Alan Radding

Monitoring and managing applications is often so complex that IT doesn’t even know that a system or network is down until users start calling–or, more likely, screaming. “We didn’t have a good problem-tracking system. Things would get missed,” admits Rob Walsh, systems operations manager at SupportKids Inc., an Austin, Texas, company that tracks down parents […]

AXA Financial Inc.’s Sharon Sibigtroth, managing director, strategic data When AXA Financial Inc., a New York-based diversified financial services company, focused on its products, it didn’t bother with customer relationship management or CRM analytics. Customers? They weren’t even on the radar screen. AXA is a company with $565 billion in assets under management, and about […]

Application service providers (ASPs) have exploded on the scene over the last year. At last count, AMR Research Inc., in Boston, tallied more than 300 ASPs, and the number is still rising rapidly. ASPs offer everything from Web site hosting to e-commerce and enterprise applications, including today’s leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship […]

As organizations plot their future use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, knowledge management will increasingly pop up on the radar screen. Once relegated to the realm of obscure academics or touchy-feely corporate reformists, knowledge management–a sometimes fuzzy term that incorporates many business intelligence tools–is latching onto ERP systems and finding a measure of mainstream […]

October 1999 ERP, componentization, and e-commerce ERP is growing and changing to meet interest in e-commerce and demands for more managaeable, scalable modules. By Alan Radding When it comes to e-commerce, why reinvent the wheel? That’s the thinking of many IT organizations in their scramble to create e-commerce applications. As they look around for the […]

Non-IT costs drove ADI’s ERP implementation Hardware and software costs, including the initial R/3 license for more than 300 users and the Oracle database license, were lower than the cost of people, both internal staff as well as consultants ($ in millions). Source:Analog Devices Inc. Fear, panic, and alarm were raging through the halls of […]

The push technology craze in general may have fizzled, but push technology continues to survive in Vienna, Va.-based MicroStrategy Inc.’s DSS Broadcaster, the Data Warehouse Product of the Year. DSS Broadcaster automatically delivers (pushes) selected content of a data warehouse to individuals via any of a number of delivery channels: e-mail, fax, pager, or mobile […]

Organizations have rushed to embrace middleware as the need to integrate applications throughout the enterprise has rocketed. Middleware knits together disparate applications–ranging from linking custom applications and package solutions to bridging the Web-to-database gap, and more. We nominated a range of products, from complete, high-level integration applications to the technical tools, and let you, the […]

Visual Basic, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp.’slong-running development toolkit, has scored another success with version 6.0, despite the availability of other technology and more sophisticated tools. “Visual Basic still remains very popular,” says Dave Kelly, a senior analyst at Hurwitz Group Inc., of Framingham, Mass. The programming tool appeals to a wide range of developers, from […]