Spotlight Features

IT wizards have been praising Web services for some time now, but the concept continues to elude much of the rest of the world, masking the massive promise this technology holds for e-business. In plain English, Web services allow a company to link its applications with those of its partners, custom...

The e-commerce sector's recent successes are staggering. Combined sales of Amazon and eBay totaled US$19 billion in 2002, according to Forrester Research, and robust fourth-quarter numbers bucked the lackluster offline trend. But the path to those lofty results was paved with the failures of countle...

In the wake of a spectacular meltdown that featured financial shenanigans, overspending and broken promises, can the telecom industry recover and grow strong again? The answer is yes, industry experts say, but telecom faces a long road back -- and it will not recapture the heights of three or four y...

Long after the bubble burst, leaving office buildings half-empty and six-figure software engineers hunting for work, Silicon Valley remains one of the most important technology centers on Earth. But in an era of bottom-line budget scrutiny, does it still make sense for companies to stay in the North...

The complaints are essentially the same, but the venue is different. Microsoft is under attack again for leveraging its monopoly and bundling its products, but this time its lines of defense are concentrated on the European front. In fact, it seems that so far, Europe's antitrust investigation has b...

Now is the winter of IT's discontent. Last month, the doomsayers at Goldman Sachs projected a 1 percent decline in IT spending in 2003. This week, they released a new report projecting a 10 percent decline. Given this dismal forecast, what should a company that has survived the tech implosion do nex...

Using centralized database technology, it can take seemingly forever to query multiple databases, and structured and unstructured data cannot be integrated. Labor costs are also substantial. To remedy these problems, companies must find a way to access data stored in disparate locations on the fly.

During the high-tech boom, vision was in. Corporate leaders like AOL's Steve Case, who made bold predictions about the future and then acted on them, became the heroes of the New Economy. Nowadays, on the other hand, CEOs seem to be cherished more for their ability to cut costs and make tough busine...

Driven to reap ROI from real-time data access and advanced collaboration among employees and partners, more and more IT executives are hunting for the right enterprise portal. This is not a simple search, however. The array of choices is dizzying, with solutions up for grabs from pure-play vendors B...

Spurred by fears of "hostile environment" employee lawsuits and concerned about lost productivity hours, companies increasingly are turning to anti-spam technologies to eliminate -- or at least reduce the volume of -- unsoliticated e-mail. Several spam-fighting software firms have seen measurable fi...

Financially, 2002 was not a gangbuster year for IBM -- revenue from continuing operations declined 3 percent. But the company still earned $5.3 billion in the year, even as most firms struggled to stay out of the red zone. Its WebSphere software dominates the e-business arena, and its consulting div...

In the late 1990s, CIOs began to hear a new story from vendors: It had become undesirable to store valuable corporate data on a disk inside a computer. What if a fire broke out and your data disintegrated along with your servers? The race was on to separate disks from servers via network connections...

Nearly 20 years ago, two guys set up mail-order businesses, one from his dorm room, the other from a barn in South Dakota. Dell had a paper route and rooted for the Texas Longhorns; Waitt had a pony tail. Fast forward to today. Michael Dell's eponymous company has annual sales of more than $30 billi...

Idealab and CMGI were among the most widely praised models of the New Economy. But they were both hit, and hit hard, by the implosion of the dot-com sector. Now, they are in the fight of their lives to survive. The questions facing these companies are big ones. Can Idealab generate enough brainstor...

The tale is familiar: Enterprises are generating massive amounts of data, and IT managers are scrambling to identify and purchase the most cost-effective, easy-to-manage storage solutions available. But vendors are in a quandary. Even as they try to pump up revenue, their customers, faced with tight...