Kurz nach der Übernahme von Fastviewer durch Siemens Enterprise Communiations (SEN) schnappt sich Citrix den Karlsruher Wettbewerber Netviewer AG. …mehr
Eine Standardlösung für die IT-Planung soll die Prozesse bis Mitte kommenden Jahres transparenter und effizienter machen. …mehr
Das Start-up Quest Visual hat mit "Word Lens" eine App für das iPhone veröffentlicht, die Texte in Bildern erkennt und übersetzt. …mehr
Die 882 nicht von Attachmate gekauften Novell-Patente teilen sich offenbar ein paar Firmen, die man nicht gemeinsam in einem Boot erwartet hätte. …mehr
Yahoo! will nach einer Welle von Stellenstreichungen nun auch traditionsreiche, aber unprofitable Geschäftsbereiche schließen. …mehr
Es ist ein Etappensieg für Julian Assange, aber nur auf einer Flachetappe. …mehr
Keine Frage – HDTV ist das Fernsehen der Zukunft. Die meisten HD-Programme gibt es per Satellit. Unsere Schwesterpublikation PC-Welt hat zehn HDTV-Sat-Empfänger mit Festplatte getestet. …mehr
Allen Unkenrufem zum Trotz ist der Blackberry weiter ein Verkaufsschlager. …mehr
Erst der Triumph über SAP vor Gericht, jetzt glänzende Geschäftszahlen: Der US-Computerkonzern Oracle hat einen Lauf. …mehr
Nach 14 Jahren sehen auch scheinbar moderne Ehen eher konventionell aus: Mama putzt und kocht, Papa geht arbeiten. …mehr
Wer gut ausgebildete und kommunikative IT-Expertinnen ins Unternehmen holen will, sollte ihnen so weit wie möglich entgegenkommen. …mehr
Egal ob iPad, Kindle oder Galaxy Tab: Lesen Sie, welche Hardware es 2010 in die Top 10 des COMPUTERWOCHE-Rankings geschafft hat. …mehr
Wie Sie Personalauswahlgespräche professionell vorbereiten und führen und so den richtigen Mitarbeiter für Ihre Firma finden, verrät Dr. Joachim Kolbert. …mehr
Die direkte Kommunikation zwischen elektronischen Geräten (M2M-Kommunikation) gilt als ein Wachstumsmarkt der Zukunft. Studien gehen davon aus, dass sich der M2M-Markt in Deutschland bis 2013 verdoppelt. …mehr
M2M-Kommunikation erzeugt kleine, aber viele Datenpakete. Herkömmliche Netze sind für diesen Verkehr nur schlecht geeignet. …mehr
Mit der Erweiterung der M2M-Kommunikation um eine mobile Komponente, konnte der Flughafen Köln Bonn die Ausfallzeiten bei der Gepäckbeförderung verringern. …mehr
Oracle's net income for the quarter ended Nov. 30 rose 28 percent from a year earlier to US$1.9 billion, buoyed by strong software license sales and an improving hardware business, the company said Thursday. Revenue was $8.6 billion, a jump of 47 percent. …mehr
Being in the Army is a 'family tradition' for John Holley. His grandfather fought in World Wars one and two, and his father was a soldier and mechanic, and later on, a supplier, in the Army. So Holley grew up living in military bases across New Zealand. On a summer break from Massey University, where he was studying computer science, Holley worked as a driver in the Linton Army Camp in Palmerston North. After graduation, he moved to a number of IT management, sales, and consulting roles, including at the University of Auckland, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind, and most recently, the Auckland Regional Council where he was a CIO and acting General Manager Operations. Yet, Holley never really left the Army. Today, he is a reserve officer, with the rank of Lt Colonel. He joined an operational deployment to East Timor in 2002, and spends 60 to 80 days a year working with the NZ Defence Force where he is a staff officer at the Directorate of Reserve Forces and Youth Development. He spends two weeks a year teaching operational planning and leadership at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. He explains why he never really left his holiday job 28 years ago."For me it has always been about being involved in some other stuff that gives a bit of diversity. People get confused; here is John Holley the geek running around, shooting weapons. There is a bit of discontinuity for some people. But the key thing for me is the stuff I learned about leadership and management that does not really come from the IT environment. "Even as a part-time soldier or officer, every year you train staff, and are given opportunities around leadership. You are taught about strategic geopolitical theory, strategy, leadership, a whole range of things to turn you into a senior officer. When you go away and do this planning, you work in environments where you can actually make a significant difference -- good or bad -- by your actions. It is no good to say 'all I know how to do is shoot a rifle'. You need to understand strategy."When I was in East Timor, I was the planning officer for the New Zealand battalion. My job was to write the plans and I was writing those on behalf of the commanding officer and we were a multinational battalion. You can apply that framework to almost anything."I do the same thing in a different way [at ARC, now part of the Auckland Council]. It was about, what are you looking to achieve, what is the business looking to achieve? It challenges your assumptions... It is interesting going to some seminars recently there has been quite a bit of stuff around virtualisation and how you present it to the business. It is almost like they missed the mark because they start talking about consolidation of servers, everything else that comes back to IT being a cost. If you are talking about what are the services you want to enable [with virtualisation], that is a different conversation.""In the Army, you are being constantly evaluated on your leadership. You are an officer 24x7. You have what you call the 'game face'. You have to motivate and lead people." …mehr
Yahoo will not shut down Delicious and instead is trying to sell it to another company. At least, that's what Yahoo wrote on the Delicious blog Friday, a day after reports circulated that it planned to shut down the social bookmarking pioneer. …mehr
Cloud sync service has announced the final release of its client software. comes with performance increases, courtesy of a reduction in resources used by the program, as well as hundreds of bug fixes. However, the biggest new feature is Selective Sync, which allows users to control which files are downloaded to client computers. …mehr
There are two kinds of shadowboxing. , an Instagram-integrated approach to the less aerobic variant: hand-carved bamboo shadow box frames for your favorite Instagram shots. …mehr
Four executives at publicly traded technology companies have been arrested on charges they sold inside information about their employers, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. …mehr
One way to gage the popularity of a product is to propose killing it. found that out the hard way. Now Yahoo has discovered it too with its ill-conceived move to "sunset" the popular social bookmarking site . Unlike Coke, though, it has only taken 24 hours for Yahoo to change its tune on Delicious. …mehr
Networking vendor Huawei has contributed $250,000 to training facilities at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) as part of its memorandum of understanding with the Victorian university. …mehr
After by effectively declaring that only future versions of LTE and WiMax will be 4G, the International Telecommunication Union appears to have opened its doors and let the party come inside. …mehr
Google jumps back into the phone hardware business , and the phone to bits. That's just the natural order of things. …mehr
No year in the IT industry would be complete without a number of high-profile ERP (enterprise resource planning) project failures, ones that burn through mountains of cash, bring company operations to a standstill, generate bad publicity for vendors and toss careers in the trash. …mehr
Think of and the human body. …mehr
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should expand network neutrality rules to providers of broadband service to schools, libraries and other community institutions when it votes on new regulations next week, three Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives said. …mehr
is a completely free app that rips a Flash video from one of a number of Web sources and converts the video to the format you want for offline viewing. The was already a must-have app, and version 2.0 adds a few critical new features to the mix that make it even better. The app now converts on the fly as it downloads, which saves a lot of time. All of the video file types and presets formerly present only in sister app are now included, meaning that only one app is now required (though Converter is still useful for additional fine-tuning of the conversion process). You can now select a destination folder for the converted video, and more information such as file size and duration are made available as the video is being downloaded and converted. …mehr
The "It Gets Better" project is a video campaign where people speak out for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth suffering from bullying. Today, . …mehr
Java developers are getting more assistance in writing parallel programs for multi-core systems with another technology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. …mehr
What tech treats top our holiday wish lists? Join PCWorld editors Robert Strohmeyer, Steve Fox, Ed Albro, and Jason Cross as they run down their most coveted technology items for 2010. From to , to , there's bound to be something on our lists that you'll love, too. …mehr
Today a lot of people are mourning the (or, as it used to be known, del.icio.us), following news that Yahoo is planning to sell or otherwise dispose of the popular Web bookmarking service …mehr
Rejoice, Mac bundle enthusiasts. It's been since we've written about a for the holidays, but is here to quench our thirst for software and gifting software with the . …mehr
EA announces a registered user milestone and new features in its free to play online racing game. …mehr
CFOs are taking a more prominent role in enterprise decision-making. "The CFOs are in the boardroom and executive level discussions and carry more weight than ever," says Gary Obbes, consultant in financial management practice, IBM New Zealand.Finance in the past was seen as one of the back-office functions, now it is something that can drive value for the enterprise, says Obbes, who conducted the local surveys for the IBM 2010 Global CFO Study.The survey involved 1900 senior finance executives in 81 countries, with 27 New Zealand finance chiefs included.The survey reveals more than 70 percent of CFOs provide advisory roles or are in decision-making roles. But while CFOs find their roles elevated, the study finds they face intense pressure on three areas -- reducing the enterprise cost base, making faster and more accurate decisions and providing more transparency to external stakeholders. The pressure in these areas is expected to increase dramatically over the next three years.While there are signs of stability, the new economic environment is likely to be a period of low economic growth. The question for CFOs, he says, is how to make the enterprise smarter during this period of uncertainty.A key finding in the survey is that since 2005, the enterprise focus of driving integration of information across the enterprise has more than doubled -- from 35 percent to 73 percent.The need for faster decision-making and demand for external transparency -- which together with cost has been identified as the top pressures for CFOs -- are linked together, says Obbes. "The CIO absolutely has a fundamental role to play in that, because it is a demand from the CEO and the organisation to provide this information and answer these questions," says Obbes. "Therefore, I see his priorities aligning with the priorities of the CEO and the CFO in that regard, the driving of integration of information."There are two fundamentals to achieve this, says Obbes. First is standardisation of data definitions, the governance around data and putting a framework around data governance and finally providing the analytical tools in place. He says around 50 percent of finance's time is still spent on transactional activities and CFOs are trying to drive that down to 30 to 35 percent, and divert that effort into analytics and analysis. Therefore, the CIO has a role to play in helping drive the automation of, for example, "systems talking to each other".The CFOs responded generally, particularly in New Zealand, that their finance systems and financial information have a high degree of reliability and is highly automated, says Obbes. Operational information, on the other hand, is lower down in terms of automation and in the degree of confidence."This whole idea of integration of information is really about joining those two together," he explains. "It is really associating our finance number with whatever the activity or unit was behind that to get a ratio or a measure of sorts which makes sense of the number and the data."He says while there has been "a little more room for investment" compared to the past year, the pressure to manage the cost base remains. For the CIO, says Obbes, there are two things to consider: How does the CIO contain costs in his own organisation and how to meet the expectation that productivity will increase amidst flat or reduced costs."What does the CIO have to do in order to manage that cost base?"Obbes says the CIO needs to "think creatively". This includes looking to create a variable cost base. This could be through outsourcing, partnering, leasing, use of external datacentre and shared services. He cites at least two financial companies that have gone further -- creating a 'centre of excellence' in New Zealand to also support Australia. The government, on the other hand, is doing this through shared services. While he says the 'centre of excellence' model and shared services overlap, there are distinct differences. Obbes explains a shared services model will be along the lines of getting similar processes together and putting people working on them in one area. With a 'centre of excellence', a high degree of expertise that is required in one area is centralised and can serve the parent company. In finance, for instance, this will be a group of finance analysts producing information and doing the analysis for the business. In IT, this can also mean concentrating IT resources in one place to look after the parent company offshore.The IBM study listed four different profiles of CFOs: constrained advisors, discipline operators, scorekeepers and value integrators.The last group -- the value integrators -- was found to consistently outperform their peers in all key financial metrics by driving two key qualities across their organisation: Finance efficiency through the use of common process and data standards across the organisation, and business insight capability.So what is the implication for CIOs?"Because he controls the purse strings, the CIO absolutely has to have a good relationship with the CFO. The CFO will have a say on how much money is spent, whether some things are affordable or not; therefore he needs to understand the benefit of taking certain courses of action."The relationship, however, must be "symbiotic", says Obbes. "Similarly the CFO can partner with the CIO to help him understand his cost space, to help him understand where he may be able to save.Drilling in on the four types of CFOs, Obbes says none of the local respondents were in the constrained advisors quadrant, compared to 12 percent of global figures. The New Zealand results show 63 percent of respondents (compared to 32 percent globally) are disciplined operators. The figures for both the two other types of CFOs -- scorekeepers and value integrators are the same -- 19 percent. …mehr
XDA member has hacked an , replacing the Windows Mobile OS with Android, raising the question: what hasn't been hacked to run Android yet? …mehr
I receive a lot of promotional e-mails that blast "new," "game changing" and "dramatic" survey results that relate to technology--whether in the consumer or enterprise (B2B) space. …mehr
Apple aims to simplify the process of buying a Mac, one kid learns the hard way that stealing is bad, and we're shocked----to find that there's insider trading going on here. The remainders for Thursday, December 16, 2010 are treading the straight and narrow." …mehr
How do IT news and reviews affect your life? Be you CIO or CTO, vendor or client, developer or helpdesk tech, we want your opinions and arguments on the latest Computerworld stories. Here are some comments that caught our eye this week: …mehr
The iconic characters from Team Fortress 2 influence a new downloadable content pack for the PC version of Worms Reloaded on Steam. …mehr
Research In Motion may have high hopes for its PlayBook tablet but it looks like the device will not go on sale until the end of the first quarter, according to comments from executives during RIM's earnings call Thursday. …mehr
ASX-listed security vendor Senatas (ASX: SEN) has warned that its current half year results could be a loss of up to $1.5 million due to current expenditure reviews by governments and agencies around the globe. …mehr
If AirPort troubles have got you blue going into the holiday season, then perhaps this will help: Apple on Thursday released both a firmware update for AirPort Base Stations and Time Capsules that fixes a number of bugs in the wireless routers and an update for its AirPort Utility. …mehr
It turns out that Christmas lights are more than just pretty objects used for decorating trees; they make great indicators to see who's online. In time for the holidays, a Microsoft employee hacked a string of the lights to serve as a status indicator so he can see when his colleagues are in the office. …mehr
iiNet and Internode have changing business strategies for 2011, with applications and improved customer service becoming they focal points in the coming year. …mehr
