Almost half of all cellphone subscribers are now availing themselves of services other than voice, said a recent report from Forrester Research. That means more typing and less vocalizing. Can a study showing a rise in thumb injuries be far behind?
Continue reading "Keypad Economics: Why Talk When You Can Type?" »
Business process improvements, customer relationship management and business analytics are high on CIOs' to-do lists this year.
Fortune Magazine Published their list of America’s Most Admired Companies, how did your organization do and how can you use this information to increase sales?
Continue reading "Fortune's Most Admired Companies- Where does your company Rank?" »
I always thought it was a good time to be in software sales, but now it is not just my "gut instincts" . Revenue for the software segment is forecasted to grow faster than the rest of the IT industry, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
Continue reading "Software Sales growing faster than other IT segments in 2007?" »
An Article in todays USA Today highlights the challenges of organizations that are hitting the 30 year mark- can they mature and continue to grow?
Continue reading "The 30 biggest companies by market value that are age 30 or less" »
The software industry is quickly settling into a gang of four: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. How will this impact sales in these companies and of those they aquire?
Continue reading "Software Consolidation- What's the impact for Sales?" »
Despite recent improvements in the economy, the outlook for IT spending in 2007 calls for slower growth, particularly as it relates to investments in hardware. What's a hardware rep to do?
Continue reading "Report claims IT Capital Spending Will Slow In 2007" »
SAP AG said today it is launching a new business unit that targets small and medium-sized firms.
Continue reading "SAP AG starting unit to target small, medium-sized firms" »
SAN FRANCISCO - Cisco Systems Inc., the world's largest networking equipment maker, said Wednesday its first-quarter earnings surged 28 percent over last year as customers spent gingerly to upgrade their networks to accommodate faster Internet traffic.
Continue reading "Cisco Systems 1Q profit jumps 28 percent" »
Skill level is dwindling and now this labor lake must be stocked through a better human capital investment, according to a new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Building off the Salesforce.com model, Workday aims to provide business software as a service.
Continue reading "PeopleSoft Founder Duffield Takes The Wraps Off His New Company, Workday" »
NEW YORK - The former chief executive of Computer Associates International Inc. was sentenced to 12 years in prison and was fined $8 million on Thursday for his role in a massive accounting fraud scandal at one of the world's largest software companies.
Continue reading "Ex-software CEO gets 12 years in prison" »
Analysis: Partnerships - not big cheques - will help Ellison own the world...
Continue reading "Oracle - how to make friends and influence people" »
IBM has a gaping hole in its portfolio that is crying out to be filled by a business intelligence specialist.
Rounding out its acquisition spree to an even dozen this year, information lifecycle management and storage specialist EMC on Wednesday announced plans to buy Avamar Technologies, a provider of data protection software.
Our hall of shame of tech failures includes McDonald's $170 million ERP fiasco, an electric-company software bug that wiped out power to much of the northeastern U.S. and Canada, and more. Get the sordid details and find out how you can avoid a disaster of your own.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Finding the right attorney or plumber in the yellow pages has never been easy. It's not just any professional or tradesman you may be after, but someone who comes recommended and at a fair price.
LinkedIn, the biggest social network for business users, late on Sunday said it will offer members a way of choosing business service providers based on recommendations instead of just random listings on traditional yellow pages guides.
Continue reading "LinkedIn adds yellow-pages-like services directory" »
Vodafone's embattled chief executive Arun Sarin has made cost cutting one of his main priorities, as the company struggles with decline in its core European markets. Some 6,000 employees will be affected by the forthcoming outsourcing deals. Most of the impacted staff are expected to transfer to EDS and IBM, with the remainder to be retained by Vodafone.
Continue reading "Vodafone Signs EDS, IBM for Global Outsourcing Deal" »
With an ERP business line that is twice the size of Oracle's, there is little sign that SAP will be dislodged from its No. 1 position, said Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of research at AMR Research. "Oracle spent billions of dollars to go from a quarter of the size of SAP to half of its size. I don't know what they could buy to close that gap."
With the company's former ethics officer facing criminal charges, Hewlett-Packard on Thursday hired a replacement to help put an end to spying scandals.
Continue reading "Hewlett-Packard hires new ethics officer" »
MCLEAN, Va., Oct. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BearingPoint, Inc.
(NYSE: BE), one of the world's largest management and technology consulting
firms, announced today it will highlight a new suite of Oracle-based
solutions designed to leverage customers' ERP and technology investments
and provide an effective technology framework in preparation for Fusion
Applications at the Oracle(R) OpenWorld Conference taking place October
22-26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
BearingPoint Inc. is moving ahead with several new government consulting contracts while working to recover from a major court judgment and threats to delist it from the New York Stock Exchange.
McAfee Inc. on Tuesday added another piece to its enterprise security strategy with the acquisition of patch-management provider Citadel Security Software Inc. Best known for its antivirus and intrusion prevention technologies, McAfee is looking to take an even larger share of the desktop security market with the $56 million purchase.
Continue reading "McAfee acquires patch-management vendor Citadel for $56 million" »
Lawson Software Inc. posted a first-quarter loss on Tuesday, saying its earnings were weighed down by more than $15 million in pre-tax expenses. The company also announced it has appointed Robert A. Schriesheim, a current member of its board of directors, to serve as executive vice president and chief financial officer.
Continue reading "Lawson reports Q1 loss, appoints new CFO" »
The solutions mentioned in this article can be extremely useful for mapping business processes to technological dependencies, but, as with all tools, effectiveness is based on the attention to detail the business invests in them. They will help organize and rationalize the process, but they still generally require many hours of meetings and collaboration, as well as ongoing maintenance, to be truly effective.
Continue reading "Considering Business Continuity Software" »
Company insiders claim AT&T is set to dramatically increase its use of India-based labor.
Continue reading "AT&T To Cut Hundreds Of U.S. Tech Jobs, Sources Say" »
CRM predicted to figure prominently in the growth of software as a service
Continue reading "On-Demand Apps To Grab Share Of Software Market" »
Equality at the top still elusive
As Indra Nooyi takes over as CEO of PepsiCo this month, she takes the number of women in top jobs at Fortune 500 companies from 10 to 11. Back in 2001, there were only five. Still, while progress is being made in the area of female executive advancement, a new study by executive search firm Christian & Timbers finds women are still finding a glass ceiling in major industries such as technology and finance.
The Big Get Bigger
The 10 largest software companies, ranked by revenue growth
Continue reading "50 Fastest-Growing Software Companies for 2006" »
Baseline's ranking of the 50 business software companies with the biggest year-to-year growth finds that eight of the top 10 offer software as a service.
Continue reading "Pedals to the Metal- 50 fastest growing software companies" »
By Renee Boucher Ferguson
September 29, 2006
Ann Winblad, a co-founding partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and to many in the software industry a bellwether of successful trends, believes that software as a service is beyond the tipping point of customer adoption.
Continue reading "Software Investor: Software as a Service Beyond Tipping Point" »
By JESSICA MINTZ, AP Business Writer Fri Sep 29, 3:40 PM ET
NEW YORK - Software stocks have been on an upward tear since August as seasonal consumer and enterprise software spending patterns and an attractive upcoming slate of new products coincided with changes in software business models and corporate IT needs.
Trends in both packaged software — priced somewhere between $100 and $1,000, often directed at consumers — and big enterprise applications are driving investor interest in the sector higher than usual.
AFX News Limited
10/02/06 9:40 AM PT
Much of Salesforce.com's recent success has been from the head start it had in the market over its competitors. However, intensifying competition from Oracle, Microsoft and German business software maker SAP should hurt the company's subscriber growth rate and its cash flow growth, said Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. analyst David M. Hilal.
Continue reading "Salesforce.com Downgraded, Analyst Cites Competition" »
AFX News Limited
09/29/06 8:47 AM PT
Delphi's outsourcing of IT services to EDS and HP will enable the company and its subsidiaries to reduce their IT supplier base from 100 regional-based suppliers to fewer than 10 direct suppliers. Delphi provided no other details of the agreements; it asked a judge for permission to file them confidentially with the court.
Continue reading "Delphi Cuts outsourcing deal with EDS and HP" »
After years of M&A and LBO exits, the rare "software IPO" may be making a comeback in the coming year.
By Tom Taulli
Sep. 18, 2006
Tech Worker Job Satisfaction Low
More than half of technology workers recently surveyed aren’t happy with their jobs and are “actively searching for new opportunities,” according to the Computing Technology Industry Association.
By Mark Larson
Tech Job Growth Strong: Study
The expansion nearly doubled the 78,900 tech jobs added in the first half of 2005 and represents the strongest job growth of any six-month period since 2001.
September 11, 2006 8:53AM
By being aware of the strategies that eBay sellers use, eBay buyers can benefit as well. For example, be wary of high-traffic auctions: Prices can get artificially inflated. Instead, try searching for items using common misspellings and check out products listed without pictures. These auctions generally receive fewer bids, and therefore usually end up with cheaper sale prices
By Ellen Messmer
September 26, 2006 8:59AM
"Centralized logging and monitoring of application-level events is being driven by regulatory compliance, highly publicized data theft incidents and targeted application-level attacks," says Kelly Kavanagh, Gartner analyst in information security and privacy.
Continue reading "VeriSign Expands Security for Databases and Applications" »
By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
SAN JOSE, Calif. — For Bruce Chizen, it all started at his dad's Brooklyn appliance store.
"Getting to watch my dad, in retrospect, taught me more about business than anyone else in my life," recalls Chizen, the CEO of software giant Adobe Systems (ADBE). "His business was all about loyalty and word of mouth. He would do anything for the customer."
Chizen has brought that same customer focus to Adobe, where he's been CEO since 2000. The company is known for three of the world's most popular products: Adobe Photoshop for image editing, Adobe Reader to access PDF files, and Flash for viewing video on the Web.
Under Chizen's leadership, revenue has doubled to $2 billion. Today, Adobe is riding high, thanks to a decision Chizen made last year that effectively doubled his customer base. He acquired rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion, bringing Flash and popular Web publishing tool Dreamweaver into the Adobe family.
Wall Street applauded the move. The company recently reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and announced that it will roll out next month a new version of its Acrobat software, which companies use to create PDFs. The stock is up 9% since the announcement.
SunGard Availability Services today announced a portfolio of Pandemic Response Planning services to help organizations develop and test preparedness plans that help safeguard employees and business operations during an influenza pandemic. The services help companies minimize the risks to business and information technology (IT) operations created by a pandemic where upwards of 40 percent of staff may be absent over an extended timeframe.
Continue reading "SunGard introduces pandemic planning service" »
Intel is expected to debut its Xeon 3000 processors this week at the Intel Developer Forum. The chips, close relatives of the Core 2 Duo desktop line, are for low-end servers.
The Xeon 3040, 3050, 3060 and 3070 processors, expected to ship this month, are geared for uniprocessor servers that typically use Pentium D processors. The 3000 series is based on the Core microarchitecture, which improves the performance and electrical power efficiency of Intel processors, compared with NetBurst-era chips such as Pentium D.
Word is that Adobe has started a secret team to beef up the voice over Internet Protocol capabilities in Flash, a move that would make VoIP accessible to Flash developers, according to a handful of Web sites.
Blogger Om Malik posted an item on Friday about Adobe's plans, pointing out that Adobe's Flash is widely used in high-volume video-sharing sites like YouTube. Adobe has created a team to productize the voice over IP work, Malik reported.
Continue reading "Adobe said to be creating VoIP Flash team" »
AUSTIN, Texas - Computer maker Dell Inc. plans to hire another 500 engineers to work in its central Texas product development operations, founder and Chairman Michael Dell announced Monday.
Dell joined Gov. Rick Perry at the Texas Capitol to announce the company would immediately begin hiring new electrical, software and mechanical engineers and program managers.
Dell has 18,000 employees at its Round Rock headquarters and other Austin-area locations.
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Continue reading "Dell adds 500 engineering jobs in Texas" »
Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ - News), which develops business intelligence software, hit a key milestone over the past year: $1 billion in revenues. But, to keep the growth moving, management realizes it needs to continue to innovate -- which often means buying small companies. The most recent deal is the $56 million purchase of Armstrong Laing Limited (ALG), which should help fill some holes in Business Objects' product offerings.
Continue reading "Business Objects Uses Its Hefty Checkbook" »
Unfiltered writings let exec reach public directly
Monday, September 25, 2006
Rachel Konrad
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — At the helm of Sun Microsystems Inc., Jonathan Schwartz became un blogeur when he started publishing his blog in French and nine other languages.
Schwartz, whose Web journal attracts 50,000 viewers each month, says going international will generate new customers and attract prospective employees in Europe, China and elsewhere. That puts the 40-year-old CEO at the vanguard of a trend in corporate communications, one that tears down barriers between executives and the public.
Michelle Leder reported on Footnoted.org: Apologies in advance for the bad cliche, but it was too hard to pass up after reading an item in the proxy that Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW - News) filed earlier this week that, continuing the bad cliche, sheds new light on how the company grants stock options. Though more than 115 companies — the majority of them technology companies — have been caught up in the growing stock option scandals according to this chart from the WSJ, Sun is not on that list. Which makes their disclosure even more welcome, because it’s not in response to a scandal.Here’s what they said:
Continue reading "Sun Microsystems Shines With Stock Options Disclosure" »
NEW YORK (AP) -- Working Mother magazine released its annual list of the top 100 places to work, with its chief executive touting an improvement in mother-friendly benefits in corporate America.
Working Mother CEO Carol Evans, who authored the book "This Is How We Do It: The Working Mothers' Manifesto," said that in order to retain female employees, a growing number of companies are offering customized schedules