Stories by IDG staff

Industry news

As expected, Intel last month reported disappointing results for its first fiscal quarter, prompting the chip maker to announce staff reductions of up to 3000 employees.

Networking & Telecomms

Claiming its customers have little interest in open high-speed token ring products, networking kingpin Cisco Systems announced it had withdrawn from the High-Speed Token Ring Alliance, a vendor association created to drive development of products that run at 100Mbps.

Rules for data cleansing

Data cleansing is one of the most demanding parts of data warehousing. It includes data scrubbing and discovering business rules embedded within data.
Before you start, you need to know what to expect and how many mops and buckets you'll need.

Software briefs

Digital releases Web clustering server software; SAP pushes supply chain integration system; IBM boosts business intelligence offerings.

Government finally appoints its new IT boss.

The Federal Government has officially signed up Glenys Roper to the permanent position of Chief Government Information Officer, previously held by Andy McDonald. Roper, who had been acting in the position as head of the Office of Government Information Technology since mid November last year, is set to hold her appointment for a period of three years.

Industry Briefs

IBM acquires GE Capital Services' outsourcing business; Network Associates to acquire TIS, be one-stop security shop; Tenix dumps Baan solution; Attachmate adds middleware consulting services.

Networking briefs

Cisco bolsters DSL with two buy-outs; Gigabit standard delayed; ISPs may fall behind users in switch to V.90; Cabletron launches E-Commerce Web site

PCs & Servers

PC market down -- but don't just blame Asia; SCO's new UnixWare; Win98 to debut on June 25; Motorola gets 300MHz, sets sights on 400MHz

Networking briefs

Two months after its first release of BorderManager, Novell is preparing to reveal the second release of its family of security solutions at its BrainShare conference in the US some time this month. The company said BorderManager's most significant enhancement will be Sun Micro-
systems' Simple Key Management for IP (SKIP) protocol support. Novell will also reposition its Remote Authentication Dial-In User Services (RADIUSes) for Novell Directory Services (NDS) as the foundation for BorderManager's Authentication Service. RADIUS is a server-based interface between NDS and network access servers running the RADIUS protocol, and provides network access servers with the information they need to accept or deny remote users' requests for network access.

Web sites of the month

Microsoft Web site to address Y2K problems
After years of customer frustration with Microsoft's inattention to the year 2000 problem and the impact the millennium crisis may have on its 9000-plus products, the software company finally announced plans to put a year 2000 resource centre on the World Wide Web by mid-March.
Microsoft's Year 2000 Resource Center will list information about which of the company's products are compliant, how the products handle dates and how to work around problems. It will also offer tools to help fix individual products.

Software briefs

JavaSoft posts tools
JavaSoft, a division of Sun Microsystems, posted its Java Commerce Client (JCC) white paper to its developers Web site late last month. JCC is part of the Java Electronic Commerce Framework, which Java Software will detail at its annual developer bonanza JavaOne in March. The company has also posted the Java Shared Data Toolkit, and Java SSL. Noteworthy is the Java Shared Data Toolkit (JSDT) 1.0, a research and development project aimed at implementing multipoint data delivery service to help developers create collaborative applications.

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