Stories about: Aberdeen Group

When you think of RFID, you likely think of the radio tags being used to track items in a warehouse or verify prescriptions in a hospital -- two long-time uses of the radio frequency identification tags.

There's more at stake than lost productivity when application response times slow to a standstill. Company revenue also takes a hit.

One of my favorite questions for analysts and consultants is what small businesses should learn from big businesses. Let me quote Michael Dortch, long time IT analyst now with the Aberdeen Group, from an interview I did with him earlier this year: "If you are not entirely dependent on IT to do business and succeed competitively now, you will be by the time I'm finished speaking."

When Cisco Systems announced in June 2004 that it planned to develop network access control technology, it drew enormous attention to what had been an obscure market niche.

An innovative virtualization vendor called ScaleMP is attempting to bring high-performance computing to midsize companies with a model that is essentially the opposite of VMware's: Instead of carving an x86 server into numerous partitions, ScaleMP aggregates multiple x86 machines and turns them into one powerful computer.

It's no secret that blogs, forums and other online chatter can make or break a company's reputation. Just ask Kryponite, which makes high-end locks for bicycles and other sporting equipment. The company's worst nightmare came true in 2004 when a post on an online bicycling forum revealed that an expensive Kryptonite lock could be opened in seconds with a ballpoint pen.

Data breaches cost companies an average of US$197 per record in 2007, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute. The average cost of a data breach was US$6.3 million, up from US$4.8 million in 2006.

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

A&L Windows has completed an ERP upgrade to meet its five-day turnaround for customer orders.

Australian cable manufacturer Tycab has completed a large ERP implementation which replaced three disparate, ageing and paper-intensive systems with a centralized solution.

If there was any question about whether the ERP market was in turmoil, the recent shakeup in senior management at ERP stalwart SAP that pushed out rising star Shai Agassi should have answered it.