, 12:09 p.m. PDT Open source education Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Outsourcing vs. shared services There are two current trends in IT with diametrically opposed points of view that are worth looking at. The first is shared services, wherein the IT organization becomes the internal service provider to the rest of the company. The second is combined business process and IT outsourcing all done under one roof -- although, of course, that roof is somewhere other than at the company. May 30, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Network auditing on a shoestring What do you do when the auditors are breathing down your neck, wanting to see an exhaustive report on the Windows network security of a 2,000-user network across eight sites? That’s easy. Break out a text editor and start writing some Perl. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Gartner weighs in on the state of IT Promising a reporter an exclusive is like dangling a sausage link in front of your dog. So of course when Gartner Fellow Ken McGee offered me an advance look at Gartner’s presentation on the current state of IT -- to be unveiled at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in San Francisco the week of May 15 -- I bit. May 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Update: Microsoft settles antitrust suit in California Microsoft Corp. Tuesday reached a tentative US$70 million deal to settle a California class-action antitrust lawsuit, according to a statement by the law firm representing the plaintiffs in the suit. May 2, 4:45 p.m. PDT Are your software services compliant? In case you haven’t noticed, just about every part of the IT infrastructure must comply with some regulation or other. April 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT EBay Express opens its doors EBay has launched a preview version of eBay Express, a site that is more conventional than its online marketplace and that the company's largest and most experienced merchants were eagerly awaiting. April 24, 3:11 p.m. PDT Disparate groups join to form net neutrality coalition A self-described coalition of "strange bedfellows," including groups representing gun owners, librarians, religious leaders and liberal activists, has joined to advocate for a U.S. law to bar broadband providers from blocking or slowing content and services provided by potential competitors. April 24, 1:36 p.m. PDT Online advertising undergoes 'tremendous' growth Internet advertising in the U.S. grew 30 percent in 2005, although it still remains a small portion of overall ad spending, according to a study released Thursday. April 20, 10:09 a.m. PDT Amdocs buys content billing company Amdocs, a maker of billing software for telecoms and other service providers, will buy Qpass for $275 million, the companies announced Tuesday. April 18, 5:43 a.m. PDT HP expands its IP licensing program Hewlett-Packard has opened an intellectual property (IP) licensing center in Singapore, hoping to generate additional revenue by licensing HP patents and other technologies to companies in the region, it said on Tuesday. April 18, 4:24 a.m. PDT Is extreme outsourcing and consolidation worth it? Last week, Accenture signed a seven-year applications outsourcing deal with Unilever to run all of Unilever’s application development, implementation, and support. Unilever believes it can save approximately $700,000 in the first year. April 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews NetSuite Flexes Process Automation, Woos Verticals Hosted applications vendor NetSuite announced NetSuite 11.0, its latest integrated CRM and back-office suite. The new version, due in May, extends AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) beyond the current real-time dashboards into functional areas, including reporting, scheduling, and document management. It also adds complex process customization via a new scripting language, SuiteScript, built on JavaScript. The company also launched vertical editions of NetSuite for wholesale/distribution, services, and software companies. NetSuite 11.0, NetSuite April 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT MIT simulation suggests avian flu outbreak can shred supply chain At first, the reports from your supplier in China seem innocent enough: an assembly line worker has become very ill and is hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Before you know it, workers are dying, the government has quarantined your factory and its contents, your supply chain is in ruins, and reporters are camped out at your company headquarters with a fleet of satellite news trucks. April 14, 2:00 p.m. PDT Next-gen RFID tools expand the market Despite the hype, the truth is that RFID deployments made little headway in 2005. New standards, prohibitive costs, and the lack of upper-level business context left most companies tuned out to this much-ballyhooed technology. April 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Coping with the compliance headache More and more, business is being driven through regulation. Multiple regulations, from Sarbanes-Oxley to HIPAA and beyond, will have a big impact on cost but will do nothing for the revenue side. The question becomes how to minimize the impact on business operations. April 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Budgeting for security breaches It appears, according to a reliable source, that a national retailer has lost the debit card information from thousands of its customers, but as we go to press, it has still refused to fess up. April 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Collapse of Check Point/Sourcefire deal raises questions Faced with resistance from the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Israeli software company Check Point Software Technologies put its $225 million offer to purchase IPS (intrusion prevention software) vendor Sourcefire on hold March 23, raising the specter of heightened government oversight of mergers and acquisitions. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT U.S. regains top ICT rank in World Economic Forum study The U.S. regained the No. 1 position in the World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual worldwide study of information and communication technology (ICT) usage and acceptance, the WEF said on Tuesday. March 29, 4:30 a.m. PST Hughes launches managed service for businesses Hughes Network Systems, a provider of broadband satellite services, launched on Monday the first offering for the North American large-business and government markets under a new service brand. March 27, 4:36 a.m. PST The hidden challenges of federated identity For years, companies have kept stores of identity information about employees, customers, and partners. These databases and directories are critical components of a company’s identity infrastructure. But as businesses push to create new products and increase productivity, they have discovered that they often must cooperate to provide the services their customers and employees demand. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Scaling a federated identity infrastructure Different kinds of organizations approach the problem of scaling a federated identity implementation in different ways. When you’re federating with one or two partners, hammering out the legal arrangements and assigning risk and liability is done one partner at a time. Even if technology standards provide universal system interoperability, the lawyers are likely to approach each agreement as a one-off task. Let’s call this model “peer-to-peer federation.” March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST User-centric identity brings federation close to home Federation doesn’t have to be a behind-the-scenes interaction between big companies. Lately, an idea called “user-centric identity” has gained traction. It revolves around a few core principles, most notably the idea that users should be allowed to choose which identity credentials to present in response to an authentication or attribute request. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST IT spending to increase 6.3 percent in 2006 Global IT spending should grow by 6.3 percent in 2006, driven by software spending, but that growth would be smaller than the 6.9 percent in 2005, IDC said Thursday. March 23, 9:06 a.m. PST In Brief: NEC says employee faked millions in sales An NEC Engineering employee falsified sales over a three-year period that resulted in inflated sales of $36.3 billion yen, or about $309.5 million, for parent company NEC, the company said. March 23, 7:31 a.m. PST Homeland Security probes L-1 visa abuses In the course of my research for a column on misuse of the L-1A and L-1B visa program for temporary workers in the United States, I was alerted to the Inspector General’s report published in January of this year by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), titled “Review of Vulnerabilities and Potential Abuses of the L-1 Visa Program." March 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle's profits up on license sales Led by growth in its sales of software license updates and product support, Oracle's quarterly profit rose more than 40 percent year-over-year, during its most recent financial period, the Redwood Shores, California company reported Monday. March 20, 2:13 p.m. PST Top Sun software executive to depart for Adobe Sun Microsystems will lose its top software executive to Adobe Systems, the company confirmed Thursday. March 16, 4:21 p.m. PST Chambers: Cisco network smarts mean partner profits Cisco Systems' drive to build more intelligence into networks presents new profit opportunities for its channel partners, Cisco President and Chief Executive Officer John Chambers said Wednesday at the company's annual partner conference. March 15, 2:13 p.m. PST Unisys to sell stake in Japanese affiliate Unisys plans to sell its 28 percent stake in its Japanese affiliate, Nihon Unisys, it announced Tuesday. March 14, 4:31 p.m. PST Update: Google settles click-fraud lawsuit for $90M Google has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit brought against it over the issue of click fraud, which some industry experts believe could seriously threaten the company's main source of revenue: pay-per-click advertising. Google will pay as much as US$90 million to affected advertisers in attorneys' fees and credits as part of the settlement. March 9, 2:08 p.m. PST Bring business analysis to streaming events It’s no secret to IT people, or any business executive worth his Beemer, that an amazing wealth of actionable business intelligence is coursing through enterprise applications, databases, and even system logs nearly every moment of every day. The problem has not only been plucking the meaningful events from the unimportant ones but also finding the often seemingly unrelated patterns between them, and doing so before it’s too late to make a difference -- before the supplier raises the price, the shopper leaves the Web site, or the scammer transfers the funds. March 9, 3:00 a.m. PST AOL's certified e-mail plan sparks furor AOL’s plan to implement a fee-based “certified” e-mail service within the next 30 days is setting off a firestorm of protest. A coalition of more than 50 organizations has formed to fight AOL’s opt-in plan to institute a quarter-cent charge per e-mail for delivery of authenticated messages. March 6, 3:00 a.m. PST Sidestepping the analog hole On an episode of “The West Wing,” deputy national security adviser Kate Harper (Mary McCormack) reprimands presidential assistant Debbie Fiderer (Lily Tomlin) for displaying the president’s schedule on her computer screen. As Harper correctly points out, anybody could walk into the office and find out something they shouldn’t know. March 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Lehman back in Sun CFO saddle again After a four-month search, Sun Microsystems has found someone to replace outgoing Chief Financial Officer Steve McGowan: his predecessor. February 21, 5:57 p.m. PST ROI: Debating the value of metrics for IT management You’ve deployed the technology. Now it’s time to gauge the payoff. In many organizations, winning support for your initiatives from senior management means demonstrating the ROI of your IT expenditures. But is ROI a valid standard for proving the value of IT projects? February 16, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft to strengthen IP protection Moving to quell apprehension about patents, Microsoft will strengthen intellectual property (IP) protection for manufacturers and distributors using its software. February 9, 4:12 a.m. PST Bringing software development back in-house I’ve written so many columns about offshore outsourcing that I never thought I’d do another. Then I met Mike Fields, the new CEO at CRM vendor Kana Software, and I changed my mind. This time I want to talk about what Fields calls “backshoring.” February 7, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP steps into the software-as-a-service arena It’s as momentous as when the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific and the final, golden, spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the transcontinental railroad -- not that in high tech anyone would notice an event as significant. I can’t even predict for you all the innovations that will be generated from the recent developments, but I will give you my thoughts. January 31, 3:00 a.m. PST Tokyo Stock Exchange installs new clearing system The Tokyo Stock Exchange successfully installed a new stock trade clearing system over the weekend and saw no problems during the first day's trading, it said Monday. January 30, 4:08 a.m. PST Marking 20 years of viral havoc This month marks a true milestone in computing: 20 years of viruses. The Brain virus, first detected in 1986, was a boot-sector virus that infected only 5.25-inch 360k floppy disks. Unbelievable as it may seem in hindsight, Brain spread around the globe without the aid of the Internet or e-mail. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Cebit offers matchmaking system A new Web-based matchmaking system will help align businesses with outsourcing suppliers at the Cebit trade show, event organizers said Friday. January 27, 7:22 a.m. PST Update: Microsoft has record Q2, misses revenue estimates Microsoft Corp. on Thursday reported the highest quarterly revenue in company history for its fiscal 2006 second quarter on the strength of its Windows OS and a series of highly anticipated product releases. Still, the company fell slightly shy of analysts' revenue expectations. January 26, 5:00 p.m. PST Software as a service: Pay as you build, but at what cost? See correction below January 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Survey: CIOs strive to improve business processes A recent survey of global chief information officers (CIOs) found that using IT to make improvements to a company's business processes is the top priority for them in 2006, according to Gartner Inc. January 23, 11:37 a.m. PST Silicon Valley employment outlook brightens For the first time in four years, tech sector jobs in Silicon Valley edged upward, marking a welcome show of strength in the rough-and-tumble employment market. January 23, 3:00 a.m. PST CDC pulls Onyx bid, buys hosted SCM developer Hong Kong software maker CDC Corp. is withdrawing its bid for a majority stake in CRM (customer relationship management) software developer Onyx Software Corp., ending the specter of a drawn-out struggle for control of Onyx. January 20, 1:15 p.m. PST Wall Street Beat: Earnings bring mixed results Earnings season blew in with a vengeance this week, with disappointing fourth-quarter results from industry bellwethers Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. offset by better-than-expected reports from other vendors. January 19, 4:20 p.m. PST Microsoft closes UMT deal Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer Thursday announced the close of the company's deal to purchase software and other assets from portfolio management software vendor UMT. January 19, 12:54 p.m. PST SAP CEO: German IT sector needs special treatment Globalization is a good thing and it's here to stay, according to Henning Kagermann, chief executive officer of SAP. But that doesn't stop him from asking for special treatment for Germany's high-tech companies, to help them compete in world markets. High-tech companies need flexible working laws and lower non-wage labor costs, he said in a speech delivered at the German government-sponsored Informatikjahr IT conference earlier this week. January 19, 5:52 a.m. PST Salesforce.com goes live with AppExchange Salesforce.com Inc. went live this week with a heavily publicized major update, adding a new platform called AppExchange for easily deploying third-party applications to extend the functionality of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) system. January 13, 1:23 p.m. PST > Business |
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