Mel Duvall

Ben Coes has made a career out of being the middleman in tough negotiations. Throughout the 1990s, Coes was a principal of Iron Road Railways, a Washington, D.C., holding company that specialized in acquiring railway assets and other transportation companies across North America. He also earned his stripes in the public policy arena, serving as […]

The New York Society of Security Analysts came up with a timely topic for its Sept. 12 conference: “Anatomy of a Corporate Crisis: Managing Distress.” Sadly, the site of the conference no longer existed that day. Instead of hosting business executives struggling to deal with a troubled economy, the society was using its Web site […]

Business came to a standstill in many sectors today as people were riveted to the news coming out of New York. The New York Stock Exchange itself was evacuated and trading was cancelled, possibly for the entire day, following the crash of two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers, only blocks away. The Chicago […]

Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer have long coveted the e-business consulting and systems integration business that has powered IBM through the current economic slump. But the reality, analysts said, is that HP and Compaq have very different consulting operations than IBM or the likes of Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young or Electronic Data Systems. And […]

While the big guns bolster their storefront services to win over more small retailers, a group of smaller operators is trying to keep from being steamrolled. The list of startups that have abandoned the free storefront model, or have gone out of business altogether, is lengthy, including such names as Affinia, FreeMerchant, iCat and SmartAge.com. […]

Mack Murrell has heard all the horror stories about failed customer relationship management system installations. Heck, he even has some of his own to tell. A few years back, his company, The Dow Chemical Co., was involved in a big CRM project that ultimately cost a ton of money and produced few results other than […]

Sharks love to swim in the waters of an economic downturn, and Interpath Communications CEO Joel Schleicher is showing his teeth. Interpath has snapped up the PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business of ASP rival Interliant. The move provides Interpath with a top-tier list of clients to add to its customer base and a foothold […]

McAfee.com has won a patent that will protect its rapidly growing business for updating and managing security on desktop computer systems via the Internet. The patent, announced last week, appears to be the first covering security systems delivered over the Web. While some observers think the patent could be used against the application service provider […]

Internet systems integrator webMethods has forged a multimillion-dollar deal with Bank of America to connect the banks internal applications with its corporate clients. The deal represents another vote of confidence by big corporations in new technologies that can link their back-end legacy systems directly to those of their major partners, customers and suppliers. “We are […]

General Electric is testing the waters of the application service provider market by charging companies using its marketplace subsidiary — GE Global eXchange Services — for access to a series of homegrown applications. The ASP service, called Express Marketplace, is still relatively new, but Harvey Seegers, CEO at GE Global eXchange Services (GXS), believes it […]

With the economy struggling, many companies are re-evaluating corporate priorities, and in some cases are putting the brakes on noncore information technology projects. That simple reality has resulted in a steady stream of profit warnings from just about every corner of the tech sector. But one area that seems to be bucking the trend is […]

Youre not being fired — youre just going on a long sabbatical. Sounds like a cruel joke from a Dilbert cartoon, but that was, in fact, the word handed down to some 800 consultants at Accenture this month. Of course, it could have been worse: Another 600 consultants were simply handed pink slips. These layoffs […]