Short takes from the week's news.
Intel’s Itanium 2 64-bit chip for high-end
only
Intel has confirmed its Itanium 2 64-bit processor will be
engineered for high-end servers and mainframes, rather than low and
mid-range servers. Paul Otellini, Intel’s president, said last week
that Itanium, which was jointly developed with Hewlett-Packard, has
not found a large following in the server market.
Ofcom ditches plans to carve up BT
Telecoms regulator Ofcom has shelved plans to split up BT to
deliver a better service to customers and allow rivals room in the
market. But it has warned the UK’s dominant telecoms operator that
unless it offers competitors cheaper access to its communications
infrastructure to offer alternative services, the government’s
Competition Commission will be brought in to force its hand.
UK firms waste £63bn on technology downtime
UK companies are wasting £63bn a year in technology downtime
costs, a survey of 450 UK businesses by independent researcher
Vanson Bourne has found. Two-thirds of the firms surveyed have
experienced technology downtime in the past two years, with nearly
two-thirds of those suffering at least once every three months. A
fifth of companies use external support or backup services. The
survey found users experienced costs in lost sales, fixing the
problem, reduced customer satisfaction and lost opportunity
costs.
IBM E-server sets new world speed record
IBM’s processor-based Power5 E-server, running DB2 Universal
Database, has set a new world record for computing speed. It passed
the three million transactions per minute on the TPC-C benchmark.
According to the TPC, no other posted results in history have
exceeded 1.2 million transactions per minute.
Survey finds IT training is Cinderella of
budgets
A survey of 100 IT directors found that for more than a third IT
training budgets have not changed for two years. The survey for the
Computing Technology Industry Association also found that 25% of IT
directors spend less on training now than previously, even though
40% recognised the demand for relevant, specially skilled and
certified staff. Some 29% of respondents believed IT personnel
lacked management skills.
Tower Software wins £1.3m document deal
The Northern Ireland Civil Service has awarded £1.3m to
electronic document and records management software company Tower
Software to deploy its Trim Context software. The software will be
used by 18,000 civil servants to manage business information on a
single integrated platform.
Comino to manage Fife Council paperless
office
Fife Council has signed a £350,000 deal with Comino to provide a
centralised and paperless working environment with electronic
document management and its workflow application. The software will
help Fife improve customer service by reducing benefit processing
times and file storage costs.
Civica to supply number plate IT for tunnel
The Kent Police Authority has awarded a £220,000 contract to
software and services supplier Civica to equip the Dartford River
Crossing with an automatic number plate recognition system. Under
the deal, vehicles of note using the Dartford River Crossing will
be detected and stopped using the technology.
Midland to provide HR apps for council
Denbighshire County Council has awarded a £205,000 contract to
Midland HR to modernise its HR processes using its Trent software.
The new system will provide workflow, absence monitoring, people
development, training and online recruitment.
Tool simplifies storage management
Sun has introduced Storedge Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) 3.0
software. The storage management product is aimed at simplifying
the administration of heterogeneous storage infrastructures.
Sun optimises Java for 64-bit Opteron
Sun has developed a version of Java, which it said has been
optimised to 64-bit systems powered by the AMD Opteron chip.
Bundled in the Solaris 10 Java Development Kit, the Java virtual
machines will allow developers to build Java-based applications for
Linux, Windows and Solaris environments.
Latest Java developers’ tool aids teamwork
An updated version of Java Studio Enterprise 7 has been
released, which offers what Sun describes as code-aware
collaboration, designed to help distributed teams to interact. It
supports the Unified Modelling Language and an application
profiler, for analysing application performance.
University builds giant computer grid
The University of Nottingham is building a multimillion-pound
500-node central computer grid based on technology from Sun and
Streamline Computing. The grid uses AMD Opteron processor-based Sun
Fire V20z servers.
MFI sees light at end of supply chain IT
tunnel
Home furnishings group MFI said last week it was beginning to
get to grips with its troubled supply chain system. In September,
MFI issued a profits warning following implementation difficulties
with its £50m SAP-based supply chain system. According to an MFI
statement, progress has been made in resolving technical problems
with the roll-out and it had reduced the number of incomplete
deliveries by half following two months of intensive effort.
W3C considers web access from mobiles
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is considering a proposal
called the W3C Mobile Web Initiative that will seek to make web
access from mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal
digital assistants, as simple as desktop web access. The
announcement was made at a two-day Mobile Web Initiative workshop
recently in Barcelona, organised to help improve web-surfing
capabilities of handheld devices.
Court fines Russian virus writer £57
Authorities in Russia have found a member of international 29A
gang guilty of writing viruses. Eugene Suchkov admitted writing the
W32/Stepan and Gastropod viruses and providing the source code to
create new variants on a number of underground virus exchange
websites. He was fined 3,000 roubles (£57).
Security is top issue for mobile workforce
Security is viewed as the most significant challenge to UK
organisations looking to deploy a mobile workforce, said a report
from Dimension Data. Of the 505 companies surveyed, 85% said mobile
working poses serious security issues to their company. More than
three-quarters agreed that their mobile workers have a poor
attitude to security.
Oracle to issue quarterly patch updates
Oracle will begin issuing quarterly security patch updates from
January 2005 in a bid to simplify patch management. Mary Ann
Davidson, chief security officer, at Oracle said, "The quarterly
schedule strikes a balance between issuing patches often enough to
protect customers while making it easier for customers to manage
the maintenance process."