In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?
In InfoWorld's recent <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/02/27FEcompsurvey_1.html">Compensation Survey</a> for IT, we crunched the numbers and ended up with a clear picture of the major trends. Overall, the respondents said they were satisfied with their salaries, bonuses, stock options, and training. But were they happy?
At the Gartner Symposium ITXPO 2007, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of global research, gave a keynote address on emerging IT trends and how they will affect IT on a personal and professional level.
SAS Institute unveiled this week an interim release of Version 9 of its BI Enterprise Server. As an upgrade from Version 9 launched last year, the enhanced Web Report Studio will offer nontechnical business users access to a deep set of predictive analytics data.
There is no nonbiological entity that can compare to the human brain's ability to process massive amounts of different types of data, integrate it, analyze it, and respond to it in a split second. But to hear the major database vendors tell it, they're coming close.
There's something in the air these days at distribution centres everywhere.
As I've said before, RFID is going to change the way companies do business. Combined with sensor networks, it will give unprecedented visibility into the supply chain and will someday give companies the ability to make decisions while goods are in transit -- decisions that could swing millions of dollars to the plus column. There are still obstacles that must be overcome, however; and as they say, forewarned is forearmed.
To get the technical details right, I spoke with Bill Colleran, CEO of Impinj Inc., a fab-less semiconductor company that sells chips to RFID tag manufacturers. He tells me that the obstacles to widespread RFID adoption, none of which are insurmountable, are both political and technical.
Wal-Mart Stores wrapped up its three-day RFID event for suppliers this week with additional RFID product tag compliance dates for tier one and tier two suppliers and some optimistic words about the benefits of RFID for its supplier network.
Students at the Queensland University of Technology Information Security Research Centre in Australia have uncovered a flaw in an IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) protocol that allows attackers with a simple Wi-Fi-enabled handheld device to effectively shut down a wireless local area network.
SAN FRANCISCO (03/30/2004) - As the CPG (consumer packaged goods) industry gears up for RFID (radio frequency identification) mandates from giant retailers such as Target Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., enterprise software vendors appear to be in lock step with CPG industry initiatives. Oracle made good on its promise that the next version of Oracle Warehouse Management would be RFID-ready with this week's launch of Oracle Sensor-Based Services at the RFID Journal Live! conference.
PeopleSoft Inc. will set its sights a bit lower this week when it announces a hosted solution targeted at the mid-market.
There are many levels of shared services, but the core concept of having a centralized organization within the enterprise that provides services to disparate, internal data consumers rests on the power of standardized business processes.
Ben Gaucherin, CTO of Sapient Corp., tells me one of his company's clients, a telco equipment provider, had 93 different ERP systems before starting the consolidation process. And although financials are at the center of shared services, they now go well beyond that.
Taking men and women out of the so-called kill-chain was a primary goal during the war in Iraq. The idea was to reduce risk by replacing people in certain situations with machines that could gather intelligence. Since information gathering and risk reduction are perennial business issues as well, many of these same technologies are likely to make their way into private industry.
In Iraq, the military used smart robots and smart drones to reduce danger to personnel. In the future, perhaps another DARPA-supported technology called Smart Dust will reduce casualties and gather information even more effectively.
Cognos and Business Objects recently unveiled new BI products.
Cognos introduced ReportNet, a query and reporting engine designed from the ground up to support Web services, Java, and XML. At the same time, Business Objects launched Enterprise 6.1 of its business intelligence suite of applications.
"No question that this is something that should have been around from the beginning of ERP, but now we have the technology," says John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, in Rosemont, Ill.
Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Daly City, Calif., calls it the future of enterprise application software.