|
|
Free Newsletters
|
|
|
|
|
|
Weird tech: Raw fish ID When James Allard lived in Japan as a student in the 1990s, he frequented kaiten sushi restaurants, which keep prices low by circulating dishes on a conveyor belt rather than making nigiri, sashimi, and sushi rolls to order. The problem he observed was that dishes stayed on the belt too long, losing freshness and becoming unappetizing. Oracle snaps up Hyperion but will customers bite? PM (performance management) vendors appear to be universal in their delight at the news that Oracle will buy Hyperion for $3.3 billion.  March 1, 1:50 p.m. PST Triumfant's tool seeks out IT system problems Aiming to ease the enterprise help desk’s burden, Triumfant on Tuesday will announce Resolution Manager, an automated problem and resolution program based on analytics. January 30, 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 SAP, Microsoft plan more Duet features and new version Businesses interested in Duet, the software application jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP, can look forward to new features and a new version of the product over the next several months. November 15, 5:22 a.m. PST Apama and StreamBase unearth meaning in disjointed data streams In simpler times, early stream-monitoring apps took months to crank out and didn’t easily scale for reuse outside their initial scope. August 25, 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 IBM eases billing for virtualized environments IBM launched on Thursday software to help companies deploying virtualized computing environments more easily bill business departments or external clients based on consumption of resources. June 1, 7:33 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 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 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 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 Product Previews Foundry drives VoIP with FastIron switch Foundry Networks gives enterprise VoIP another push with the unveiling of its FastIron Edge X-Series 424-PoE switch, which combines PoE (Power over Ethernet) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet to help streamline VoIP migration, as well as aid Wi-Fi deployments. The newest FastIron family member boasts 24 ports of 10/100/1000 PoE with four-port combo GbE; each PoE port is 802.3af compliant. The X-Series 424-PoE also supports several Layer 2 protocols, with the option to include more advanced Layer 3 routing protocols; QoS features include voice, data, and application traffic prioritization. The switch is available now, with pricing from $6,995 to $13,485 depending on model. FastIron Edge X-Series 424-PoE Switch Foundry Networks January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST EDS settles with UK tax agency for failed system Electronic Data Systems (EDS) has agreed to pay £71.25 million ($122.7 million) to the British government's tax agency after trouble with an IT system that tracked tax credits, the two entities announced Tuesday. November 23, 4:20 a.m. PST Are CIOs headed for extinction? Is the CIO a dinosaur? Will it be an extinct position in a few short years? Merial, a large animal health care enterprise co-owned by Merck and sanofi-aventis, believes so; in fact, it's already buried the title. I spoke with Steve Lerner, IS director at Merial, about what led to its decision to eliminate the CIO position. The answer, in short, is Sarbanes-Oxley. October 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAP to acquire Canadian software vendor Triversity Business application vendor SAP has agreed to acquire privately held Triversity, a Canadian company specialized in software for the retail industry. September 19, 5:04 a.m. PDT Dirty words, take II My column "IT's Seven Dirty Words" -- a subjective list of terms that shouldn't be repeated in polite IT company -- generated piles of e-mail from readers who were quick to add a few choice words of their own. In the interest of sharing, let me reproduce a few of their suggestions. September 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT Decoding analyst-speak How many industry analysts does it take to change a light bulb? We’ll get back to you on that. But first, wouldn’t you like to purchase our Illumination Industry Survey, which predicts that yearly spending on light bulbs will reach $3.7 trillion by 2010? August 22, 4:00 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 a.m. PDT Farewell, CTO Connection If you haven’t checked out this week’s columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he’ll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Rackable iSCSI system stacks up Meeting growing storage requirements is no longer just a matter of accommodating a few more files. Thanks to legislation that mandates the archiving of e-mail and customer records and to the increased use of multimedia and VoIP apps, storage needs can double or triple in a very short time. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Cure for the common code gives apps more flexibility Alasdair Rawsthorne may have started out slowly, but he’s making up for lost time. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Enterprise service buses Few things are as fascinating in this industry as watching a new product category take shape. Multiple vendors enter the field, each delivering its interpretation of the product’s concept. Over time, though, the vendors appropriate one another’s best ideas until a certain set of features becomes common to all. July 25, 5:00 a.m. PDT Cognos unveils new performance management system At its Cognos Forum gathering this week in Orlando, business software maker Cognos will talk about the steps it is taking to help customers better use its reporting and analysis applications -- a change that will focus on improving the processes around those applications, rather than the technology itself. June 27, 3:23 p.m. PDT OutlookSoft's Everest 4.2 climbs beyond budgeting Whereas the largest BPM players cobble together acquisitions to create a more complete offering built of separate modules, OutlookSoft aims to deliver a more focused, unified approach. OutlookSoft's history of budgeting strength provides solid roots for Everest Version 4.2, a single BPM solution that integrates budgeting and planning with financial monitoring and reporting. April 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Product previews Siebel Upgrades CRM OnDemand Siebel Systems unveiled release 7 of CRM OnDemand, a version that integrates the third leg of CRM — customer service — with sales and marketing. Release 7 handles customer communications across sales, marketing, and service; captures activities and interactions from multiple channels in a single database; and provides analytics across call center and CRM interactions. Contact OnDemand, a hosted contact-center solution, will be offered as a prebuilt option within CRM OnDemand, and the software allows computer-telephony integration, interactive voice response, automatic call distribution, and PBX capabilities to be built into a hosted CRM solution. Siebel Contact OnDemand starts at $150 per user per month, with additional telephony charges. CRM OnDemand, Siebel April 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT Your business, live on screen OfficeMax had a visibility problem. "Two years ago we started a major third-party drop-ship program that caused us to lose some visibility of the orders after they left our network," says Brian Walmsley, divisional vice president of EAI technology at OfficeMax. This problem became a customer service issue, particularly for orders that went through many different suppliers. "Not only were call center staff unable to see where orders were in the process, but there was no way to determine which suppliers were underperforming and which were on target or better. The best we could do was to generate historical reports or have a staff of people carefully track individual vendors manually, which was not a great use of resources." July 23, 3:00 p.m. PDT The click-and-drag enterprise The intersection between business and IT is where the action is. It’s the point where business requirements morph into enterprise systems. It’s where consultants and software vendors make money. And it’s where most big IT problems begin — or dissolve before they gum up the works. July 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT CEOs urged to rethink corporate approach to IT LONDON -- If chief executive officers (CEOs) don't want to be wiped out by their competitors, they not only have to invest in information technology but they must also rethink how to deploy IT within their companies, a high profile panel of IT executives told attendees of the Forbes CEO forum here on Thursday. June 17, 8:46 a.m. PDT Tibco touts business activity monitoring Extending its reach in BAM (business activity monitoring), Tibco Software on Tuesday began shipping OpsFactor 1.0, which provides insights into business operations being orchestrated by the company’s business integration software. May 18, 9:35 a.m. PDT Clementine 8.1 melds BA with BI foundation Innovation, such as that required to create and deploy BA (business analytics) solutions, is generally an easier process for smaller, focused development groups. So I’m seriously impressed by what SPSS has been able to accomplish in the BA tool area with the newest version of its data mining workbench, Clementine 8.1. May 7, 3:00 p.m. PDT Tibco eyes Web services messaging, BAM Despite its skepticism about the current ESB (enterprise service bus) trend, Tibco may nonetheless offer an ESB product in the coming months. A plan to boost BAM (business activity monitoring) with a lower-end offering is also in the works, according to Tibco officials in an interview earlier this month. May 7, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Applications |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
