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CIOs Uncensored Videos

If your industry requires that communications such as e-mail be archived, Google is offering a hosted e-mail security and archiving product called Google Message Discovery. The cost: $45 per user per year.

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What's the total cost of ownership of IT? It depends on who's footing the bill. When it comes to the environment, of course, we all do. And that's why it's important to consider IT sustainability in its entirety, from cradle to grave.

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Now that the news is finally out, we can sit back and take a longer look at what makes the Storm a compelling handset. Here are five reasons why it should be a success.

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Early on in the VoIP migration, you heard, "Voice is just another application on the network." Then you heard it wasn't; it was tougher to do and more mission critical. At VoiceCon Amsterdam next week, an executive from Royal Dutch Shell will say, in essence, that voice actually is just another application.

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Primary storage is the next target of optimization. As mentioned in my last entry, the growth rate of active data on this storage is small, what is growing is the older data set which, for now, still remains on primary storage. Optimizing primary storage is the most significant step you can make in reducing not only your storage budget but also your storage's use of power and cooling.

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In our current article on IT strategies in this weakening economy, CIOs made it clear they aren't hitting the panic button. But two recent data points -- SAP's revenue warning, and a dip in U.S. IT employment -- suggest more IT leaders are punching the "pause" button at the least.

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In this economy, it can be hard to think long term. So in our article exploring the smartphones' future as a business computing platform, we don't go the "In five years, we think companies will ... " route. We ask: How ready is the smartphone today to replace a laptop?

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Maine's skipping Vista, and I'm skipping like a broken record. The government of the state of Maine has joined the burgeoning group of organizations planning to sidestep Windows Vista and go straight from Windows XP to Windows 7. I continue to say that completely ignoring Vista is a shortsighted decision that may cause both usability and security troubles not too far down the line.

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I became one the first customers in the United States to have real WiMax service today. So far (after a few easy-to-fix bumps), so good.

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The Open Source Census, which I mentioned back in April, just dropped a press release this morning about the data it's been collecting. I chatted the day before with Kim Weins, senior VP of OpenLogic, a key co-sponsor of the census, and how they found a few ... surprises in the results.

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Whether you're in the midst of an audit or a forensic investigation, thorough logs are the key to proving compliance with security regulations. So how do you prove your organization is/was compliant when you aren't able to maintain logs? This is the nagging question that gnaws hungrily at my weary brain every time I ponder cloud computing.

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Feel that? It's the economy quaking. With the House rejecting the $700 billion bailout bill, stocks seesawing, and loads of uncertainty looming, it's possible you'll have more candidates than you ever imagined applying for jobs at your company. Are you ready to handle that?

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Cisco commissioned a global survey of IT administrators and computer users about their perceptions on data leakage. Not surprisingly, the study found employees use their work computers for personal use and IT knows it.

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Not everybody remembers a little outfit called Wily Technology. It was a Silicon Valley startup that caught my eye because it did something that made eminent common sense: it watched a running Java application the way an end user would experience it on the Internet. In January 2006, CA acquired the eight-year-old company for $390 million.

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I've attended three CIO events in the past month and been greatly surprised at each of them to feel the same mood: calm.

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If an IT team decided to block Web search engines for a day, it would be mere minutes before the howling began. But unplug the enterprise search function at most companies and -- hey, was that a yawn I saw?

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No, this event doesn't exist, but CIOs are starting to feel like it does. The crescendo of "I want to use my iPhone" howls will only grow with gadgets like the HTC G1 phone, the first on Google's Android platform.

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It might be a good idea to take more than a week to formulate a response to the biggest financial crisis in our history.

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After spending some time with Google's Android platform as realized on the HTC G1, I am reluctant to call it a 1.0 mobile operating system. So much is missing, it feels more like a 0.8 beta. But that shouldn't stop anyone from being excited about the possibilities.

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That couldn't be a bigger understatement. Yesterday, at the Android launch, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page showed up on in-line skates. You'll never guess what the first application is that Sergey wrote for the Android phone.

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The U.S. managed security services market is booming, and set to double in size in the next few years? MSSPs have been around, in one iteration or another, for as long as I can remember. Why is the market set to rock now?

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Google and T-Mobile have finally brought the first Android-powered mobile phone to the market, and not a moment too soon. Apple's iPhone needs some competition.

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People tend to think of lower-cost IT services -- and not "innovation" -- when Indian outsourcer Wipro Technologies' name is mentioned. So, it may come as a surprise that $1 billion, or about a quarter of Wipro's revenue last year, was generated through R&D services -- including designing semiconductors, automobile parts, and a variety of electronic devices. Looking ahead, Wipro says those R&D services will become an even bigger chunk of the company's business.

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I'm reluctant to declare that real-time events are the Next Big Thing on the Internet, because it seems like a Next Big Thing comes along on the Internet about once a month, and they're mostly forgotten the next day. Still, I've seen firsthand how powerful virtual events can be. They're an emerging trend. And InformationWeek is in the middle of it all.

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The first phones sporting Google's open-source phone OS Android are set to be announced sometime today, courtesy of T-Mobile (my own cell provider, huzzah!). Android-powered phones are set to compete with the iPhone, Nokia's Symbian, Windows Mobile, and all the rest -- and the way I see it, it'll be in much the same way Google itself competed with AltaVista, Yahoo Search, and so on: quietly, but decisively.

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A new survey says companies and their in-house lawyers aren't prepared to meet legal discovery requests. And McAfee's recent hiccup shows that even big companies make mistakes.

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When six startups took the stage at InformationWeek's annual conference last week to make their business pitches, Xkoto wasn't the odds-on favorite. Its Gridscale database load-balancing software isn't sexy or cheap, and end users never see it. Here's how Xkoto CEO David Patrick swayed the judges in his favor.

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A scarcity of experienced talent combined with the growing popularity of SAP's NetWeaver platform and other products has helped pump up pay considerably for SAP-related skills in recent months, according to a new report.

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Oracle announced impressive first-quarter earnings yesterday, thanks in part to its highly profitable software maintenance business. At the same time, some complaints have arisen recently from both the Oracle and SAP customer camps about maintenance costs. While enterprise software vendors have to keep shareholders happy, my hope is they're listening to customers, too.

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Hearing CIOs at the InformationWeek 500 conference today talk about the unmet need for good talent was pretty good evidence that IT has to be one of the safest jobs in today's scary economy. That's only true, however, if IT professionals are of the right kind of talent.

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Our Innovation Stock Exchange had its genesis about two years ago as we brainstormed ways to supplement what we do as part of our daily work. Innovation is embedded in the Technology Information Group's culture; on a daily basis, our team members partner with Wells Fargo's other business lines to deliver innovative products for our customers, such as personalized ATMs, online banking services, and our Commercial Electronic Office portal for treasury management customers.

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Teaching is a pretty popular second act for people changing professions. The pay, of course, isn't the draw, but rather it's often the altruistic nature of teaching that's appealing to people leaving careers in other industries. Know any techies who've made the move into the education sector? What about you?

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We had been hearing a lot about the Web transforming itself into this new interactive, mature medium of the future -- Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and even higher "versions" seem to dominate a fair amount of presentations and discussions in the industry. However, this seemed to have little bearing on practical application within our environment. While we were still trying to figure out how this "ideal new version" of the Internet could impact our applications, we had a problem brewing in our own backyard.

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How do you manage information risk with 57,000 employees worldwide working in various business organizations supported by numerous third-party service suppliers?

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Manjit Singh, CIO of Chiquita, was at a meeting with fellow executives when the projector went out. Everyone looked to him to fix it. Singh's advice: If you want to be a strategic, global CIO, don't let your colleagues equate enterprise IT with personal tech. He let someone else fix the projector this time.

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Convergence is a multiyear voice-over-IP initiative at PricewaterhouseCoopers that transforms the way we communicate with each other and our clients. It provides more agility to our mobile workforce of nearly 32,000 professionals -- many of whom work at client sites, telecommute, or use a "hoteling" system to check in to temporary workstations at different PwC offices.

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Rising health care costs are a conundrum for the Western world. Attempts to manage costs have been compared with squeezing a balloon -- you may constrain costs on one end, only to have the other end inflate. The solution Cigna is seeking is to take costs out of the health care system -- without compromising care.

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Accenture's existing employees, and those we'll be hiring in the next five to 10 years, are accustomed to interacting, both on personal and professional levels, on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other Web-based social networking and collaboration sites. Today's teenagers are a driving force behind communication vehicles such as texting, IMing, video chats with Web cams, and sending messages through Web-based social networking sites.

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The CIO of a Canadian heavy equipment company delivered a warning about what happens to companies that fail to take local customs into account when doing business internationally: What happens when your contractors just stop showing up?

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In a couple of hours, I'll be driving to the InformationWeek 500 Conference, which starts today. It's a two-day annual event where elite CIOs and high-level IT managers gather to learn from each other about how to optimize their careers and departments for success

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Microsoft, IBM, EMC, and others aim to make it easier for users and applications to pull content from competing repositories.

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I just got back from my staycation, which is the holiday destination to debark at when you're not going anywhere. (I was watching my son, in the stretch between camp and back-to-school.) The week turned out to be a bit more active than I'd expected, though, and it morphed into -- here's the new word I've coined -- a workcation. You know: time off, but BlackBerry close at hand.

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According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMOFall 08 conference, we've already moved past Web 2.0. We're wrapping up the third generation of the Web. And we're moving on to the fourth. That's when social networking and Web 2.0 (which is actually Web 3.0, she says -- confused yet?) gets to work.

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Time for a change? If you're a CIO, it's always time for change. Whether it's the more optimistic, positive sort of change (i.e., growing the business) or the less pleasant (heck, painful) kind of change, like cutting costs, you'd better be ready.

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Job losses. Foreclosures. High energy costs. An unstable world economy. The bad news keeps coming. But a critically important new industry may hold the keys to economic recovery -- IF it can find sufficient investment and legislative support.

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Cases are being settled based on cost, not merit, according to results of a survey released today.

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For a long time, IT's options for how to outfit a new employee had all the thrill of the "paper or plastic?" choice. For IT, it was a "laptop or desktop?" world. Get ready for a change.

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It's been a long-running complaint that there aren't enough young people entering the IT field. But judging by the laundry list of experience and skills some employers demand from IT job candidates, you have to wonder if young people just starting out their careers even have a shot at being hired.

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Wainhouse Research is out with a new survey of enterprise attitudes and practices in adopting unified communications. One of the key findings is that, more so than last year, the decision is being made by IT, rather than at the CXO level.

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To celebrate its first anniversary, TechWeb's bMighty.com has published an actual manifesto. The message? Technology has radically shifted the competitive landscape, handing new advantages to smaller, more nimble organizations rather than large enterprises.

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