Spotlight Features

Last-minute panic drove millions of taxpayers onto the Web this year, driving traffic to several sites that process tax returns. And despite the massive spike in visitor numbers, top sites performed well, delivering pages in a timely fashion and staying available almost around the clock. Across the ...

Some believe eBay is the perfect e-commerce machine, with lean operating costs, swift strategy implementation and boundless growth opportunities. After all, the auction giant has set the pace for a host of imitators and wannabes -- but as it keeps expanding and launching new initiatives, the compan...

Early this year, a half-dozen major multichannel retailers, including Toys "R" Us, Wal-Mart and Target, began collecting sales tax on online purchases. The transition came quietly, without much fanfare and, so far at least, without much fallout. Will this promising trend continue in the future, or w...

Search engine Google is virtually revered by the Internet community and is often profiled as a pure technology company that does not take commercial interests to heart. But those days are over. In the past two years, Google has inked revenue-generating deals with almost every major player on the I...

Nearly six years have passed since Microsoft agreed to invest $150 million in Apple Computer and continue developing Mac versions of its Office application suite for at least five years. In the intervening period, both companies have experienced many changes, and after the agreement between the two ...

As a CIO or IT manager tasked with implementing a storage area network, you can start out simply -- but to build a reliable SAN and integrate it properly with the workflow of an entire enterprise network, be prepared to do a lot of planning and hard work. What are the highest data storage hurdles --...

This month's release of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 will be welcome news for some enterprise players, such as in-house application developers and ISPs. For others, it will be like walking the plank: They may not want to go forward, but they will be unable to go back -- or even maintain the statu...

It is safe to say that every company is expecting an economic recovery, though the timing of its arrival is uncertain. But after three years of dealing with slow economies, global uncertainty and layoffs, some firms may worry that their expansion muscles have turned to flab. This is a valid concern,...

Hard-to-visualize functionality, complex feature descriptions, an invisible presence in the network, and boring names, taken together, sum up why the enterprise Ethernet switching market does not get the attention it deserves. But Ethernet switching is a multibillion-dollar market that CIOs spend a ...

In the frenetic boom days of the 1990s, a matter as humble as shipping charges was nothing more than a shot over the bow in the e-commerce battles that raged. As the dot-com parade wandered off course, however, it seemed that such stunts were history. But in January 2002, Amazon.com brought free shi...

Amazon.com has filed for a patent involving online advertising, stoking the ire of many industry watchers. The company wants to stake its claim to a method of allocating online ad space via real-time auctions. But many are questioning whether this concept originated with Amazon, noting that the idea...

Just as important as backing up your most valuable documents is ensuring they are not zapped by a malicious virus, consumed by fire or accidentally erased. So far, though, most software and hardware vendors that sell storage products to the Fortune 500 have had little or nothing to say -- let alone ...

You hear it all the time: "You can't make money off free software." Actually, companies are making quite a bit of money from free software. IBM and HP, for example, have reaped billions of dollars in revenue from Linux. True, they are doing so by bundling open source software with servers and suppor...

When PayPal filed for its successful IPO last year, it listed a slew of competitors in the online payment arena. But those rivals, including Citibank, Wells Fargo, Yahoo, Microsoft and the U.S. Postal Service, barely sport as much market share combined as PayPal commands on its own. There are signs ...

When it comes to choosing a server to boost e-business efficiency, technology buyers have no shortage of options. Because of intense competition in the marketplace, the best server technologies -- and what is best for a particular enterprise -- may change rapidly. Even amid all of this upheaval, how...