Stories by IDG staff

Compaq unveils Wildfire servers

Compaq Computer's continuing effort to be taken seriously as an enterprise server technology vendor kicked into high gear last week with the introduction of its Wildfire series of high-end Alpha servers.

Business Briefs

Once thought to be exterminated, the year 2000 (Y2K) bug has managed to put the bite on Unisys, with the vendor announcing its first-quarter revenue will be a lower-than-expected $US1.66 billion to $US1.69 billion. The company cited lingering weakness in its federal government business and a slow recovery in its financial services business following the Y2K transition as the key contributors to its lowered revenue outlook. During the quarter, Unisys implemented a new go-to-market model for its 1000 largest clients worldwide. While the company said it was careful to minimise disruption to client interfaces during the transition, the implementation of the new approach requiredadditional training, organisational meetings and resource reallocation that resulted in less time devoted to sales efforts early in the quarter. www.unisys.com

NEWS BRIEFS

Nortel signs back-office outsourcing deal, Intel to acquire compiler tools specialist, Group formed to promote XML-based specification

What's new from ... EMC, Tivoli, Computer Associates, Hitachi

EMC has developed a wide range of disaster recovery and business continuity solutions to handle both disasters and planned outages.
The Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), run in conjunction with EMC's Symmetric Enterprise Storage System, is a complete business continuation solution for enterprise systems.

Net update: Consuming resources

Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog and leaves little system resources for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes that are further consuming valuable resources.

If ASP's the way to go, CSC wants to be there

Computer Sciences Corp has thrown some weight behind its 350-strong national applications team by appointing Mark Register vice president of application services Australia. Register's job is to build the application outsourcing and ASP business and he reports to Mary Jo Morris, president of CSC's application services division in the US.

It's time for gongs, drums, banners and flags

"On the field of battle, the spoken word did not carry far enough, hence the institution of gongs and drums. Nor can ordinary objects be seen clearly enough; hence the institution of banners and flags.
"Gongs and drums, banners and flags are the means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point. The host thus forming a single united body".

Computershare takes over Welsh registrar

Computershare's British subsidiary has bought medium-sized Welsh share registrar Exchange Registrars and will move immediately to transfer all of its registers to Computershare's SCRIP system.
"This latest addition to Computershare's global registry business follows our strategy of growing by acquisition as well as organically," explained Julian Leiper, managing director of Computershare Services.

Omnitech hits its exporting straps

Listed Australian company Omnitech is riding high on export markets after winning four major contracts in Asia and India through its subsidiary VFJ Technology.

Business news in brief

Online titans Yahoo and America Online have both detailed their plans for launching an assault on the business-to-business e-commerce market. Yahoo's B2B Marketplace is a directory that offers equipment, inventory, and product listings from e-commerce sites, including FreeMarket.com's AssettExchange, an exchange for industrial parts, raw materials, and commodities; Imark.com, an exchange for used equipment; and Liquidation.com.

The IT wishlist for Year 2000

During March 2000 Computerworld in the US conducted an online survey in which they asked 223 IT professionals about the top three decisions their organisations face in 2000. For each of the IT decisions, respondents indicated their top three purchasing criteria as well as the timeframes for making these decisions and implementing the technologies.

NEWS BRIEFS

Adelaide University has selected a consortium of companies including Cabletron Systems and Logical Networks to implement a multimillion dollar network and management solution.

Toughing it out with Telstra

Why doesn't Telstra tell us when they sell us an Internet connection that they may not be able to provide reasonable access to the Internet? And why doesn't Telstra tell us that when we buy a product that they can't provide us with reasonable service?

Business Briefs

Intel will buy Denmark-based communications chip design company Giga in an all-cash transaction valued at $US1.25

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