Stories by: Michael Meehan

Service-oriented architectures hold out the promise of reinventing IT as we know it, according to proponents of Web services. With Web services standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for messaging and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to identify the content of a SOAP message, users are dreaming up ways to unlock information formerly trapped in legacy systems and share it across their entire IT infrastructures.

Following its entrance last September into the small and midsize business networking market, Dell Computer Corp. last week announced its expansion into enterprise networking.

While much of the world has been watching soccer for the past month, Gerard Gouillou has been monitoring data.

Web services may be the next big thing, but a group of users, analysts and even Web services vendors acknowledged last week at a roundtable on the issue that significant barriers to using the technology remain.

Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that the next version of its portal server software will work with rival application servers and support operating systems other than Solaris, although those features won't be in the initial release.

As US federal investigators dig deeper into a scandal involving shady online energy trading, it looks as if IT departments will be required to redesign the e-commerce systems that once stood out as the pride of the energy industry.

Executives at embattled WorldCom Inc. today held a teleconference in which they proposed to sell off more than US$1 billion in assets during the next six months as part of a corporate turnaround plan.

Early enterprise application integration (EAI) mostly involved gluing together various vendors' applications. The EAI vendor sent you an adapter for your enterprise resource planning module and your e-commerce application and voilà! They began sharing data.

Giving the idea of using Ethernet beyond the LAN a boost, WorldCom Inc. last week unveiled a nationwide data networking service that offers Ethernet across metropolitan- and wide-area networks.

A week after Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers trumpeted the importance of network resiliency at the Networld+Interop conference, the company announced a major upgrade of its routing software that's aimed at reducing the number of network failures.

After giving his keynote address at yesterday's Networld+Interop conference, Cisco Systems Inc. President and CEO John Chambers told a press panel that IT managers won't be able to build better security solely by restricting access to applications.