Erin Joyce

Ask an application management team to list its biggest headache and you’re likely to hear a variant of this: As Web-based applications spread wide and far across enterprise networks, tracking down problems is too complex. Is the application glitch related to database problems? Sending too many transaction messages? Try the network administrator, or the database […]

Amazon.com’s third-quarter profits jumped more than a third during its third quarter as aggressive pricing drove sales in major categories and more third-party sellers hooked in with the online retailer’s wagon. Though strong, the results also missed analysts’ expectations by a penny. Amazon’s outlook for the fourth quarter also remained cautious compared to Wall Street […]

Currency exchanges and continued strong sales in its hardware division helped fuel IBM’s third quarter profit of $1.8 billion, but a one-time $320 million charge flattened out the bottom line results. The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant said its net income reached $1.8 billion, up 1 percent over the same time last year. Without the one-time […]

Microsoft’s Visual Studio development application, code-named Whidbey, may only be in beta, but one partner company is wasting no time shipping a toolset that works with the latest features. Infragistics, a maker of presentation layer development tools, said its flagship NetAdvantage 2004 Volume 3, which just shipped, supports the new look and feel of Visual […]

NEW YORK — As information technology migrates to a new era of on-demand computing, the head of Computer Associates is urging the industry to take a page out of the consumer technology sector’s playbook. “Consumers have very little tolerance for products that fail to deliver functionality, simplicity of use and low cost,” Ken Cron, interim […]

California’s Gov. Schwarzenegger has signed the state’s first anti-spyware bill into law, but it doesn’t do enough to terminate the growing use of spyware that logs your moves online. Watered down. Toothless. Choose your metaphor for this limp piece of legislation. For all its good intentions, California’s Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act has too […]

Amid Cendant’s $1.2 billion Orbitz buy, new entrants are rushing to the intersection of the online industry’s hottest sectors: travel booking and search. “It sure is getting crowded,” Kevin Lee, CEO of the search engine marketing firm Did-It (http://www.did-it.com), said, referring to the spate of travel search sites that have launched or re-launched in recent […]

For the past few years, a juicy business opportunity in the information technology consulting industry has been maturing, along with the development of Web services built on open standards. Now, IBM officials claim, that market opportunity is ripe for the plucking. It’s called Business Performance Transformation Services, and IBM is eager to take a bite. […]

Communications system provider Avaya is adding clustering to its flagship speech-enabled messaging platform, giving customers the ability to more quickly scale up their voice-activated messaging systems. The upgrade is part of a suite of refreshes the company rolled out, including expanded self-service options on interactive voice response systems and tools that speed the development of […]

Yahoo is wading into the online music game with a $160 million cash deal to acquire music software provider Musicmatch. The purchase places the online media/portal company in direct competition with players such as Apple’s iTunes, Microsoft’s MSN Entertainment, Real Player from RealNetworks , Wal-Mart and Napster in an increasingly crowded online music market. Terry […]

NEW YORK — UPDATED: IBM is donating software for speech-enabled applications to the open source community, a move supported by more than 20 speech vendors and platform companies, including communications systems player Avaya . Big Blue said it is donating Reusable Dialog Components (RDCs) to Apache Software Foundation and speech editors to the Eclipse Organization. […]

Microsoft is in a throw-it-off-the-train state of mind these days in regard to its Windows operating system features. It’s announced that Longhorn will ship by 2006 — but without its much-ballyhooed WinFS subsystem. Instead of bundling WinFS, the file and search sub system with SQL Server layered on top, when Windows ships, the company will […]