Infrastructure

It's a dangerous world out there. In Computerworld's Vital Signs quarterly trend survey, 31 percent of IT executives placed disaster recovery/continuity planning at the top of their priority lists, while 27 percent identified data security/privacy as their No. 1 issue.

The meteoric ascent of offshore outsourcing amongst Western-based businesses throughout the past decade has been nothing short of impressive. With dramatically improved communication capabilities brought about by such technologies as broadband networks, IP telephony and reliable videoconferencing offerings, distances have essentially been eliminated as a barrier to conducting international business.

Yogesh Jagga is the CIO of a successful mortgage brokering company in California, which has its IT as well as its sales staff in India. Parsec Loans, the company, sells loans from some 20 American banks to retail customers in America. Faced with enabling his company's sales with IT that would bring Parsec cost-effectiveness and few headaches, setting up the IT shop in India was a no-brainer. But Jagga took it a step further by not investing in any stand-alone customer relationship management software. He bought seats on Salesforce.com's enterprise edition to enable a sales team that operates from a call center in Gurgaon.

The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook personal information manager adds several key improvements to its e-mail function that beta testers and analysts say are helping early users better cope with ever-growing inboxes. Outlook 2007, has been available to business users since November and will ship to consumers later this month.

Just 21 percent of U.S. residents believe the next Bill Gates will come from their country, according to a new survey on Internet attitudes released Wednesday.About 27 percent of respondents said they believed the next wildly successful technology entrepreneur will come from China, and another 22 percent said Japan.

SOA might be the hottest thing to touch organizations, but is the adoption uniform across continents? No, says Steve Au-Yeung, senior VP and GM, Asia-Pacific, BEA Systems, during the closing moments of the BEAWorld 2006 conference in Beijing on 14 December 2006.

Early users of a new search application developed by IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. say the downloadable software has allowed them to dig deeper into their databases and carry out smarter queries.

The electronic journal (e-journal) library can be a rich resource for University of Ottawa (U of O) students, researchers and faculty, but when network limitations began to impede access to these digital readings the university decided it was time for a change.