Managed Services & Outsourcing

When it comes to tackling security, governance and compliance in 2004, Australian organizations are likely to take the same approach they have taken for the last few years, that is, continuing to "spend as little as they can get away with."

A new breed of Internet company is emerging to challenge the traditional private value added networks (VANs) that connect trading partners.

The CEO of VoteHere Inc., a developer of secure electronic voting technology, confirmed last week that a hacker broke into its corporate network in October and accessed internal documents.

Macromedia Inc. on Monday announced Macromedia Director MX 2004, an upgraded version of the multimedia authoring tool that adds support for JavaScript, Flash MX 2004 content, and DVD-Video.

In the year ahead, Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., and Hewlett-Packard Co. will bolster their utility-computing initiatives by upgrading key products.

Trumpeting their support for XML and Web services standards, leading enterprise application vendors spoke at great lengths in 2003 about playing well with others. In the end, however, they proffered their own way of doing things. IT watched as IBM Corp.'s WebSphere Integration WorkBench, Microsoft Corp.'s BizTalk, SAP AG's NetWeaver, and Siebel Systems Inc.'s UAN (Universal Application Network) went head-to-head-to-head-to-head, as each vendor offers its own custom integration solution.

Delivering value to the organization is the mandate of every CIO and IT department, yet it's long been a difficult goal to achieve, and perhaps an even harder one to quantify. At Bank of Montreal Financial Group, five key steps are being taken to ensure that IT pulls its weight, and then some. Technology head Lloyd Darlington gives CIO Canada readers an inside look at how it's being done.

You get what you pay for. And sometimes, when there's extra goods and services bundled into a contract, you get more than you bargained for - and a bigger bill to boot.