Articles by Vincent Ryan

When it comes to choosing a database, size matters -- not so much the size of the database, but the size of the company. Whereas mid-size to large companies generally select a complex database and then task administrators and developers with building applications around it, small businesses usually take a different tack, focusing on simplicity and ease of use, because they often do not have an administrator on staff...

Search engine Google is virtually revered by the Internet community and is often profiled as a pure technology company that does not take commercial interests to heart. But those days are over. In the past two years, Google has inked revenue-generating deals with almost every major player on the Internet, stepped up efforts to secure the lion's share of Internet advertising dollars, and tested the waters in the news and e-commerce sectors...

IBM wants to help enterprises clean out their patchwork, outdated programs and transform them into shiny new applications that can take advantage of Web services protocols The company has announced a new initiative designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining old software applications dating back to the "green-screen" er...

Hard-to-visualize functionality, extremely complex feature descriptions, an invisible presence in the network, and boring names, taken together, sum up why the enterprise Ethernet switching market does not get nearly the attention it deserves But Ethernet switching is a multibillion-dollar market that CIOs spend a lot of time scrutinizing. And alth...

Google and Amazon.com have tied the knot in a deal designed to expand Google's advertising presence and give Amazon.com users greater access to products not listed on the e-tailer's site The multiyear agreement will make Google's search technology and targeted sponsored links available on Amazon.com within the next several months. In fact, sponsore...

Motorola has signed a 10-year global IT infrastructure outsourcing pact worth US$1.6 billion with Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC), the largest such agreement in Motorola's history and a healthy sign for the outsourcing business "Outsourcing has been on the rise for the past 12 months, and it is continuing to gain momentum," Yankee Group s...

In a move likely to raise the hopes of high-tech deal watchers, Cisco Systems has entered the home networking fray by agreeing to acquire The Linksys Group, a leader in home, small-office and home-office (SOHO) networking gear, for US$500 million in stock "The leading position of Linksys offers a tremendous top-line growth opportunity," Charles Gia...

The e-tail universe has seen tremendous consolidation since the dot-com bubble burst. The list of online-only retailers that wound up on the Internet scrap heap is too long to mention. But the idea of selling consumer products to people via the Internet has not suffered. Indeed, more people are buying online every day. Air travel, consumer electro...

In the wake of a spectacular meltdown that featured financial shenanigans, overspending and broken promises, can the telecom industry recover and grow strong again? The answer is yes, industry experts say, but telecom faces a long road back -- and it will not recapture the heights of three or four years ago Job one for carriers in 2003 will be to g...

Consumers are still having a hard time getting companies to service their needs via e-mail, and the experience is souring them on buying again from the same companies. Those were some of the results of a Jupiter Research survey designed to gauge how well companies respond to customer inquiries in the electronic channel Although 88 percent of consum...

As more and more business is conducted online, and as companies develop a three-dimensional view of their customers by correlating information from multiple departments and multiple data sources, today's centralized relational databases have become obsolete, according to Nelson Mattos, director of information integration at IBM Using existing techn...

After years of cost-cutting, reorganizations and investor discomfort, IBM is on top again. While rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems struggle to survive the industry downturn, Big Blue has been humming along Financially, 2002 was not a gangbuster year for the company -- revenue from continuing operations declined 3 percent. But it stil...