Stories about: Gartner Dataquest

Data will flow more freely as mobile communications networks move towards a "flat IP" model, but developers and operators will face new security challenges, according to engineers gathered at the Freescale Technology Forum in Paris.

CIOs have ranked business intelligence (BI) projects as the number one technology priority for 2007 with revenue expected to grow 12 percent in Australia topping $100 million.

Intel has attached a privacy license to its new location-aware software product, intended to protect cell phone users' personal information as mobile devices increasingly rely on tracking technology to provide targeted services.

Governance in software development will be a key focus at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2006 event in June, an IBM official said this week.

Never short of a comment on vendor consolidation, the IT analyst community was quick to opine on what news of Oracle's PeopleSoft acquisition will mean to users.

Robert Joyce understands complex relationships. A former salesman and now managing director of corporate relationship management at The Bank of New York, Joyce completed a CRM deployment in March that gives the firm's 1,650 sales employees in 30 countries a single, consolidated view of each customer's interactions with the bank.

Consumer goods manufacturers face unique challenges when rolling out CRM applications, compared with other industries such as insurance or finance. For one thing, they don't typically focus on supporting call centers or remote sales force automation processes, but rather on building better marketing and sales campaigns. And they generally don't have direct contact with the end consumer, but rather deal exclusively with a middleman retailer or product distributor.

A customer at electronics store Best Buy might not recall purchasing Shania Twain's CD Come on Over back in 1997, but the $25 billion retailer certainly does.

There's no question that the prolonged slowdown in corporate technology spending is having an impact on many IT vendors. Increasing market consolidation is forcing many of the smaller vendors out of the market, leaving the top flight players to battle it out.

Netgear Inc. next week is expected to jump into the Layer 3 Gigabit switch market with a 24-port box that can act as a hardware-based LAN router for small and midsize nets.