Drew Robb

Cooper/T.Smith Corp. of Mobile, Ala. knows a few things about monitoring traffic loads. Since 1840, the privately held stevedoring, import/export and international logistics company has been keeping loads moving along the Mississippi River and in and out of ports throughout the Western Hemisphere. When it came to monitoring the loads on its WAN, however, it […]

Using the image of a cloud to depict the Internet is a convenient metaphor. Once the user connects to the ISP, he’s not concerned about how or why the messages arrive where they should. It’s as easy as flicking a light switch and being certain that somehow all those generators and transmissions lines will manage […]

When the City of Los Angeles decided to implement a PeopleSoft ERP/procurement throughout the city, it didn’t bargain for the complaints, outright refusal to use the system and headline news that greeted the project long before its completion. So the project team took a step back, reevaluated the implementation process and pushed it through to […]

These days, IT has evolved into a tangle of mainframe, mid-range and client/server systems. This confusing array of platforms, operating systems, applications, and databases adds a massive burden to IT that acts as a roadblock to corporate growth. Non-relational databases, for instance, rarely integrate well with the enterprise reporting systems implemented by top management. Typically, […]

For many years, India has been the poster child of the offshore software development industry. Many of the Fortune 500 have been quietly beating a path to Indian vendors to reduce software development costs and speed up time to market. As well as their much-publicized work on Y2K and mainframe maintenance, these companies also take […]

In these days of constant mergers and acquisitions, it’s quite common for companies to find themselves operating two or more mission-critical relational databases. Though you struggle along running these database management systems (DBMS) side by side, it ties up IT time, adds unnecessary expense and slows down standard reporting functions. But which database to chose? […]

Medieval kings knew exactly how to ensure security. Just build a big stone wall around the city, surround that with a moat and make everyone enter over a guarded drawbridge. It used to be that simple for IT managers as well. Only a select few had access to the data center and intruders were unlikely […]

Having conquered the consumer desktop space, Microsoft has spent the last decade trying to muscle in on the enterprise market. With the release of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, Redmond hoped to have finally evolved a server operating system that could mount a serious challenge to the dominance of the big UNIX vendors. Yet after its […]

While many major software vendors embrace a specific platform, Computer Associates, Inc. has focused on the middle ground — breaking down the barriers between different platforms, managing the heterogeneous enterprise or acting as middleware between complex systems. Its products currently support everything from IBM mainframes running zOS and OS/390 down to PDAs running Windows CE. […]