Sears, Roebuck and Co. plans to deploy 95TB of new storage capacity by April, tripling the amount it now has installed and allowing the retailer to consolidate two key data warehouses and build a storage-area network.
Despite the economic downturn and industry consolidation, competition is forcing banks to increase IT spending this year by an average of 4 percent, according to a report released today. Overall IT spending within the U.S. banking industry this year is forecast to total US$32 billion.
Seung-Ho Choi, CIO at Serome Technology Inc. in Seoul, oversees South Korea's newest and largest voice-over-IP service provider network. With more than 5 million users on the company's unified messaging service, any performance degradation or downtime on its servers and network related to backups equates to lost money. And Serome Technology has nearly a terabyte of e-mail data alone that it must back up regularly.
In September, the Boston Stock Exchange appointed Mike Curran as its first CIO to handle an increasing number of technology projects focused on disaster recovery and customer services. Curran had already held a number of senior positions at Zurich Scudder Investments Inc., most recently as chief operating officer of its international business unit.
While other companies are cutting thousands of jobs to pare costs, Bank One Corp. announced last week that it plans to add 600 IT workers in an effort to speed up and expand internal technology projects.
Two studies released last month show that the use of electronic bill presentment and payment services has taken off during the past year, with some industry experts saying the most recent growth is connected to the threat of anthrax in the U.S. mail.
Instant messaging has become a popular means for financial advisers to communicate with clients. But now regulations governing electronic communications are prompting some financial services firms to shut down IM traffic until it can be tracked and stored like regular e-mail.
With the latest Web-enabled technology and a wealthy client base, investment advisers are being targeted by insurance companies as an obvious sales channel. But getting high-margin stock brokers to bite at the smaller commissions from insurance sales will require a standardized technology platform.
Health insurer Highmark Inc. is suing KPMG Consulting Inc. for what is likely to be tens of millions of dollars over what it claims was the consultancy's failure to create a critical electronic billing and accounts-receivable system. Highmark said KPMG abandoned the two-year, US$15 million project this summer after it missed deadlines and created cost overruns through mistakes.
Compaq Computer Corp. and EMC Corp., the two largest and fiercest competitors in the storage arena, have opened their programming interfaces to each other, a move that will eventually allow IT managers to integrate storage networks with disk arrays from either company.
Health insurer Highmark Inc. is suing KPMG Consulting Inc. for what is likely to be tens of millions of dollars over what it says was the consultancy's failure to create a "critical" electronic billing and accounts receivable system. Highmark said KPMG abandoned the two-year, US$15 million project this summer after it missed deadlines and created cost overruns through mistakes.
While account aggregation is one of the hottest services being offered online by financial services firms, few organizations are managing the technology themselves. Most are opting to use hosted models just to get their service up and running quickly.
IBM announced today it will begin shipping a new storage server that provides 2GB Fibre Channel connectivity, as well as enhanced network-attached storage and Internet protocol storage products aimed at the midrange market.
As vendors pitch products such as storage management and virtualisation software, end users say few technologies measure up to their increasingly complex environments. And with the current IT spending slowdown, some are concerned there will be even less crucial technology development in the near future.
As vendors pitch products such as storage management and virtualization software, end users say few technologies measure up to their increasingly complex environments. And with the current IT spending slowdown, some are concerned there will be even less crucial technology development in the near future.