Stories about: Arrow Electronics

When CompuCredit began feeling the sting of the subprime mortgage mess and resulting credit crunch toward the end of last year, CIO Guido Sacchi's IT organization was forced to absorb a 20 per cent year-over-year hit to its annual IT budget.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is going after the virtualization market in the small-to-medium business space by offering a program to assess how an IT system might benefit from the technology.

Beginning July 1, the European Union will bar import of electronic components that include lead, mercury cadmium and several other substances. The law, known as the European Directive of Restriction of Hazardous Substances, or RoHS, has vendors scrambling to meet its deadline, but it is not without implications for non-European users.

IBM Wednesday announced its acquisition of Viacore for an undisclosed amount. Viacore provides software and services for linking supply chain partners that want to swap information about product capacity, inventory, delivery and forecasting.

Manufacturers dream of a finely tuned supply chain, with finished goods landing softly on distributor and retailer loading docks at exactly the right time in precisely the right quantity. That can't be done, of course, without accurate demand forecasting -- which still tends to be based on intuition, last year's sales numbers, and spreadsheet war games between sales and marketing groups. For most, the dream remains distant.

Even an IT department that's good at managing contractors can be tripped up by unexpected problems such as a dispute over the definition of software defect, according to a panelist at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in Arizona.

With the help of stronger search and navigation tools, Arrow Electronics is making sales that are 400 percent bigger than those it's used to closing.

Intel is forging ahead with making purchases and selling its products through the RosettaNet Internet exchange standard. More than 10 percent of its customer and supplier transactions were executed through RosettaNet in 2002, a total of about $5 billion, Intel said Tuesday.

Fish is a management philosophy that originated at the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, where fishmongers playfully toss around trout and salmon. The idea is to transfer that enthusiasm to the business world by encouraging employees to adopt a playful attitude about work and to go to extra lengths to make a customer's or a colleague's day special.

The travails the RosettaNet consortium has experienced in trying to launch its XML-based business-to-business e-commerce standards effort could serve as a bellwether for the thousands of companies that have yet to join the herd.

United Parcel Service of America Inc. plans soon to launch a beta project using XML to exchange shipment, tracking and rate information with select business customers.