John Moore

Its 3:30 p.m. Thursday at a Marriott in Northern Virginia, and IBM business partners are exchanging cards amid the sushi and vegetable platters. Among the crowd is a firm representing developers in Pakistan, a placement agency for Tivoli specialists, and a group of Lotus Notes developers. All are participating in IBMs latest experiment in partnering: […]

Consolidation in the Internet services space quickened last week, when Compaq Computer disclosed plans to boost it professional-services organization with the acquisition of Proxicom. Compaqs move comes a week after IBM announced it would buy Mainspring, an Internet consulting services firm. The Proxicom acquisition, valued at $266 million, will jump-start Compaqs presence in Internet services. […]

The policy battle over the “last mile”—the lines that connect telecom services to homes and businesses—has become particularly intense in recent months. Competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) say their incumbent counterparts (the former Baby Bells) are hampering efforts to provide broadband services. They say the incumbent local exchange carriers are flouting the federal Telecom Act […]

One former employee of professional services firm EDS says he used to sum up the companys approach to selling IT services in a soft market like this: “Look for the cow in the ditch.” In other words, locate the customers pain points—those pressing business problems that cant be put on the back burner until the […]

The dot-coms and their Internet consultants may have lacked business sense, but they sure had taste in office furniture—with Herman Millers coveted Aeron chairs among the sitting devices of choice. Now, that high-end furniture can be yours for pennies. In a recent Liquidation. com listing, a Net-based business put 1,200 Herman Miller workstations up for […]

Theres partnering in the usual sense, and then theres partnering. For most solutions providers, teaming up with a product vendor or another service firm with a complementary skill is a routine occurrence. But DuPonts Journey Leader program takes partnering to the extreme. The $28.3 billion maker of Teflon and Lycra is working with three e-business […]

When Divine Inc. disclosed plans to acquire portions of MarchFirst Inc., the company was on board for assets, not liabilities. But the Chicago-based companys pending purchase of the bankrupt Internet consultancys hosting business comes with some strings attached. For one, Divine will inherit some of MarchFirsts obligations to Microsoft, a key investor in the hosting […]

3Com is priming partners with an IP telephony product that the company contends hits the sweet spot of the telephone system market. The company this month began customer shipments of its SuperStack 3 NBX networked telephony product, which is available only through authorized resellers. The SuperStack 3 NBX, which supports up to 600 telephone users, […]

Just a couple of months ago, the passage of a national online privacy law this year seemed inevitable. Consumers rising concerns over Internet safety and privacy, and industrys worries over identity theft and fraud, were to make privacy a key Congressional issue. But the Bush administration hasnt taken kindly to regulation, as the well-publicized overturn […]

In these times of economic upheaval, some PR folks speak in strange tongues. As a public service, Sm@rt Partner decodes the hidden meanings. What follows are a series of common corporate pronouncements and their English translations: PR Speak: “We deny the charges as baseless.” Translation: We are bending the truth as sharply as possible to […]