Stories by Len Rust

Unified messaging use to surge

Unified messaging (UM) systems that provide users with one "mailbox" for all business-related communications, will become much more broadly adopted in the near future

More open competition coming for telcos

The worldwide telecommunications industry is about to liberalise into a more open marketplace, which will force national governments and regulatory agencies to prepare for this changing and challenging business environment

Young, affluent males dominate mobile Web use

Wireless Web device owners tend to be young, affluent males between 18 and 34 years of age, living in a household with income of $US100,000 or more. Their profile reflects the early Internet adopters who were seen five years ago when the Internet was still in its fledgling stages

European credit card fraud soars

Credit card fraud in Europe soared by 50 per cent last year and a large proportion of the increase involved payments made by telephone or over the Internet, hitting consumer confidence in transactions over the Net and dampening the potential for expansion of e-commerce

Strange times indeed: Is this the next phase?

The IT industry has faced a period of intense reformation. Most of today's IT buyers lack the skills needed to support e-commerce and many existing systems don't meet e-commerce requirements for reliability, speed and continuous operation. Most enterprises are building a new set of legacy systems by creating Web sites that aren't integrated into the overall IT architecture. There are changes everywhere, not all painless, in these times that are strange -- indeed

Mobile phone sales head for slowdown

Worldwide mobile phone sales totaled 412.7 million units in 2000, a 45.5 per cent increase over 1999 results, according to Dataquest. Despite some "hiccups" within the industry and its key supply channels, overall shipments continued to perform well throughout the year. However, persistent rumours of a market slowdown that dogged the industry throughout the year started to come true toward the end of 2000.

Sweden remains top information society

Sweden has maintained its position as the economy most in tune with information technology in all its aspects even though Australia is making a remarkably strong showing, according to a study released by market analyst IDC.

Disk storage to retain double digit growth

The disk storage industry will grow at double-digit levels with worldwide revenues in increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 12 per cent from $US28.4 billion in 1999 to $US53.3 billion in 2004, according to IDC.

Australian IT industry confidence stays high

The Australian information technology sector is still nearly twice as confident as most other sectors, according to the most recent quarterly TMP Morgan and Banks Job Index. The index showed that 59 per cent of IT firms expected to hire new staff in the next quarter and only four per cent intended to downsize, giving a net effect of 55 per cent

Industries update highlights Aust slowdown

Australian information industries employment actually contracted during the latter half of the 1990s, despite experiencing strong growth in the first half of that decade. While information and communication technology (ICT) businesses generated up to 77,000 new jobs in Australia between 1992-1993 and 1995-96, they actually lost almost 2500 jobs between 1995-96 and 1998-99, due to contraction in the ICT manufacturing sector.

Consider a billion customers online

ETForecasts' claimed last week there will be 1.17 billion Internet users by 2005. It may be hard to imagine that almost one in every six people on the planet will have access to the Internet in four years' time, yet according to a forecast released by ETForecasts that will happen when some 1.17 people are online.

Internet penetration hits 60 per cent in US

Internet penetration reached 60 per cent in the US in January 2001 when more than 168 million people had Web access, according to The Internet Ratings Report from Nielsen//NetRatings

CIO: Change Isn't Optional

Information technology professionals like to think they're old hands at dealing with change. After all, anyone who has cut their teeth on a mainframe or even an 8086 has already lived through many generations of technological innovation. Many of these technical people still believe that their primary goal is the care and feeding of corporate information systems. This impression must be corrected and there is no one to do it but the CEO.

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