Drew Robb

If you have to screen your calls to avoid an endless procession of headhunters and potential customers offering you ever-higher rates for your IT services, you can skip this article. In fact, you could probably write one of your own. But for those mere mortals faced with keeping customers happy, here are a few tips […]

Doing everything yourself may sound great, but it quickly becomes tedious and inefficient. So we outsource everything from pumping our water to ironing our shirts and educating our children, focusing instead on our core functions. The same holds true in IT. Outsourcing continues to grow as a means of cutting costs, improving quality/performance, increasing flexibility, […]

When the world’s first electronic tube computer, the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC, went on line in 1945, all six of its programmers were women. One of those programmers, Betty Holberton, later designed the control console for UNIVAC I, wrote the FORTRAN test suites for the National Bureau of Standards and chaired the committee that set […]

Analysts and offshore outsourcing experts gathered at the recent U.S.-Russia Technology Roundtable in San Jose, Calif., identified five major trends in offshore development. Here’s a summary of those trends, as well as some of the factors driving them: 1. More and more IT jobs will move overseas in the coming years Forrester Research estimates that […]

For most American IT executives, offshore outsourcing presents an opportunity to cut costs. But there are many other considerations, so before you rush to outsource beyond U.S. borders, it’s imperative that you do your homework. That was the consensus at a U.S.-Russia Technology Roundtable held last month in San Jose, Calif. Experts at the event […]

A few years ago network management comparisons were easy. On the one side stood huge and monolithic network management frameworks, such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView, which took an army of technicians years to deploy. On the other side were low-cost tools and toolkits such as Aprisma, WhatsUp Gold and WebNM. It was a […]

What a difference a few years make. Walking the aisles of Comdex in the ’90s meant being assailed by a barrage of the latest and greatest in hardware — servers, disk arrays, switches, routers and storage devices. This year, enterprise-class hardware was hard to find. Servers, in particular, could well be candidates for the endangered […]

A lot has been written about the right of all citizens to access the Internet. Billions has been spent placing computers in classrooms and libraries, and stringing broadband to rural communities. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has donated vast sums to wire Navajo reservations in the Southwest. But you don’t have to […]

Sometimes you just hit a dead end. It can happen when you are out driving, and also in the rapidly changing world of IT. Clothing retailer Burlington Coat Factory, for example, used Sequent NUMA-Q (Non-Uniform Memory Access) servers for its Oracle database. IBM bought Sequent Computer Systems and decided not to develop new NUMA-Q products. […]

The facts of life regarding Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are both shocking and remarkable. On the plus side, the technology’s popularity is obvious — from annual revenues of about $2 billion in 1999, CRM vendors are expected to rake in $20 billion a year by 2004, according to Boston-based AMR research. Currently, the technology has […]

In most areas of life, experience is a good thing. You prefer to have a veteran mechanic, doctor or lawyer, for example. But then again, you wouldn’t tend to boast too much about being divorced five times or undergoing your seventh IRS audit. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies getting a job. You will […]

Accurately modeling climate issues is a huge computational task. The National Weather Service’s supercomputers, for instance, have a hard enough time generating accurate local weather forecasts just a few days out. So imagine trying to generate accurate forecasts on a global scale 50 years into the future. This is causing particular consternation when it comes […]