Stories about: Sapient

Tim Stanley, senior vice president and CIO at Harrah's Entertainment, sat down with Computerworld at its Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference Monday to talk about the lessons learned from integrating IT systems after its purchase of Caesars Entertainment last year. "Speed is key," said Stanley, who also detailed some of the other IT projects Harrah's is working on. Excerpts from the interview follow:

To hear John Dillon tell it, "the enterprise software model is prehistoric and outdated." Dillon, the former CEO of Salesforce.com, is currently CEO and president of Navis, a supply-chain distribution and logistic software vendor. And, he's a big supporter of software as a service.

With the introduction Tuesday of BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft Corp. is delivering a more complete package of business integration software that will allow for faster and less costly implementations, two of Microsoft's system integrator partners said.

There's plenty of news making a noise this month, and here are a few short takes that you are sure to hear more about in the months ahead.

This year looks to be brighter for information technology. Budgets are thawing. And numerous new products — many of them relatively inexpensive — beckon with promises to improve the performance, reliability, security, manageability, or profitability of your infrastructure. Which ones will really deliver? Here’s the roundup of 2003’s key IT trends and the picks, from the test centre of Computerworld’s sister publication InfoWorld, of the most innovative and effective products for 2004.

Trumpeting their support for XML and Web services standards, leading enterprise application vendors spoke at great lengths in 2003 about playing well with others. In the end, however, they proffered their own way of doing things. IT watched as IBM Corp.'s WebSphere Integration WorkBench, Microsoft Corp.'s BizTalk, SAP AG's NetWeaver, and Siebel Systems Inc.'s UAN (Universal Application Network) went head-to-head-to-head-to-head, as each vendor offers its own custom integration solution.

Most companies are late into the budgeting cycle with about 90 percent of the budget allocated and locked in. But there is still that remaining 10 percent, and many companies are in, let's say, the mid-to-late point in that decision-making cycle.

There are many levels of shared services, but the core concept of having a centralized organization within the enterprise that provides services to disparate, internal data consumers rests on the power of standardized business processes.

Any executive worth his wingtips knows that most exciting new technologies don't generally burst upon the business scene in full glory. Instead, they arrive in phases, like a space launch. You've got the lift-off phase, where gurus and techies foam with excitement about the concept's potential. (This also tends to be where the hype barometer registers its highest reading.) Then you have phase two, otherwise known as reality. Glitches show up, vendors start pushing proprietary solutions, standards bodies start pontificating, and users start tinkering with the technology in an effort to get it to work as originally advertised. If all goes well, you get phase three, in which the technology is finally mature enough to be widely accepted.

Microsoft is extending to its enterprise customers a developer program previously only available to commercial software vendors, offering free resources and tools for building applications and systems based on the .Net. platform.

Harrah's Entertainment is known as a high-stakes player in the glitzy world of hotel casinos and gambling. But in contrast to the bright lights of Las Vegas, the company's Web presence was dull and static and did little more than house communications and financial investment information. Furthermore, several of the company's individual properties had developed their own marketing-oriented sites, leaving the company without a unified face on the Web.