Features

• CIOs highlight BI, virtualisation and cloud computing as key to competitiveness

  An IBM survey of 2500 international and 129 local CIOs suggests business intelligence and centralisation of IT systems through virtualisation and cloud computing will be crucial to remaining competitive in the coming months.

• IT managers seeking new tools that can analyze Web 2.0 data

  Some IT leaders look to new offerings that analyze data from corporate blogs, social networks.

• How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown

  In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

• Building a new window into crime

  By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.

• Analytics vendors show there's still innovation in BI

  Managing data isn't as glamorous as many of the glitzy Web 2.0 apps on display at the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, but it's what keeps businesses running. Enterprise applications to speed databases, manage unstructured data, and handle BI queries on a massive scale made their debut this week, and at first blush they look positive. Of course, all will have to stand the rigor of real-world use and testing.