Stories by: Sami Lais

Poor data quality can confuse your customers, undermine your applications or even put you out of business -- and there's everything in the world you can do about it. More than simple data-cleansing, which involves correcting a misspelled name or changing "Avenue" to "Street," a data quality initiative addresses more complex and subtle problems.

In a sort of digital interpretation of the adage, "Waste not, want not," the basic idea of grid computing is to use the computational power of idle PCs and harness those heretofore wasted cycles to form a virtual supercomputer.

The MPEG standards are an evolving group of compression and decompression standards defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group for digitizing and delivering audio, video and multimedia over computer systems and networks, including the Web.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the translation of optically scanned bitmaps of printed or written text characters into character codes, such as ASCII. This is an efficient way to turn hard-copy materials into data files that can be edited and otherwise manipulated on a computer.

With release last week by the Distributed Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF) of the final version of Common Information Model (CIM) 2.5, IT managers see interoperability of systems inching closer to reality.

BMC Software Inc. officials this week said the software vendor is starting to rebound from the financial hit it took in its last fiscal year. And while the development strategy for BMC's flagship Patrol product line is stirring some controversy, IT managers attending the company's annual user conference here seemed willing to take a wait-and-see attitude.

At its annual user conference, BMC Software on Monday announced several initiatives aimed at supporting service providers and helping IT managers maintain service-level agreements.

Automated network management software sophisticated stuff that promises an unprecedented ability to monitor a corporate network is on the horizon.

IT managers exasperated by out-of-control network traffic who are about to throw bandwidth at the problem are the target audience for a new combination of software and services from NetQoS Inc. in Austin, Texas.

NetIQ Corp. last week added two new tools to its Windows 2000 back-office application migration and management suite to help users plan and execute migrations to Microsoft Exchange and Windows 2000 Active Directory .

What detail of your private life would you least like to see splashed across the Internet? Or added to a database, linked to your name and sold in a mailing list? Your concern could become a source of amusement to your grandchildren, because by then, "privacy as we know it won't exist," predicts Nick Jones, a London-based research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group Inc.