Edward Cone

About

Senior Writer and author of the Know It All blogEd Cone has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, a senior writer for Ziff Davis with Baseline and Interactive Week, and as a freelancer based in Paris and then North Carolina for a wide variety of magazines and papers including the International Herald Tribune, Texas Monthly, and Playboy. He writes an opinion column in his hometown paper, the Greensboro News & Record, and publishes the semi-popular EdCone.com weblog. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Lisa, two kids, and a dog.

One Stop

Oracle is putting a new face on its software-as-a-service business by folding all of its online service offerings into the Oracle.com brand name. Oracle.com will function as a business information portal through which users can access integrated versions of the companys full line of applications. The brand will be supported by marketing and advertising campaigns […]

Big Play

Jamcracker, the richly funded application services firm headed by Exodus Communications co-founder KB Chandrasekhar, is a blue-blooded company in what turns out to be a blue-collar business. While neither the company nor its young industry have matched expectations of spectacular growth, Jamcracker executives say they are still on course. “We were going to go 120 […]

Same Game, New Name

Providing application services has become the business model that dares not speak its name, but investors arent giving up on managed software and services. “There is disdain in the marketplace about the label ASP, especially among financial analysts,” says Ritu Raj, chief executive of Chapter 2 e-services. Thats one reason the San Francisco company now […]

Big Blue, Big Muscle

Robert “Boomer” Brown rounds a corner in IBMs data center in research triangle Park, N.C., and stops in front of the big boxes that power Web operations for retailer Victorias Secret. “This is our sexiest site,” says Brown, a program manager at IBM Global Services executive briefing center. The joke, of course, is that a […]

Pay Me Now

One promise of software as a service is to change the way companies pay for applications. So far, its just a promise, at least in the enterprise market served by legacy software vendors and their application service provider partners. Established software companies are in no hurry to move from booking fat, one-time license sales to […]

Service Contract

Microsofts planned $1.1 billion purchase of Great Plains Software will give the worlds largest software company an instant presence in the server application market, but Great Plains brings something extra to the deal. As one of the most aggressive software vendors in the application services business, Great Plains should help boost Microsofts application service provider […]

Fighting From Strength

With 2001 expected to be a year of consolidation in the application services business, Agilera Chief Executive Paul Rudolph put his company ahead of the curve in December 2000 by acquiring another privately held application service provider, Applicast. Unlike many of the deals to come, this one involved two healthy companies. “We have a clear […]