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SCO says there is 'substantial doubt' it will survive With its cash reserves running out and its legal case against IBM unravelling, The SCO Group now says there is doubt that it will remain afloat. Singapore Exchange hit by yet another computer problem Singapore Exchange (SGX) warned investors not to rely on data provided for the Straits Times Index, one day after a computer inaccurately reported the value of the component stocks in the benchmark index. The incident is the latest in a string of computer-related problems to hit the exchange this year. September 6, 6:38 a.m. PDT Power outage hits parts of San Francisco A power outage in parts of downtown San Francisco Tuesday affected office computers, lights and a hosting company for several Web sites. July 25, 3:59 a.m. PDT Ailing Motorola shuffles businesses A troubled Motorola has realigned itself as its critical cell-phone business slows down. July 18, 11:48 a.m. PDT RIP, electronic medical records? And so the story of the largest, most visible attempt to digitize health care delivery in the U.S. has finally been told on page one of the Wall Street Journal. And it ain’t pretty.  April 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT More IT firms afoul of stock options laws The practice of manipulating stock options grants to make them more favorable has come back to haunt yet another round of high-tech executives. A former Monster Worldwide Inc. executive is expected to agree to a plea deal in New York Thursday, just a day after the founder of Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. pleaded guilty to a state felony related to backdating. February 15, 9:15 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 Dodgy IT research yields dubious findings Well, it’s almost that time of year, when the holiday cards start to roll in. You know the drill — the ones from relatives and close friends get opened and showcased prominently, especially if their kids or dogs are cute. But the courtesy ones from people you barely remember sit there in a pile for weeks until you overcome the guilt of chucking them. November 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Simplify the workplace with IT datacenter consolidation TRW Automotive, a Tier One global supplier of auto safety products, had a big control problem. “We had always operated as a dozen or so largely independent business units, each with its own systems,” says Joe Drouin, vice president and CIO. “As a result, we had dozens of mission-critical applications, including multiple flavors of SAP, running in dozens of different places.” November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST New litigation rules put IT on the front lines of data access On Dec. 1, when the latest version of the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) goes into effect, CIOs and their IT departments will find themselves on the firing line in most major business litigation. [Read about the cases that started it all.] November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Update: HP quadruples income for fourth quarter Capping a year when it reclaimed the title of world's largest PC vendor despite a boardroom scandal, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) on Thursday reported net income of US$1.7 billion for the fourth quarter, more than four times its mark for that period last year. November 16, 3:02 p.m. PST IT by the book Can something that’s been kicking around for more than 15 years qualify as an overnight success? It certainly feels that way with ITIL, a collection of nine books that lays out a blueprint for IT service management. In the United States, at least, ITIL has recently catapulted itself from a respected, if somewhat obscure, treatise for governance geeks to a mainstream discipline. October 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Driving IT innovation abroad As you read this, I’ll be winging my way to Prague, where I’m helping facilitate a two-day CIO round table on IT in emerging markets. Don’t worry — it’s not a boondoggle. Just an out-and-back trip (flying coach) — and I’ll probably be too jet-lagged to enjoy the beer. September 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT The case of the disappearing datacenter I manage a complex voice and data network: 15 servers hosting e-commerce Web sites, mail servers, FTP servers, database servers, remote access connections, internal VPNs. All the usual stuff. August 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Alcatel Lucent: A married name is born The couple of the year in the network equipment industry, Alcatel and Lucent Technologies, will play it safe with their married name. August 7, 12:24 p.m. PDT Business continuity software is just the starting point Mapping business processes and technological dependencies for business continuity planning is not a new concept; however, the few tools out there require a healthy measure of manpower and input to yield meaningful results . Many business continuity planners use spreadsheets, databases, and diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio to accumulate, visualize, and store their business model information. In any case, other software can make your efforts more focused and comprehensive. August 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Profit warnings chill U.S. financial market Earnings warnings from some of the biggest names in IT and some downbeat reports from brokers put a damper on technology stocks this week, sending the Nasdaq Composite Index to its lowest point this year and close to its 52-week low. July 13, 1:57 p.m. PDT Bill, bills, and billionaires The news is bursting with stories about rich geeks giving away their money, from BMW (Bill, Melinda, Warren) to Larry Ellison. But do I see any of it? Nooooo. How about funding a retirement home for cranky journalists with a penchant for puns? Don’t you think Sir Bill would pay to see me retire? July 7, 3:00 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 Are you significant? You know how political polls always mention a “margin of error” of so many percentage points? So Candidate X may be 3 percent up in the polls, but that’s actually “a statistical dead heat.” Well, the technology research world needs some discipline like this, because too many research firms have gotten lazy and are playing it fast and loose with small sample sizes. June 2, 3:00 a.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 EMC banking billions on ILM EMC Corp. is investing US$1.2 billion this year to develop and acquire technologies geared to help businesses share, protect, manage and secure data, said Chief Executive Officer and President Joe Tucci in his keynote address at the EMC World conference in Boston Monday. April 24, 10:12 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 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 Top six steps toward disaster-recovery I recently got to write a fun piece for InfoWorld called "Stupid user tricks" about protecting your network from human error. Researching the article revealed to me how many variables folks tend to miss when running a network, as well as when planning to protect and recover that network. (By the way, if you were one of the folks who submitted anecdotes for this article, check out the SMB IT blog to see whether you’re on the list for a free InfoWorld backpack.) 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 Managing disruption Let me take you back to a dinner conversation from roughly five months ago. InfoWorld had just finished day two of our SOA Executive Forum in New York, and the editors were dining with a subset of the InfoWorld CTO Advisory Council. We routinely rely on the council -- dyed-in-the-wool technologists with a keen sense of what’s happening in the IT trenches -- for guidance, ideas, and constructive criticism. April 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tokyo exchange plans compete system revamp by 2009 Tokyo Stock Exchange is planning a complete revamp of its information-technology system, to be completed by 2009, its top executive said Friday. April 7, 4:24 a.m. PDT Product previews Sonic Software revs enterprise service bus Sonic Software today announced Sonic ESB 7.0, an upgrade to the company’s SOA platform. It brings the Sonic Workbench to the Eclipse IDE; incorporates support for advanced Web services standards WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-Policy; and introduces a lighter-weight approach to high availability through a new mode in the Continuous Availability Architecture, which the company says provides highly reliable and available brokered communications without the latency of persistent messaging. Sonic ESB 7.0 will be available in April. Sonic ESB 7.0, Sonic Software March 27, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP moves to create non-union workers' council SAP has taken steps to form a workers' council comprised of non-union employees in an effort to fend off what the German software vendor views as the harmful influence of unions on its "startup" company culture. March 15, 5:54 a.m. PST Filling the void left by baby-boomer techies The big exodus is getting closer and closer. The baby boomers are about to retire in droves. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 50. In the next 10 years, 43 percent of the workforce will be eligible for retirement, while the next two generations are about 15 percent smaller. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST IT's input on outsourcing Few words strike fear into the hearts of IT pros like "outsourcing" and its closely related foreign cousin, "offshoring." For many, the "O" words are simply euphemisms for layoffs, an all-too-common occurrence. Worse, the corporate appetite for outsourcing continues to grow. February 27, 3:00 a.m. PST It takes an extraprise to secure your business Back in May, I wrote a column about our country's lack of an overall plan to protect critical infrastructure in case of attack -- telecommunications and fiber in particular. Consider this Part 2. February 21, 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 Mapping IT meltdowns Every few months, I exchange e-mail with a contact of mine, a guy with a fairly high-level IT job in the government. Actually, I don't really exchange e-mail with him. Because he works for a particularly secretive branch of the government, he has never given me his e-mail address. So I send a note to his assistant, who eventually e-mails his boss's response back to me in government time -- somewhere between immediately and never. The reply e-mails are based, presumably, on whatever my .gov guy has told his assistant. Occasionally, though, the whole process feels like a high-tech version of the game "telephone," with exquisite opportunities for misunderstanding built right in. January 30, 3:00 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 Google, Apple top 2005 poll of most influential brands Google regained its title as the world's most influential brand in 2005, displacing Apple Computer for the second time this decade, according to a Monday poll. January 23, 4:12 a.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 3Com CEO Claflin headed for retirement 3Com Corp. President and Chief Executive Officer Bruce Claflin will retire as soon as the networking technology vendor finds a replacement for him, the Marlborough, Massachusetts, company said Wednesday. January 11, 5:01 p.m. PST IT needs to prepare for avian flu disaster What is it about birds and progress? Why are birds always mucking things up and slowing us down? If they’re not pooping on our windshields, they’re attacking our french fries or flying into our wind generators. And now, just when you thought you were prepared for any IT emergency, here comes the avian flu. December 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Beating the competition If InfoWorld were seeking a mantra, we might just opt for “IT is the business,” a quote from Netflix’s Tom Dillon. Interviewed in this week’s cover story, “Why IT gives business a competitive edge”, the movie-rental company’s COO was asserting that IT should be integral to a business’s goals, not an afterthought or simply a support mechanism. The conclusion: When fully aligned -- even woven into -- core business strategy, IT can foster competitive advantage and drive market leadership. InfoWorld shares that belief deep in its bones. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Managing merger mania Oracle gobbles up Siebel (buuurp). Sun swallows StorageTek (slurp). Adobe feasts on Macromedia (brrrap). And let’s not forget Sprint and Nextel’s $35 billion hookup, eBay’s purchase of Skype, the Symantec-Veritas wedding, or scores of other megabuck deals that are roiling today’s enterprise market. October 31, 3:00 a.m. PST The fragile wireless network The veil was lifted from my eyes when Katrina hit. I realized that our wireless infrastructure, critical for relief efforts, was sorely lacking. September 13, 4:00 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 Microsoft to integrate speech into Exchange SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Corp. aims to add speech-enabling technology to a future version of its Exchange Server as part of its unified messaging strategy, a move that could potentially compete with its third-party ISV (independent software vendor) partners. August 2, 1:45 p.m. PDT Seven keys to job security Wondering how to prevent your job from being downsized, marginalized, or outsourced? There’s no magic formula, but these strategies will help make you more valuable. To put it in glossy-magazine terms, “Old and Busted” is routine work and technology that is not critical to business strategy. “The New Hotness” is the ability to manage a coherent set of business processes and services that contribute materially to the company’s efficiency or competitive edge. July 4, 5:00 a.m. PDT SNIA works toward ILM standards Implementing an ILM strategy is neither simple nor straightforward for any organization. For one thing, although the point solutions offered by storage vendors today address parts of the problem, true ILM must encompass the whole datacenter. June 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Taking charge of the enterprise information lifecycle There’s a stage in the life of a new technology in which half the world thinks it’s a whole new paradigm and the other half thinks it’s all hype. Half says it will never happen whereas the other half says, “We’re doing it now.” And even the most improbable vendor claims to have strategies and products to support it. So it is with ILM (information life cycle management). June 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT The great business process handoff During the past 15 years, standards such as Java, Windows, and TCP/IP have made it much easier to outsource various aspects of IT, spawning a huge IT outsourcing industry. But that trend may pale in comparison to the next outsourcing wave: BPO (business-process outsourcing). May 9, 5:00 a.m. PDT The IT generalist makes a comeback I’ve been seeing the title “IT generalist” coming back into use. It’s a welcome sight. I recall the generalist from the days when minicomputers and mainframes were being traded for less costly Unix microcomputers. Back then, the generalist was the one who had a functional understanding of the entire technical operation and many of the processes that depended on it. If you had a generalist, by any title, you may have him or her to thank for easing the transition from legacy to modernity. March 30, 6:00 a.m. PST SOA apps meet reality See correction below February 28, 6:00 a.m. PST Teaching the enterprise to share Following Sept. 11, 2001, many companies beefed up security to the point where it was hard for people to get in and out of their buildings. As a result, IT departments at those companies wanted to keep their lockers for storing service parts on-site, even when the parts inventories were managed by outside maintenance contractors (as is most often the case). August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT HP bids for Synstar to broaden European reach Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is making a bid for U.K. IT services company Synstar PLC. in an effort to expand its service capabilities in Europe. August 9, 4:42 a.m. PDT Exclusive: HP wields blades to ease desktop management Probably no other task in IT generates as much frustration as supporting users' PCs. Many CTOs lament that despite outrageous maintenance costs, ensuring proper resilience and security for PC-based applications is often merely wishful thinking. June 11, 3:00 p.m. PDT Netli bolsters application delivery Netli this week enhanced its application delivery network services with the addition of performance monitoring and business continuity services. May 7, 3:06 p.m. PDT IBM buys Schlumberger's business continuity unit LONDON -- IBM Corp. has agreed to buy the business continuity services unit of Schlumberger Ltd. in a move to shore up its global services division in Europe and help companies comply with new data protection regulations. April 13, 9:15 a.m. PDT Taking a serious look at grids Whatever future there is for business applications of grid computing, it won’t be shaped by technology. Business attitudes must change to embrace the technology that already exists. This is a classic example of technology that’s crucial to business having its uptake delayed by an apparent lack of demand. It isn’t a solution looking for a problem; there are plenty of existing problems to go after with grids and similar approaches to distributed computing. What sticks in the minds of many IT professionals is that grids are useful to science and academia, therefore they are likely to be too esoteric for business computing. January 16, 3:00 p.m. PST 2003: The news in review The economy grabbed a lot of headlines in 2003, but competing for space in the IT arena were lawsuits, acquisitions, security issues, and technology upgrades. December 22, 6:00 a.m. PST Don't forget the basics: Power We spend a lot of time in IT talking about the virtual -- packets, protocols, bits, and bytes -- while paying little attention to boring facilities issues like electricity and HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning). When we buy servers, we demand redundant power supplies but ask little about the power once we plug the server in. When we load a new server into a rack, we plug it into a power strip or daisy-chain power strips and plug even more stuff in. We assume it will all work out, and most of the time it does. October 31, 3:00 p.m. PST Microsoft ponders automatic patching In the wake of a widespread Internet worm, Microsoft Corp. is weighing options to get more users to secure their computers, including automatically applying security patches to PCs remotely, the company said Thursday. August 22, 6:25 a.m. PDT Ballmer bullish on IT future REDMOND, WASH. -- Microsoft's ever-enthusiastic CEO and President Steve Ballmer is, well, enthusiastic about the future of software and IT. July 24, 5:10 p.m. PDT Battle-tested tech Imagine you wanted to devise a stress test for a new supply-chain-management solution. Perhaps you'd start with a harsh desert terrain. Then you'd add some mind-boggling requirements such as the ability to deliver real-time information from diverse points to track the overseas distribution of everything from 7 million sandbags, to 337 million gallons of bulk fuel, to 40 million packaged meals. Sound like the ideal lab environment? It was the actual battlefield of the recent Iraqi war, as you probably guessed from these Department of Defense figures. May 30, 3:00 p.m. PDT Cybersecurity gets auditing push at RSA Auditing firms Deloitte & Touche, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young joined White House Cyber Security Advisor Howard Schmidt at the RSA Conference on Tuesday to drum up support for stepped up public and private efforts to help secure the nation’s information infrastructure. April 15, 3:36 p.m. PDT On the front lines of IT If your office is like mine, the overall difficulty of doing business during the rough economy of the past two years is now compounded by something new: the war in Iraq. Regardless of how you feel morally or politically about the war, it is clear that IT must continue its usual mission, although the context has changed in subtle ways. Running IT during a war is not necessarily business as usual. April 4, 3:00 p.m. PST SAP late with software for U.S. small businesses SAP, Europe's largest business software company, has got off to a late start in rolling out new applications for small enterprises in the U.S., but is making headway, it said Friday. March 7, 5:00 a.m. PST In Sendmail threat, beginnings of a cyber plan BOSTON -- The new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) received praise for the role it played in coordinating the response to the recent Sendmail vulnerability, but challenges remain as the agency defines its role in securing the nation's information technology infrastructure, according to those familiar with the Sendmail investigation. March 4, 3:15 p.m. PST Disaster recovery finds prominence If there's one trend highlighted in the 2003 InfoWorld Storage Survey that everyone should take to heart, it is this: Business continuity, taking adequate measures to recover storage equipment from a disaster, has become part of a CTO's daily life and is no longer an afterthought or a placebo to pacify questioning auditors. February 14, 3:00 p.m. PST Making IT headlines February 14, 12:00 a.m. PST > Business > Data management |
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