vendor consolidation - News, Features, and Slideshows

If your enterprise has customised your mission-critical ERP systems over the years, your future upgrades will likely be more troublesome and terrifying because the changes can conflict with the patches. On the other hand, if you are running out-of-the-box ERP with little customisation, maybe you're not getting all the important features your business needs.
So what's a CIO to do? And how do you figure out what to do next if upgrades or replacement are looming in your future?

Increased revenue will foster mergers and acquisitions in the technology space, according to a survey by accounting and consulting firm BDO USA that polled chief financial officers at technology firms.

By almost any measure, Cisco Systems, Inc. is the biggest fish in the networking pond. Thanks to more than 130 acquisitions, a brisk pace of internal development and a much-discussed new organisational structure that the company is using to attack a slew of new markets, Cisco's reach extends from the consumer to the enterprise and deep into service provider networks. The company offers everything from personal video cameras to high-end telepresence systems, set-top video boxes to, lately, servers for the data centre, in addition to more traditional network gear like routers and switches.
But Cisco's real ambition, as articulated by its high-energy CEO, John Chambers, is to become the most important IT company of all. In this installment of IDG Enterprise's 'CEO Interview Series,' Chambers talked with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Scot Finnie and InfoWorld.com Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr about the market transitions fuelling Cisco's bold strategy, what it means for enterprise customers and how the company will compete head-to-head against the industry's biggest players.

In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS ( now part of Hewlett-Packard) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.
British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) had signed a £48 million outsourcing contract with EDS to build a customer service system in 2000, but terminated the deal early in 2002 after what it said was "woeful" performance by the IT service provider. BSkyB alleged deceit, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract by EDS.

The battle and competition in the enterprise software market between SAP and Oracle has fast become one of the hottest rivalries in high-tech. And while it might not have the pop-culture pizzazz of Red Sox-Yankees or Coke-Pepsi, the passion of the thousands of the combatants involved makes it no less fervent or important a battle.
As it stands now, these companies are big. Not only in revenues, customers and market cap, but also in the number of employees who call each vendor "my employer."

The ICT sector was as dynamic as ever with company mergers, innovative products and software, new markets, non-traditional delivery models and emerging technology and services driving the companies that make up this year’s Strategic 100 list.
While this has been the norm for the past four editions of the Strategic 100, this year has been markedly different — the presence of the not so hypothetical elephant in the room — the global economic turmoil that has left no business sector untouched.