The clamor for convergence is reaching a deafening roar as IT departments seek new ways to make scarce budget dollars support broad and sweeping business changes. The more flexible and adaptable the technology, the better the play, the thinking goes. Better still: the technology becomes invisible, connecting multiple uses and
When USinternetworking, an application service provider (ASP) to more than 150 companies, was still very small, software architects and programmers were able to keep track of the available application codes and figure out how to make them work together. But as the Annapolis, Md. based company grew, the task rapidly
At one time, the IT staff’s mission was to stay out on the bleeding edge — first adopter, first adapter, first developer, first to market. But now the frontlines have changed, withdrawing to more cautious ground where bottom-line hemorrhaging can be stemmed and new strategies drawn. “Without IT and business
Is the Microsoft monolith beginning to crumble? Alternative applications for everyday office tasks like word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations have been available for years, but their small size and limited resources relegated them to the sidelines. Now, however, the software giant is facing challenges from champions of similar size.
It’s an unpleasant and unavoidable fact of life: IT organizations are almost always in problem-solving mode. And the best way to address unusual, urgent or one-time issues is to create temporary IT “solution teams.” The experts on these SWAT teams – the apt acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics –
It’s virtually a no-brainer. Your data is backed up the instant you make a change to it — any change, no matter how small. You can retrieve it immediately. That’s right; no need to hassle with locating and accessing the right backup tape. And the expense is easily justified by
Ramiro Perez doesn’t like to wait around. As purchasing manager for Copart Inc., a $500 million automotive services firm based in Fairfield, Calif. helping insurance companies process and sell “total loss” vehicles, his job is all about efficiency — and that’s as much about making sure his organization doesn’t waste
A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. “We ran out of power capacity,” says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the
After being sidelined for years by low-cost PCs and servers, the virtues of virtualization are re-emerging. Its adoption is accelerating among companies of all sizes. “The world will be virtualized in several years,” says Sal Capizzi, senior analyst at the Boston, Mass. based Yankee Group. “In five years, they’ll be
Rapid change in technology is nothing new. But some things remain a constant: CIOs will always be under pressure to prove IT spending improves business growth and, at the same time, find ways to deliver more with less. These days, that means figuring out which parts of IT to keep