Stories about: Harmonic

SAP will bring a unified interface across its suite of business applications over the next few quarters as part of an ongoing effort to make its software easier to implement, according to company co-CEO Leo Apotheker.

It's the ideal coffee shop toy for music lovers: A wireless media player that connects directly to an online music service. Besides the usual playback capabilities, the device's built-in Wi-Fi enables you to play Internet radio. If you hear a song you like, you can press a button to download it, the album the track is from or a mix of similar songs.

Making data centres more power-efficient is becoming a mantra of modern IT practice. Whether it is to reduce electricity costs, to get around supply limitations, or to become friendlier to the environment there are a lot of IT directors, equipment suppliers, research and analyst houses and green lobby and pressure groups all singing off this same hymn sheet.

The CSIRO is laying claim to developing the world's best breed of 200GHz millimetre-wave (mm-wave) amplifier and mixer chips that double wireless data transfer rates, while being more cost and power efficient than current wireless chips.

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.

As I write this, the countdown timer on the Olympics Web site says there are 127 days, 17 hours, some minutes and seconds to go before the momentous event begins.