Spotlight Features

Financially, 2002 was not a gangbuster year for IBM -- revenue from continuing operations declined 3 percent. But the company still earned $5.3 billion in the year, even as most firms struggled to stay out of the red zone. Its WebSphere software dominates the e-business arena, and its consulting div...

In the late 1990s, CIOs began to hear a new story from vendors: It had become undesirable to store valuable corporate data on a disk inside a computer. What if a fire broke out and your data disintegrated along with your servers? The race was on to separate disks from servers via network connections...

Nearly 20 years ago, two guys set up mail-order businesses, one from his dorm room, the other from a barn in South Dakota. Dell had a paper route and rooted for the Texas Longhorns; Waitt had a pony tail. Fast forward to today. Michael Dell's eponymous company has annual sales of more than $30 billi...

Idealab and CMGI were among the most widely praised models of the New Economy. But they were both hit, and hit hard, by the implosion of the dot-com sector. Now, they are in the fight of their lives to survive. The questions facing these companies are big ones. Can Idealab generate enough brainstor...

The tale is familiar: Enterprises are generating massive amounts of data, and IT managers are scrambling to identify and purchase the most cost-effective, easy-to-manage storage solutions available. But vendors are in a quandary. Even as they try to pump up revenue, their customers, faced with tight...

When it comes to enterprise e-mail, Microsoft Exchange on the back end and Microsoft Outlook on the front end are among the most frequent vectors for viruses and worms. The cost of downtime as a result of this malware plague is measured in dollars, lost productivity, disrupted communications, and ma...

The U.S. economy was not kind to offline retailers during the 2002 holiday season: They saw the smallest revenue gains in more than 30 years. But e-commerce, which tended to overpromise and underperform during the Internet bubble as many Web-only outfits stumbled over fulfillment and customer servic...

On one hand, enterprise storage needs are increasing exponentially year after year. On the other hand, IT costs are controlled more fiercely than ever, often by non-IT executives. In this stingy environment, vendors are attempting to convince corporations to buy entirely new networks dedicated to da...

After announcing its .NET initiative in mid-2000, then backing it up with a slew of releases and hype, Microsoft clearly was hoping 2002 would be the year Web services took off. But the calendar has flipped to 2003, .NET is not as far along as anticipated, and some observers are wondering if the sof...

Total security for a corporate network may be a goal of many IT executives, but no matter how much a company invests in security systems, breaches -- originating either outside or inside a network -- are a fact of life in the information age. By budgeting for the extra resources needed to respond to...