Taken out of context
Question today’s popular notion that your business should outsource everything but its core functions MANAGEMENTSPEAK: It’s a high-level model. TRANSLATION: It’s wrong. — This week’s anonymous contributor is right. ONE OF THE MOST popular games in the world of business…
Rocket science coming to an enterprise near you
The concept of treating the network as a single machine running a distributed OS has intrigued the processor-hungry IT community for years. The latest incarnation is grid computing, in which compute resources are aggregated across geographically dispersed locations to tackle…
Maintenance games
Buyer beware: Readers say some vendors are insisting on maintenance policies that border on exploitive HEY KIDS, this week we’re going to play a new game. It’s called “Name That Vendor,” and the category this week is “Maintenance Manipulations.” Here’s…
State of Web services
Standards, tools, and, yes, even deployments are gathering steam IT IS ONLY natural to be skeptical of Web services. Promising cheap, reliable, flexible, and scalable computing — as well as simple deployment and maintenance and nearly mythical ROI — Web…
NAS for the masses
Microsoft applies its operating system savvy to the storage market, with interesting results MICROSOFT HAS made an art form out of stealing good ideas and delivering them to the masses. Now the company is applying this strategy in an attempt…
Can we talk about XP?
A debate has broken out about whether the latest XP hole is serious, so let’s get it straight FOR THE PAST few weeks I’ve described security problems in Windows XP, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, and Internet servers in general. In…
Backbone builder
Terremark CTO brought all his talents to bear on construction of the ‘NAP of the Americas’ TERREMARK WORLDWIDE CTO Monty Bannerman recently completed a Herculean task by any measure — one that, among other things, required him to fortify operations…
Insuring IT innovation
Squeezed by tighter competition and budgets, insurance industry CTOs face unique product integration and customer challenges PHIL FELICE FACED an immense task when he joined Guardian Life Insurance Company of America as its first CTO in January 2001. He had…
The bottom line
Web services today Despite IT professionals’ typical knee-jerk skepticism about the latest buzz phrases — and Web services certainly counts among them — leading-edge companies have already begun deploying Web services that are giving them competitive advantages. Major platforms vendors…
Insurance goes to PARIS
As Ohio Casualty Insurance’s first CTO, John Kellington places a high priority on building internal systems that can address the needs of external users. Winning the hearts of independent agents, Ohio Casualty’s key distribution channel is essential to success in…
