Stories about: IT Matters

When Anne Mulcahy took over as CEO of Xerox in August 2001, the outlook for the company to which she had devoted 25 years of her life could hardly have been bleaker. Xerox was over $17 billion in debt, bankruptcy appeared inevitable, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating alleged accounting irregularities.

Verizon Wireless Thursday officially announced an agreement to purchase Alltel for US$28.1 billion, which would make the new company the largest wireless carrier in the US with 80 million subscribers.

One of the interesting things that's been happening over the past few years is that just as workforces have become less centralized, IT departments have gotten more so. The vast majority of companies I work with consider themselves virtual, meaning that employees work together on teams from widely distributed geographies. Yet fewer IT teams are virtual in the same sense -- in many cases IT teams are increasingly consolidated into a few central sites.

Storm is a shadow of its former self, Kraken is just another name for Bobax and the biggest botnet goes by the mouthful of "Srizbi," a noted botnet researcher said Wednesday as he released the results of his census of the various armies of hacked computers that spew spam.

I found Oracle's statements on open source, tendered at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference, intriguing to say the least. I'll begin by making it clear that I don't doubt the veracity of the database giant's experience with its customer base.

Windows may boast the lion's share of the desktop education market, but the economic and technical benefits of open source software has seen many schools and education institutions implement various flavours of Linux across their desktops and server back-ends.

Over the past 100 years I've been writing this column, readers have sent me several irate letters because they were enraged that I would dare to bring politics into a technically oriented publication. For those of you who feel this way, you might want to stop reading now.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World.

With more than 1 billion phones sold globally for the first time, 2007 was a banner year for mobile phone sales. As sales continue to grow, the big questions this year are whether global market leader Nokia can expand in North America, and whether Motorola can stop its slide.

Toyota Financial Services is implementing an Ethernet VLAN solution to optimise the resiliency of its existing infrastructure.

Talk may be cheap, but technology projects are not. No wonder companies are so eager to discuss their IT spending pain.