Source Wars, Episode 7. The intellectual property battle over who really owns what lies inside the Linux source code is primed to develop into a full-scale legal orgy, as Linux vendor Red Hat filed suit in Delaware last week alleging SCO is conducting an "unfair, untrue and deceptive campaign…to harm Red Hat's…operating system". Red Hat is demanding a jury trial, and the move immediately follows IBM's legal counter-attack on SCO.
With Microsoft's forthcoming CRM (customer relationship management) software drawing headlines and renewed industry attention to the CRM sector, several growing ASPs (application service providers) are seizing the opportunity to evangelize about the advantages of hosted CRM deployments, a model analysts say remains a small market, but one that is making significant headway in customer acceptance.
Today, the most easily downloadable digital music sits in one of three formats: MP3, Real Audio and Windows Media Audio (.WMA). All three use compression algorithms to shrink huge files into manageable sizes, while retaining much of the clarity and quality we've come to expect in the CD age. The problem is that these formats are proprietary. Microsoft Corp. owns .WMA, RealNetworks controls Real Audio, and the German Fraunhofer Institute owns (and extracts royalties for) MP3. As a result, some smaller vendors and music makers can't afford to play in the digital audio game, while some listeners are bugged by the thought that their favorite tunes are held hostage by corporate-owned formats.
Let's say you decide to go for a run. After a few minutes, your breath quickens, your heart rate increases, and you start to perspire. All this happens whether you think about it or not--because your autonomic nervous system has roused the right organs to respond to the increased load on your body.
Autonomic computing, a phrase coined by IBM Corp., describes technology that self-regulates and even heals itself much as the human body would do. "When I say technology, I'm including all of the software, all of the applications, all of the storage, all the pieces of the infrastructure," explains Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy for IBM's server group. "Now, I don't mean any far out AI project. What I mean is that...instead of the technology behaving in its usual pedantic way and requiring a human being to do everything for it, it starts taking care of its own needs."
Despite recent troubles plaguing the telecommunications industry, including bankruptcies, plummeting valuations, and deep cuts in capital expenditures, there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel.
IDC’s newly launched research service, Worldwide Telecom Black Book, says worldwide spending on telecommunications services will exceed $US1.2 trillion in 2003.
The last thing Andrew Care would call himself is a Linux geek. If anything, says Air New Zealand’s acting CIO, “I’m an IT cynic; I’m not one of the brigade that’s out there modifying Linux, and I was actually surprised at how well it’s gone into organisations, especially large ones.”
Manufacturers in New Zealand and Australia are planning to ramp up their investments in information technology in the coming year. A sample taken from a global survey of 530 manufacturers across 40 countries revealed that 38 per cent of ANZ manufacturers plan to deploy e-commerce solutions and almost another 27 per cent are planning customer relationship management projects in the coming year.
The Global Manufacturing Survey 2002, sponsored by manufacturing IT vendor, SSA Global Technologies, showed that 56 per cent of CIOs worldwide expect to have bigger budgets next financial year. Findings in ANZ were even more positive, with 62 per cent of senior IT managers who responded expecting budget increases. Conversely, only one in eight ANZ manufacturers anticipate a contraction.
By Don Hill
Gartner group vice-president Craig Baty has issued a wakeup call to CIOs. “Today’s CIOs need to be able to demonstrate the business value of IT in the same way that other business units have been required to do in the past,” he says.
One of the most urgent debates in our field today is: How do we ensure that the IT plan is consistent with the company's strategy? We attend conference after conference grappling with just this question. I think this is one of the most important issues that IT faces, and it is at the heart of how IT is accepted within an organization.
Since its founding in 1995, Amazon.com Inc. has taken a lot of titles. Internet bookseller. Warehouse builder. Personalization expert. Shipping discounter.
IBM Corp. president and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano proclaimed, "the client is the driving force" behind his giant company's US$3.5 billion acquisition of New York City-based PWC Consulting, a deal that was approved by the PWC partners on Oct. 2. But analysts watching the deal say CIOs who are customers of IBM Global Services and PWC Consulting would do well to approach the combined IT services superpower with caution during the next year.
Here's Sheryl Gavin's presentation.
Click the file below to view the Powerpoint slides within your browser, or right-click and choose "Save Target as" in Internet Explorer (or "Save as" in Netscape) to download the file to your local hard drive.
If Care had any lingering doubts about Linux, they were dispelled when he paid a visit to the LinuxWorld conference in the US a few months ago. Among other things, he found American and European companies had been using Linux on mainstream systems — “platforms, applications, what you will” — for a number of years, “so it was quite reassuring to see that we were behind that first wave, knowing what other people had gone through. But considering the potential it has to be a disruptive technology, it’s actually gone quite smoothly. The kind of case studies that went up, the likes of Amazon and others out there, it’s amazing, for an IT technology, how easily and smoothly and relatively cost-effectively Linux went in”.
It was also reassuring, he says, to find that a company like Sun Microsystems, with its vast commitment to Solaris and Sparc, was there and supporting Linux — even providing a keynote address — after having roundly slated it a few years before.
By July 2003, if the European Union's finance ministers have their way, Internet sales of digital goods and services to European shoppers will be subject to a value-added tax (VAT). That means if you're selling online content to a consumer in Germany, you have to charge more to include the German VAT rate.
The rub here, according to U.S. officials, is that companies with offices in Europe pay the home-country rate. Vendors outside the E.U. pay the VAT rate based on where the consumer lives. U.S. officials argue these rules will put small U.S. companies seeking to grow global sales at a disadvantage. European online surfers already shopping U.S. websites probably won't be too pleased, either. Most U.S. companies selling digital products don't add VAT.
You're getting another choice in the contest for your IT consulting dollars: Microsoft. In its move from supporting player to starring role, the software company has created a single consulting organization called Microsoft Worldwide Services that as of Memorial Day had about 12,000 employees.
According to Jim Wilson, group marketing manager for Microsoft Worldwide Services, IT consultants focusing on e-commerce, enterprise application planning and distributed network architectures make up a little more than a third of this group. The rest are IT analysts and a growing legion of customer service representatives.
The modern citizens of the medieval, canal-dissected town of Brugge, Belgium, must have thought it strange to see packs of businesspeople following the dim green glow of cell phone screens through the city at twilight. What they were witnessing was a demonstration of one of the latest innovations in geographic information systems technology by Tele Atlas North America, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital data provider.
The first night in Brugge, the Tele Atlas conference participants divided into groups of 10 to 12 people, with each team given a cell phone into which they entered a code. What followed was dinner, entertainment and a tour of the city -- guided by the GPS-enabled cell phone. Instructions appeared on the screen, telling the participants to follow different streets and alleys as they made their way through the town. At certain destinations, the teams would enter location-specific information, such as the date on a 15th century guild house, to find out where the next course of their meal could be found.
Dozens of information sources. Hundreds of thousands of data points. All of them critical to the future success of your company. But trying to analyze such massive amounts of information might even spin the number-happy head of A Beautiful Mind's John Nash.
That's where Spotfire steps in. The Somerville, Mass.-based company builds analytical tools designed to let corporations create on-the-fly visual representations of complex data sets, helping mere mortals pluck drops of gold from oceans of lead.
Think of this as ROTC for security geeks. The U.S. government has started to award millions of dollars in scholarships to computer science students specializing in information assurance ensuring data and systems are secure, private and reliable. In return for the scholarship, recipients agree to work at a federal agency for two years.
Congress allocated more than US$11 million for the Federal Cyber Service program last year and the same amount this year (at press time, the White House is requesting additional funding). Critics of the program say it's far too little to protect the country's vulnerable IT assets. Only 54 students received scholarships last year (this year's scholarship awards have yet to be announced), but some of the funding has also gone toward helping universities develop information assurance courses and train faculty to teach them. "Of course it's too little, and of course it's too late, but that doesn't mean you don't do it," says Andrew Bernat, the program director at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., and head of the cyberservice program. "Maybe half your cows have escaped the barn, but does that mean you don't close the barn door? Of course not."
Digital asset management (DAM) products may be a hot topic now, but a January report by Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group predicts that by 2004 or 2005, such tools will likely evolve into nothing more than a set of features inside more complete enterprise content management tools.
That said, Meta doesn't think customers should ditch DAM systems. Instead, the report, "An Update on Enterprise Digital Asset Management Systems," indicates that companies should still use DAM systems to manage their unstructured multimedia content, resting safe in the knowledge that existing tools from established players will likely be acquired by more inclusive content management players. That may provide some security despite ongoing consolidation in the marketspace.
Companies are expanding the range of IT services they outsource. Internal staff shortages and cost constraints are primary drivers of outsourcing decisions, but CIOs are finding that they can also improve quality and delivery time of IT projects with the right outsource provider.
Best Practices
