Samantha Perry

Business intelligence (BI), like too many technologies, was over-hyped in its early days. Again, as with many other technologies, this hype was rapidly followed by some very public implementation failures, before everyone settled down and realized, as usually happens, that BI is not the be all and end all that it was often claimed to be.

In the face of smarter and more sophisticated criminal attacks, Standard Bank of South Africa is ramping up its efforts to protect its customers.

Standard Bank and MTN last week launched MTN Banking -- a mobile, person to person banking platform. MTN Banking is a 50/50 joint venture between the two, which sees Standard Bank providing the banking infrastructure (and licence), and MTN the telephony/SMS system.

At its EMEA press product launch event, held in Monaco recently, Dell outlined the steps it is taking to comply with the E.U.

Viruses are getting more virulent, and hackers faster and smarter. The threat of a zero-day virus attack is rapidly becoming a reality. These risks, according to Jean-Noel Ezingeard, Professor of Management Studies at Henley Management College in the U.K., while concerning, are not what should be keeping CIOs and IT managers awake at night.

The Western Cape has received a lot of press lately as the South African hub of call centre activity, to the degree that readers would be forgiven for assuming that is all that goes in Cape Town, IT-wise anyway. The region, however, has long been a hub of niche software development activity, and is making its mark in other sectors too.

Accenture Ltd. last week released the results of a survey which it conducted into the local shared services (SS) market. According to the results, while the local market is aware of the benefits of shared services centres (SSCs), it has not followed global best practice where centres have been established.

Welcome to 2005, the year that telecommunications is finally set to enter the modern era in South Africa. The SNO is almost here, 3G is here, and wireless broadband is here.