Anne Chen

Post-dot-com conventional wisdom has it that, among independent business-to-business e-marketplaces, first-mover advantage was a myth and profitability a pipe dream. Try telling that to Paul Bourke, CEO of Altra Energy Technologies Inc. The Houston-based company launched an independent online energy trading exchange—now known as Altra Marketplace—in 1996, long before the word “e-marketplace” had been conceived. […]

This summer, one year after friends regaled him with stories of how hot his skills were and of the unprecedented hiring packages he would receive, David Kim entered the job market only to receive a chilly welcome. “Recruiters would look at my résumé, smile grimly and say two fatal words: hiring freeze,” said Kim, a […]

CIOs frustrated by increasingly expensive, sometimes kludgy software would be well-advised to pay attention to the status of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act as it wends its way through state legislatures. The legislation, already enacted in two states, could make it harder for enterprises to fight ISVs that attempt to sell software that doesnt […]

Desperately needing a major software upgrade but unwilling to pay through the nose for a new enterprise software license on which his vendor insisted, Dave Waterman recently found himself between a rock and a hard place. After weeks of negotiations in which he attempted—unsuccessfully—to wring price concessions out of the vendor, CompuWare Corp., Waterman, the […]

At Kelley Blue Book Inc., nothing new is done without a road map. As owners of the venerable Kelley Blue Book car-pricing manual, the company, based in Irvine, Calif., employs Web data analysts who spend months determining how visitors navigate its Web site before recommending new tools and changes to Web developers. “Were a conservative […]

Top U.S. negotiators working on Chinas re-entry to the World Trade Organization arent the only ones trying to clear major roadblocks. In a country where business is based on guan-xi (relationships) and IT investments are almost always focused on lowering costs, U.S. enterprises have to work especially hard to persuade Chinese companies to buy into […]

More than 2,000 years ago, invading tribes from the north were repulsed by the 1,500-mile Great Wall, built by vassal states of the Qin Dynasty to protect the fertile lands of China. At the beginning of the 21st century, the walls that separate the Chinese economy from the rest of the world are poised to […]

Sometimes Cindy Groner must feel like shes swimming in circles in a sea of acronyms. As director of mobile traveler services at Sabre Inc., Groner oversees a team of wireless developers who, in the process of coming up with new wireless services for Sabres customers, must create multiple versions of each page. One in the […]

The certainty that XHTML basic will emerge as the standard language for next-generation wireless devices lies in the fact that it is backed by two organizations with tremendous clout: the WAP Forum, owner of the Wireless Application Protocol specification, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.s wireless division, DoCoMo, in Tokyo, which has more than 23 […]

About this time last year, as the stampede to the Internet and e-business grew, you could stick a fork in the ERP market. It was dead. Muerto. Not alive. Enterprise resource planning, common wisdom held, didnt fit e-business. Not only were most ERP software suites still based on outmoded client/server technology, they focused on improving […]

Revamping ERP to support collaborative commerce is becoming increasingly common. But, experts say, corporations shouldnt stop there. As organizations turn their attention toward linking their enterprise resource planning systems to the Internet, they should also focus on building and integrating them with a private trading exchange. “We expect over the next few years that companies […]

If e-business had a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, his name would be David Dittrich. Dittrich, a security manager at the University of Washington, in Seattle, is one of a rare breed of security pros—the computer forensics expert—whose skills are getting ever more precious as the number of computer crimes spirals. These are the data detectives who […]