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Sony Pictures A Digital Future
Sony Pictures Entertainment is going digital. It's partnering with Ascent Media Group, a services company for the entertainment industry, to convert warehouses full of films, television shows, and other media assets into digital format.

It's a key step toward Sony's strategy to digitize its operations, from production to distribution. The effort will use Hewlett-Packard's new Digital Media Platform, a suite of servers, software, and services built to create, use, and store digital media.

Sony and Ascent Media have been testing the HP software and hardware since November and already have converted 500 movie and television titles using the system. "This project marks a significant step towards the future of file-based digital-content delivery," Jeff Hargleroad, Sony's senior VP of worldwide product fulfillment, said in a statement.

Sony also is installing a fiber-optic network to transfer its digital media to and from a number of facilities, such as screening rooms and Ascent Media's facility, where the film will then be distributed to theaters and television stations. For now, Ascent Media will distribute the digital film on portable storage devices. One of the next big steps toward a digital future: transmitting the files via satellite or some other electronic medium.

-- Laurie Sullivan

Drugmakers Need New Analysis Tools
Now that drugmakers have discovered that long-available medications such as Vioxx and Bextra have potentially dangerous side effects, IT managers in the industry see the need for new tools to more quickly analyze drug-usage data to spot problems earlier.

How to collect and analyze information about commercially available drugs was a frequent topic at last week's SAS Users Group International conference in Philadelphia. A number of major pharmaceutical companies use SAS Institute Inc.'s analysis software.

Pharmaceutical makers continue to test drugs and monitor information about their use after they hit the market. But stepping up surveillance of drugs once they're on the market will become a top priority for drugmakers, said Raymond Bain, VP of biostatistics and research decision sciences at Merck Research Laboratories, and the industry is working on new methodologies to do that.

One challenge will be collecting data from disparate sources and standardizing it for analysis. Unlike data collected during clinical drug trials, data on actual usage and side effects can come from hospital health records, patient health diaries, payment claims, and other sources that are all in different formats.

Some format issues will disappear if the health-care industry switches to electronic medical records from paper-based systems.

-- Rick Whiting Feds Opt Out Of Security Group

An effort to get government and businesspeople working together to improve cybersecurity is fast losing support because of fund-raising practices. Karen Evans, the Bush administration's top IT official, last week accepted a recommendation by the CIO Council--made up of the most-senior federal IT executives--to withdraw from the recently formed CISO Exchange, a private group led by government IT specialists to find practices to improve security. Evans said she supports its goal of "improving the federal government's security posture," but the CIO Council's best-practices committee is the best format for that.

A week earlier, House Reform Committee chairman Rep. Tom Davis, R.-Va., withdrew from the CISO Exchange because the group solicited fees--as much as $75,000--from IT vendors to support its operations. The CISO Exchange was to hold quarterly education meetings and report on federal IT security. Critics say the fee plan gives the impression vendors could pay to gain access to government officials who decide on IT purchases.

Stephen O'Keefe, whose public-relations firm manages the CISO Exchange, says he doesn't see a problem with the fund raising because government IT officials have participated in IT-industry-financed organizations for years.

-- Eric Chabrow