Expert Advice

In today's world of hybrid cars and wind farms, consuming energy wisely is on every individual's agenda. Companies and their IT departments should be no different. Statistics aside, there is no doubt that collectively data centers have a huge "carbon footprint" and are the biggest or one of the bigg...

Prior to the mid-1990s, the prospect of launching a globally minded company in rural America was, in a word, remote. However, times have changed. The Web now makes it possible for anyone to do business anywhere in the world. Small towns in America's heartland that have long been dependent on agribu...

Cloud computing and Software as a Service have emerged as the hot new technology trends in 2009. Companies from Microsoft to Big Blue to Oracle have announced their intentions to move away from their lucrative and proprietary models to address this fundamental shift in how software is delivered. The...

Maintaining the network. Ensuring remote users have access to resources. Updating virus definitions. Troubleshooting email problems. Any number of IT issues can arise on a daily basis. So does it make sense for small businesses to hire a full-time IT staffer or outsource their IT needs? That de...

Seeking to supplement the dramatic falloff in demand from the world's retail and wholesale giants in the wake of the global recession, more manufacturers than ever before are turning to international e-commerce to find and attract new buyers. As more and more China-based manufacturers raise their o...

Pay per click advertising is a huge market. The model is especially attractive to new companies that have not yet established themselves in the organic search engine rankings. The downside is that making PPC pay can be quite an exhausting and overwhelming task. There's much more to it than choosin...

E-Commerce software allows the marketer to execute and record millions in annual sales. However, in the era of direct digital marketing, online retailers are seeking a solution that accomplishes more than the expected sale. If e-commerce software is able to secure sales of the "ripe fruit" -- and so...

Up to 70 percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing the checkout process, according to SeeWhy, a company specializing in abandonment tracking software. This rate, which rose substantially from 2005 to 2008, is in part a reflection of the intensified comparative shoppin...

So you are ready to embark on an e-commerce project. You are not alone. The Economist found that of 15 major industries studied in late 2008, only one -- e-commerce -- had a sunny outlook for 2009. My analyst tells me that 20 percent to 30 percent of firms that do business online will start a major ...

Lacing a shoestring budget with enough green to get your startup up and running takes some finagling. Still, it can be done. If you can't find investor backing right now, then turn to alternative funding routes. You may want to start with your own hidden assets to find the cash you need. One example...

Funny thing about economic disasters: They tend to spawn a bevy of new businesses. It's not that a recession is the best time for pie-in-the-sky thinking; rather, it's when pie-in-the-mouth issues become most pressing. "The tantalizing successes of some startups, coupled perhaps with the rise in une...

The products that fueled first-generation e-commerce -- books, software and music, to name a few -- are all simple to understand items that can be easily shipped to consumers. Today, we are at the outset of a second wave of online growth, as consumers push beyond these simple transactions to researc...

It should come as no surprise to any IT manager that your organization's appetite for data keeps growing every minute. No sooner than a new set of storage tools is deployed, it becomes clear there's a need for more, and you start planning the next wave of hardware purchases. More hardware means more...

As a growing number of enterprises transition to cloud computing, the use of the term "cloud" becomes more appropriate by the day. Just as natural clouds foreshadow weather events ranging from calm to stormy, cloud computing presents enterprise security professionals with a host of difficult challen...

In the world of IT, it's important to maintain an open mind and be willing to consider new approaches to addressing problems. People often have a tendency to get locked into a particular approach and hold onto it long past the point at which it has ceased being a best practice. On the other hand, i...