Stories by Mario Apicella

SCSI going serial

Have you had a chance to take a look at the new SATA (serial ATA) drives and RAID controllers? You'll appreciate SATA's point-to-point, slim, independent connections between controllers and disk drives.

Disaster recovery taken to heart

If there’s one trend highlighted in a recent survey that everyone should take to heart, it is this: business continuity, taking adequate measures to recover storage equipment from a disaster, has become part of a CTO’s daily life and is no longer an afterthought or a placebo to pacify questioning auditors.

Growing into storage

Storage has gone beyond being a simple technical asset and has become central to smooth business operation. In this first of a two part series, Mario Apicella looks at strategies.

Product Review: Streamlining sales

After months of rumblings out of Redmond , Microsoft Corp. finally released Version 1.0 of its Customer Relationship Management (MS CRM) Professional Suite Edition late last month. The wait has paid off: There is little doubt in our mind that the new suite will change -- for the better -- the landscape of the controversial market segment.

You've got CRM

Probably the most difficult question you can ask sales or marketing managers is to define what their companies' CRM requirements are. No matter how differently sales professionals may perceive their companies' business requirements, they share a common desire for simplicity in their CRM applications. Ask salespeople to interact with a keyboard and mouse more often than they feel is needed or to submit to some extensive training, and your CRM application is quickly doomed as your sales force will avoid it like a traffic jam during rush hour.

SAP's e-business integration gambit

SAP AG CEO Hasso Plattner shared a message at the recent Sapphire expo that probably will echo throughout the IT community for some time. He promised customers a new layer of applications, xApps (cross applications), that deliver e-business integration functionality from SAP's own software and, interestingly, from other vendors' solutions.

Storage networking for the masses

There is general agreement that Fibre Channel solutions are unnecessarily expensive and proprietary. You can blame the profit motive for this, but Fibre Channel vendors may not be completely at fault for cost and interoperability issues.

MSP strategy: Gear up for management

As the landscape of business applications becomes more complex, companies are turning to MSPs (managed service providers) to attain more effective, professionally supervised operations. But often they find that cost-effective, impeccable levels of service can be hard to achieve.

Networked storage

Morphing from workaday drudge to the belle of the ball, storage is the Cinderella of IT. Its traditional, and often ancillary, role as a safe and reliable repository for data hasn't changed, but the amount and variety of information that companies manage have increased dramatically. There's no relief in sight to this data glut, which was kick-started by companies that moved their businesses to the Internet and embraced multimedia formats, such as graphics and movies.

Playing data host

Outsourcing is increasingly appealing to companies struggling to contain costs and make meager budget resources more effective. Initially focused on well-defined application domains such as payroll, the outsourcing model is extending its reach to more ambitious targets, including ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM, and SCM (supply-chain management).

Web services promise a new look at software use

Web services promise to deliver an open, Web-based architecture to connect business processes, which could potentially turn upside down the way we think of, create, and use software. It's reasonable to predict that more granular applications, sized to solve discrete business problems, will replace today's monolithic, all-encompassing suites. Therefore, companies should be able to support their business by building a mosaic of best-of-breed Web services, choosing (and therefore paying for) only those that satisfy requirements.

Side-by-side in perfect harmony?

The e-business revolution prompted companies to abandon their company-centric focus and broaden their definition of interactions with customers and business partners; as a result, many companies have developed interconnecting business processes -- and applications -- over the Web. The latest technology, Web services, defines a common set of standards that facilitates bridging incompatible systems and databases, thereby invading the traditional domain of EAI (enterprise application integration).

CRM applications turn to the Web

For many companies, CRM has always ranked among the most challenging and multifaceted of enterprise technologies. Establishing the priorities among CRM goals and identifying the best approach to achieving them always varies greatly, depending on the industry sector, culture, and size of each organization -- which explains why, in 2001, CRM still meant different things to different people.

A rich dollop of CRM

CRM products are likely candidates for hosted applications. Companies signing up for such services benefit from reduced deployment time and costs. As an added bonus, some vendors such as Oracle, Upshot, and Salesforce.com are offering free online evaluations that give companies the opportunity to try the various solutions without making any commitment.

A tasty CRM appetizer

Many industry analysts foresee a promising future for service-based CRM (customer relationship management). According to International Data Corp. estimates from May 2001, worldwide revenue from CRM outsourcing will jump from US$32 billion in 2000 to more than $66 billion in 2004. We took an in-depth look at Oracle Sales and Oracle Support, the free SFA (sales-force automation) and customer service components of the vendor's CRM offering.

[]