Stories about: Hewitt Associates

Ever since the economy began to stumble in mid-2000 and companies began trimming IT spending, industry watchers have wondered how long organizations would stretch the lives of their desktop hardware before beginning widescale upgrades.

Recent years have been unkind to the worldwide utility sector. Industries such as oil, gas, water, nuclear power, electricity and petrochemical have seen their share of woes -- from the doleful economy to deregulation to increased governmental scrutiny because of the corporate collapses.

Trying to further fuel its momentum in the grid computing market, IBM Corp. on Wednesday rolled out two new offerings aimed at the banking and financial markets and announced a handful of new grid projects among both commercial and scientific institutions.

IBM is pushing a new set of provisioning technologies and lower-cost Linux-based blade servers to help IT managers deal with cost-cutting pressures and a desire to scale up processing for compute-intensive tasks on an as-needed basis.

If you're an IT manager, you need to know what skills your staffers possess. Without a proper skills assessment, how can you go about planning projects, changing strategy, outsourcing work, and training or downsizing staff?

Ah, the promise of Web services, the Internet-resident applications that have the major technology vendors united for the first time ever and consequently the entire sector abuzz with unbridled enthusiasm. According to its own rapidly spreading mythology, Web services -- where application can talk to application without messy human intervention -- is going to solve every lingering technical challenge. In the future, all your applications -- from the largest CRM system to the smallest utility -- will interact seamlessly, thanks to Web services.

A development centre was opened in Victoria yesterday which aims to create 100 jobs from the state's IT graduates, professional community and from the vendor's Bangalore head office.

Last summer, an intern at Hewitt Associates LLC scanned the logs on the company's Domino servers at its headquarters in Lincolnshire, Ill. He looked to see who, if anyone, used each application and database that is replicated between servers. It took all summer to manually check the logs and delete unused items from the servers. The result: 63GB of storage space was freed up in the company's messaging database. This summer, the intern will be doing other things.

Integration and interoperability were the buzzwords of the day at IBM's briefing Monday on its Web services strategy. IT vendors are under such a tremendous amount of pressure from customers to develop and stick to Web services standards that even the industry's most notorious standards-scourge, Microsoft, is playing nicely with others, said several Big Blue executives.

Novell and Courion introduced separate security products on Monday that take aim at filling basic security lapses, ranging from self-service password authentication to Web-based application and network access.

Next to glamorous dot-coms, which offered IT professionals the chance to change the world and become millionaires while wearing bluejeans to work, some corporate IT organizations seemed like mousy country kin, especially as the companies competed for the same limited pool of IT talent.