eWEEK EDITORS

An impossibly slow web site may be worse than having no site at all. As it becomes critical for sites to guarantee consistent response times, companies are turning to more sophisticated tools and services to test and monitor their Internet applications. NetCalibrate, which last year spun off from Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, has been focused […]

Napster, the titular leader of the modern peer-to-peer movement, may die a pauper. More than two years after Napsters birth, one big question remains unanswered: Can peer-to-peer Internet “communities” become viable businesses? Some observers believed Napster was a revolutionary P2P application that would force the music industry to adapt or die. Napsters popularity made its […]

At its upcoming user conference, analysts expect SAP to announce new ways that its enterprise software will link with non-SAP software and across firewalls to outside companies. “If you look at what SAP has, the greatest need is integration,” said Dave Boulanger, an analyst at AMR Research. Integration is critical to its new portal business, […]

Return on investment isnt always clear, but general trends are identifiable. Based on what companies are buying, customer relationship management software offers the most near-term value, says Jon Ekoniak, an analyst at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. ROI in this area can take nine months to two years to appear, but there is a lot of […]

So, what should we do now?” I was sitting across from the CEO of a once-hot, now-struggling electronic marketplace. His office was surprisingly opulent, a legacy of happier times. The e-market, like most of its brethren, had spent aggressively, racing to become the industry leader. But it hadnt worked out that way. Participants were slow […]

Talking Telephones The race to recruit voice-over-broadband customers continues to heat up, with Net2Phones launch last week of its VoiceLine service, which allows customers to place and receive calls over broadband networks using standard telephones. In the same vein, Jetstream Communications and Panasonic said they expect to roll out a broadband telephone by the fourth […]

BMC Software Inc. late last year pledged to put more development muscle into technologies for service providers. At the vendors Learning Universe user conference in Orlando, Fla., last week, BMC showed an updated version of Siteangel and shared details of Project Guardian Angel, which aims to make BMCs flagship Patrol product available to service providers […]

Reckless venture capitalists urged so many telecom players into so many spurious business models that the crashing and burning has just begun. That was the mea culpa consensus of leading industry analysts and venture capitalists gathered at SuperComm in Atlanta last week. “Im to blame. Its my fault,” said Howard Anderson, founder of The Yankee […]

As Santera Systems CEO David Heard talked about Class 5 switches, Asynchronous Transfer Mode data and the need for a machine capable of switching multiple data formats, a decidedly un-high-tech machine worked methodically a few hundred yards behind him. A yellow Caterpillar D6M bulldozer slowly scraped the outline of a new street in the muddy […]

Rival storage and switch vendors got together last week in the name of interoperability, but questions remain whether such solutions meet IT needs. The Storage Networking Industry Associations Supported Solutions Forum, announced last week, aligns storage challengers Compaq Computer Corp., EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Inc. and IBM with switch makers Brocade Communications Systems Inc. […]

Axa Financial Inc. dodged a big, bad bullet early this year when, soon after launching a new customer Web portal, the financial services company got a call from an irate customer who couldnt register on the site. AXA officials traced the problem to incomplete customer data coming from one of the companys dozens of legacy […]

IBM says a layer of ruthenium “pixie dust” applied to its next-generation disk drives fools recording heads into thinking the magnetic layers are thinner than they really are. And that may eventually allow 100 gigabits of information — or the equivalent of 13 hours of MPEG-4 compressed digital video — to be stored on a […]