Novell last week showed the door to some 900 staff, a 16 per cent cut which shrinks the Utah-based NetWare maker to 4600 employees worldwide. This move followed an 83 per cent plummet in third-quarter net income to $US8.6 million on revenue of $270 million against income of $49.3 million and revenue of $327 million for the same quarter last year.
While e-commerce projects are not all that's going on in your IT department, managing them can be tough. What's needed is a balance between speedy and flexible development cycles, and a framework which ensures all the right boxes are ticked, including: goals, measurable (and appropriate) outcomes, and detailed reporting ( Cover story, page 18).
A new online trading exchange for the health industry has been launched with more than 40 hospitals and some major medical suppliers already signed up.
Dr Frank Soltis, chief scientist for IBM's AS/400, was in town recently to discuss the future of the platform he has been pivotal in shaping.
Here's a news flash: Telstra is sick of 'Telstra bashing'. Executives such as Deena Shiff, Telstra director, regulatory, claims that criticisms of its costings are part of a "one-sided, ill-informed, Telstra-bashing exercise designed to promote the short-term interests of rival telecommunications companies against the long-term interests of Australian consumers".
To succeed at e-commerce, you need to find a balance point in several dimensions, and the fulcrum will be different for every organisation, says Canada-based director of the Seneca College Internet Commerce and Technology Institute, Dr Bob Fabian.
It's an old rule of fashion that what was once in' and now out' will eventually be in' again. I spotted this rule in action today as I walked through a car yard and noticed the cars mostly featured upholstery cut from the curtains my mum used to hang in the seventies. Still daggy, but at least in', according to preferences of this Adelaide-based Japanese car maker.
Here's a twist. The chairman of the IT&T Industry Training Advisory Board (and regional MD for Oracle) warns that Australia is in danger of being left behind unless it solves the IT skills crisis. Another expert, also from the software industry, reckons the crisis is exaggerated, and can be tackled successfully by using more efficient development tools (which incidentally, his company will sell to you).
Go on, be honest, the word procurement' really does get your blood pumping, especially when the e-vowel is parked out the front. Admittedly, driving the word procurement' into my thought processes had images of Big Fresh shopping and Billy Connolly's hilarious routine about a visit to his proctologist backing out of the dark, lower levels of my mind.
To fully exploit the Internet as it's going to look over the next few years (ie, Internet: the next generation), organisations must expose themselves programmatically' online, says Paul Maritz, the Microsoft group vice president of the platforms strategy and developer group.
Are you ready to be dot-netted? Better be, because self described caged animal' Steve Ballmer is now done with a wild six months' and is out of the closet', ready to pounce on you with the .Net message. They have too much fun in Redmond, don't they?
As a manager it's easy to pay lip-service to training by sending staff to any vaguely relevant course and hope that benefits will flow.
Do you remember token ring versus Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet versus ATM on the Desktop, Explorer versus Navigator, NetWare versus NT, NetWare versus Vines, Apple versus Wintel (ie the PC industry), Lotus 123 versus Excel, Word versus WordPerfect, Unix versus NT, Cisco versus Synoptics; on and on, ad nauseam?
Does using an application service provider (ASP) rate in your IT plans? Recent headlines suggest that this is a billion-dollar market waiting to happen.
Only 5 per cent of organisations in Australia were adequately protected against Love Bug type virus threats, according to research conducted by Computer Associates (CA).