Stories by Leon Erlanger

Networks smarten up

The days of the fat, dumb pipe, are over. Server applications, and storage have been shouldering the intelligence and security burden for too long. By Leon Erlanger

Transamerica turns silos into services

One of the real promises of SOA is enabling companies to leverage existing legacy systems as a set of core, reusable Web service building blocks that can be assembled to create new processes and applications quickly and inexpensively. That's just what Transamerica Life Insurance was looking for when it sought to provide its business partners with self-service access in real time.

British Telecom dials into SOA

Telecom providers are competing tooth and nail to provide consumer and business customers with the latest and greatest value-added services. This smorgasbord of offerings includes everything from ring-tone downloads to hosted messaging, accounting, and other business services. An SOA makes perfect sense in this have-it-your-way environment because it enables providers to cobble together new offerings with those of third parties and integrate them quickly with their internal, mainframe-based billing, provisioning, and other support systems.

Making VoIP Secure

When voice and data share the same network, extra measures must be taken to keep voice secure.

BAM brings you reality business, to the minute

Unlike BI – the rear view of business which analysts love, business activity monitoring – BAM to the acronym-philes – gives you the upfront action on whatever part of the business you nominate, live on a PC near you. And the action is attracting not only pure-play vendors, but also BI, apps integration and the heavy hitters too. Leon Erlanger canvasses some early adopters who say, "start small"

Your business, live on screen

OfficeMax had a visibility problem. "Two years ago we started a major third-party drop-ship program that caused us to lose some visibility of the orders after they left our network," says Brian Walmsley, divisional vice president of EAI technology at OfficeMax.

Rethinking IDS

After the Nachi worm hit last year, Joe Granneman, manager of networks and PC services at Rockford Health System, knew it was time for a change. "It only took three infected machines to bring down our dual processor firewall," he marvels. "Without our Internet connection we couldn't process claims or do much of anything."

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