It's official: Australia's skills shortage is back with IT managers confirming they are working longer hours and struggling to retain staff. …mehr
Information technology executives last week said that Microsoft Corp.'s decision to delay the release of some versions of Windows Vista -- those aimed at consumers and small businesses -- likely won't affect their rollouts of the software. …mehr
Cognos Monday joined the fray with those companies that seek to offer the enterprise better behind-the-firewall search capabilities. In recent weeks, Oracle launched a new in-house search engine and Google a new enterprise search appliance. …mehr
As IT executives seek to transform their operations into true, corporate assets that can help grow the business at their companies, many are finding that first they must impose much tighter controls over their often vast and unwieldy portfolios of technology projects. …mehr
Australian software house Object Consulting is leveraging off Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team System with a plug-in that aims to show developers how to work in a team environment. …mehr
Oracle Corp. last week moved to stake a claim in the increasingly crowded enterprise business intelligence market with a new suite of tools and applications. …mehr
In the spring, a CIO's heartstrings are pulled by the lure of reorganization. …mehr
For the past half-decade, it seems, networked storage has been expected to explode. "The Year of the SAN" was always just a few calendar flips away, analysts and vendors assured us. …mehr
Sonic Software is upgrading its enterprise service buses (ESB) Monday, with the company touting what it calls the industry's only third-generation ESB. …mehr
One day, Sanjay Shah, CIO at Cabell Huntington Hospital, simply stopped trusting magnetic tape for radiological image and patient-record backups. Instead, he and his IT team began using an optical disc jukebox for its backup and archive, and they have never looked back. …mehr
Microsoft Corp. Monday announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of BizTalk Server 2006, which will be generally available May 1, according to company executives. …mehr
Nortel Networks Corp. announced Monday that it will simplify its services offerings as well as provide integration of equipment from other vendors, in an effort to spur new revenue from the services it offers to large businesses and service providers. …mehr
Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. in Memphis recently found itself dealing with a proliferation of user-owned plug-and-play USB port drives that posed a security risk to sensitive patient data. …mehr
It was the Keystone Kops routines that convinced Scott Roemmele that there had to be a better way to store and retrieve e-mail archives at Quicken Loans Inc. …mehr
Jim Stallings is two months into his job as general manager of IBM's mainframe System z division. In an interview this week with Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau, Stallings mapped out some of his plans, including security, the training of 20,000 mainframe workers by 2010 and the prospect of new specialty processors. …mehr
Multimedia developer Jered Cuenco calls it the "gray-box application" phenomenon: A Web developer, befuddled by a graphic designer's computer-drawn mock-ups, delivers a prototype full of generic gray buttons, plain white backgrounds, oversized headlines and other crimes against visually interesting user interfaces. …mehr
Lucent, Alcatel in merger negotiations …mehr
Ismael Ghalimi is either a harbinger of the future or a candidate for the loony bin. With the exception of his operating system and a browser, he has emptied his PC's disk drive of business applications and data. He has no local storage for his work. Zip. Nada. Nichts. No, he isn't hooked to a Citrix server or some back-end mainframe. He put all his information on the World Wide Web. Is he crazy or what? …mehr
Finally, corporate chieftains are beginning to understand that business runs on information. Information properly exploited can yield competitive advantage. Information properly stored can be retrieved when needed for business, legal, regulatory compliance or disaster recovery purposes. And information properly protected will keep the company's name from joining the news media's growing list of privacy and security breaches. …mehr
... to get business services instead of Web services. Bobby Soni, chief strategy officer at Webify Solutions Inc., contends that many IT vendors are approaching service-oriented architecture projects from the wrong direction. " IBM, Oracle, BEA, SAP and others are going at the SOA problem from the bottom up," he says. "You need to go from the top down." Soni argues that …mehr
Squeezed by two seemingly contradictory trends that are slowly draining IT operations of senior employees and making it harder to hire replacements: an aging workforce and increasing automation. …mehr
Thin-provisioning applications are among the latest weapons in the battle of the bloated storage budget. Several vendors are now pushing these optional features of familiar storage systems as a way for corporate IT officials to send a powerful message to storage-hungry business units: Finish what's on your plate before going back for seconds. …mehr
Samsung executives guilty of price fixing …mehr
Looking to tackle the problem of data integration in scenarios involving mainframes, Neon Systems last week shipped what it calls the industry's first ESB (enterprise service bus) for big-iron boxes. …mehr
The Federal Communications Commission announced last week that it deregulated the prices Verizon Communications Inc. can charge businesses for high-speed data services, a move that outraged corporate customers. …mehr
Boston's Suffolk University launched one of the first online MBA programs in 1999. Initially, the school used an application service provider to host its courses, but in 2004, it brought the program fully in-house, using an e-learning system from Blackboard Inc. in Washington. This meant changing the IT infrastructure to boost reliability. …mehr
With corporate uptake of Windows Vista likely to be "sluggish", news last week that the general release of Windows Vista has been delayed until January 2007 left many IT managers unfazed. Few companies said they planned urgent rollouts of Vista and were happy with the stability of their XP fleet. …mehr
If you want to keep yourself and your company competitive in an economy that's getting more global with every sunrise in the East, to what should you devote your energy? What causes or initiatives should you champion? …mehr
The Internal Revenue Service continues to put taxpayers' sensitive personal data at risk by not strengthening its information security systems, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. …mehr
Vincent Fusca trusts his staff. But he can't take any chances. It's all about the money. …mehr
A major upgrade to the core financial systems of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has encountered turbulence from end users and the agency's inspector general before getting far off the ground. …mehr
For the past few years, to keep track of this projector, IT staffers at this corporate office have been using a sign-out sheet. But one day, a VP doesn't want to go through the sign-out process. "It's only for an hour," he complains. "I don't see why I have to. What's the point?" IT pilot fish calmly explains that it's the only way to prevent the projector from disappearing. Besides, says fish, you're the one who came up with the sign-out sheet idea, and it's worked well so far. "Really?" says VP. "Oh. It's a terrific idea, then." …mehr
The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) Monday released its data and storage provisioning requirements for enterprise grids as part of its ongoing effort to foster development of interoperable grid products and best practices. …mehr
Fidelity Investments last week confirmed that a laptop computer containing confidential information on more than 196,000 current and former employees at Hewlett-Packard Co. and companies it acquired was recently stolen from the financial company. …mehr
Canada's National Ballet School has chosen IP communications technology for its new building complex in downtown Toronto, including voice over Wi-Fi phones. …mehr
Since the dawn of the digital computer age, long-term data storage and backup have been the province of a single primary medium: magnetic tape. Tape has compelling advantages. It's inexpensive to operate and buy, and even cheaper to store, whether it exists on reels, inside cartridges or as part of an automated tape library system. Tape also has the benefit of separating the portable and inexpensive storage medium from the larger, more costly recording machinery. The introduction of tape made it possible to back up everything, keep copies off-site and restore older or deleted files as needed. …mehr
Cognos Inc. Monday announced an update to its Cognos 8 business intelligence (BI) tool set, adding a new search capability and access to enterprise applications. …mehr
Microsoft begins OpenXML effort …mehr
Microsoft begins legal attacks on phishing …mehr
Motorola has launched its Hangzhou R&D center the company's 17th R&D facility in China. …mehr
Golden Gate Capital Corp. completed its US$1 billion acquisition of Geac Computer Corp. on March 14 and last week launched a company called Extensity Inc. to further develop and sell Geac's financial applications and business intelligence tools. Geac's enterprise planning software line was shifted to Golden Gate-funded company Infor Global Solutions. Ken Walters, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Extensity and former president and chief operating officer at Infor, recently discussed his plans for the business with Computerworld. …mehr
General Motors Corp. is turning to automation to improve its distribution of auto parts to dealers, ending practices that produced a bumpy ride for its parts supply chain. …mehr
Think Microsoft Vista's latest schedule slip doesn't matter? Think again. Sure, last week's announcement -- that the next version of Windows won't be out in time for holiday sales -- is more an industry sideshow than a big deal for corporate IT. It'll stunt PC sales at the end of this year and give Microsoft-haters something more to bleat about. But for most IT shops, that delay just means we'll start testing Vista a little later. …mehr
While I write this column on my BlackBerry, I'm reflecting about the effect that Research In Motion's settlement with NTP will have on the IT industry. …mehr
With more consumers monitoring their credit records online to fight fraud and protect themselves from identity theft, online credit monitoring service TrueCredit has decided to ramp up its Web infrastructure to keep pace with demand. …mehr
Australian banks and financial institutions will soon use protocols to stem phishing attacks, similar to those used by credit card companies to stop fraud. …mehr
Information technology (IT) professionals across Asia, particularly the Philippines, are recognizing the importance of a domestic software industry and the role the government should play in developing it. This is according to a study commissioned by global organization Business Software Alliance (BSA) where 800 IT professionals from eight countries in Asia were surveyed. …mehr
Java faces encroachment from dynamic languages such as Ruby in the Web application tier, but Java can be improved and Java Virtual Machine functionality can be extended to dynamic languages, said panelists at TheServerSide Java Symposium on Saturday. …mehr
Die wachsende Zahl an WLANs wird zum Problem. Die Funknetze beeinträchtigen sich, der Datenfluss tröpfelt. …mehr
