The Nasdaq trimmed gains Wednesday and the Dow dipped after the Federal Reserve kept a key short-term interest rate near zero, but said nothing about expanding a program meant to keep long-term rates from spiking.
Oracle Corp's quarterly earnings beat market expectations as profit margins hit a record high and software sales fell less than anticipated, sending its shares up 2.5%.
At a table in Las Vegas, a town fueled by big bets, IBM software chief Steve Mills outlined one he doesn't want to make: Buying application provider SAP.
Merger activity in the tech sector has dropped precipitously from a year earlier, but the landscape is quickly changing as confidence returns.
Last year when Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed visible signs of illness at public speaking events, the company's stock began to gyrate unpredictably. When Jobs unexpectedly spoke on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, the stock rose 12% in part because he simply showed up. When he canceled his MacWorld appearance, Apple shares plunged 7%. Investors worried that Jobs might step down. Could anyone replace him?
Oracle pounced on Sun Microsystems a week ago, agreeing to buy the battered server maker for $5.6 billion, excluding Sun's cash. On the surface, the tech world responded relatively quietly to Oracle's bombshell by getting about the business of reporting earnings. Behind closed doors, however, the entire industry has been turned topsy-turvy. One bold and unexpected deal has changed everything, and the ramifications will play out increasingly dramatically for months. Consider how the move affects the mightiest in the industry.
International Business Machines posted first-quarter earnings per share Monday that rose more than expected from a year ago, even as sales slipped substantially.
If the term "serial acquirer" were actually in the dictionary, it would probably be accompanied by a picture of Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison.
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by International Business Machines' rival Oracle on Monday came just weeks after Sun's negotiations with IBM failed.
Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Monday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy server builder Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion.
The Nasdaq trimmed gains Wednesday and the Dow dipped after the Federal Reserve kept a key short-term interest rate near zero, but said nothing about expanding a program meant to keep long-term rates from spiking.
Oracle Corp's quarterly earnings beat market expectations as profit margins hit a record high and software sales fell less than anticipated, sending its shares up 2.5%.
At a table in Las Vegas, a town fueled by big bets, IBM software chief Steve Mills outlined one he doesn't want to make: Buying application provider SAP.
Merger activity in the tech sector has dropped precipitously from a year earlier, but the landscape is quickly changing as confidence returns.
Last year when Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed visible signs of illness at public speaking events, the company's stock began to gyrate unpredictably. When Jobs unexpectedly spoke on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, the stock rose 12% in part because he simply showed up. When he canceled his MacWorld appearance, Apple shares plunged 7%. Investors worried that Jobs might step down. Could anyone replace him?
Oracle pounced on Sun Microsystems a week ago, agreeing to buy the battered server maker for $5.6 billion, excluding Sun's cash. On the surface, the tech world responded relatively quietly to Oracle's bombshell by getting about the business of reporting earnings. Behind closed doors, however, the entire industry has been turned topsy-turvy. One bold and unexpected deal has changed everything, and the ramifications will play out increasingly dramatically for months. Consider how the move affects the mightiest in the industry.
International Business Machines posted first-quarter earnings per share Monday that rose more than expected from a year ago, even as sales slipped substantially.
If the term "serial acquirer" were actually in the dictionary, it would probably be accompanied by a picture of Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison.
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by International Business Machines' rival Oracle on Monday came just weeks after Sun's negotiations with IBM failed.
Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Monday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy server builder Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion.
This summer, diplomas will be handed out, hats will be tossed in the air and college graduates will look to enter that elusive Real World they've heard so much about. It's all very exciting and nerve wracking, in a good way.
To preserve cash, several big banks, including some healthy ones, have been forced to slash their dividends.
Software giant Oracle reported fiscal third quarter profits and sales that beat Wall Street's expectations, and also announced that it would be issuing a dividend to its shareholders. The company also reported "record operating margins."
It is the buzz of the tech world: Cisco Systems may soon try selling servers, those heavy-duty computers that companies use to run critical back-office applications. The prospect of router giant Cisco's entering the already crowded $55-billion-a-year server market is intriguing (imagine if LeBron James decided to try his hand at football) but also has the potential to disappoint. (Remember Michael Jordan's ill-fated effort to play professional baseball?)
A decade ago Marc Benioff declared that software was dead. In 1999, while on leave from his job at Oracle, he convened a group of developers in his downtown San Francisco apartment building to build Salesforce.com. Soon thereafter he paid the quirky rockers the B-52's $250,000 to perform at a bash where he distributed buttons with the word "software" crossed out, Ghostbusters-style. And that was all before he had signed up a single customer.
Showing that its Web application priorities extend to the mobile world, Google on Wednesday demonstrated a version of Gmail for the iPhone that could be used even when the phone had no network connection.
With all the buzz about software served up over the Internet, you'd think old-guard enterprise software makers like Oracle and SAP would be panicking over the future of their businesses. You'd be wrong.
The last few weeks have led to the startling revelation of large-scale lapses in corporate governance by a leading India-based IT company. The disclosures have indeed been a wake up call for all stakeholders -- companies, customers, governments and employees.
Say what you will about Larry Ellison's style, but the in-your-face founder of Oracle knows how to manage a company through a recession, at least so far.
Software vendor Oracle blamed the currency impact of a strengthening U.S. dollar for a decline in its second-quarter earnings, reported Thursday. While sales rose against the year-ago quarter, they came up short of analysts' expectations.
Warren Buffett has already told the world what he's doing in this frightful market. The Oracle of Omaha proudly proclaimed that he's "been buying American stocks" with his personal funds.
It's called "The Internet of Things" -- at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.
These are the days that bring out the power shopper in Larry Ellison. With so much chaos in the markets and panic in the boardrooms, the Oracle CEO sees right now as a fine time to stroll through Silicon Valley and buy pretty much whatever he wants.
After taking one of the first Internet companies -- EarthWeb -- public in 1998, Nova Spivack joined some friends at a weedy airstrip deep inside the new Russia for a trip into Earth's stratosphere.
From almost every angle, it looked like one sweet deal.
Before there was Goo-Tube, there was Googleplex.
Nearly half of U.S. IT jobs involve the upkeep and maintenance of computers - a sector previously thought to be safe from offshoring. But technological change is sweeping the industry, and soon the servers that host your favorite websites or run your online banking could be run from halfway around the world.
Margie Backaus is standing on a 17-acre plot outside Secaucus, N.J., shaking her head in disbelief. Garbage bags and broken glass litter the ground, and weeds have taken over the parts of the land ...
Margie Backaus is standing on a 17-acre plot outside Secaucus, N.J., shaking her head in disbelief. Garbage bags and broken glass litter the ground, and weeds have taken over the parts of the land that aren't bald. At least the view is nice, if you like power lines, shipping containers, and the New Jersey Turnpike.
Automatic Data Processing ranks no. 271 on this year's list of the FORTUNE 500, with $8,499.1 million in revenues, up 9.6% from the previous year. The Roseland, N.J.-based company was ranked no. 277 on the 2005 list. Its 2005 profits were $1,055.4 million, up 12.8% from a year earlier.
Ever since tech pundit Nicholas Carr published a provocative Harvard Business Review article titled "IT Doesn't Matter," business leaders have been debating Carr's thesis that information technolog...
(FORTUNE Small Business) - John Hoss, partner and VP of Freeport Launch Service, doesn't have time to monkey with his computer system. Operating a nine-vessel fleet off the coast of Freeport, Texas...
On the 10th floor of a New Orleans high-rise, Michael Barnett, crisis manager at DirectNic, is blogging (www.mgno.com) about his co-workers' efforts to keep the Internet service provider online through the hurricane and its aftermath.
After years of competition, the world's two most populous countries -- China and India -- are starting to embrace cooperation.
LexisNexis announced Wednesday that IDs and passwords belonging to customers of its newly acquired Seisint unit were "misappropriated" by "third parties" and used to access information on 32,000 individuals in a "potentially fraudulent" way. (See correction.)
Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft...
Executives at Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and IBM don't need to worry about losing a lot of corporate business any time soon -- at least according to a new report about customer loyalty in the tech sector.
Some time between 2008 and 2010, annual export revenues from India's information technology (IT) sector are predicted to hit $50 billion, up from $16.3 billion this year.
Sam Palmisano has reason to feel good. Two years ago he took over one of the biggest jobs in American business and, along with it, the mantle that had been worn by now-legendary CEO Lou Gerstner. ...
Bubble Madness Is Over (Hallelujah!)
The outsourcing of prized information technology jobs overseas has created tens of thousands of new jobs in the United States, according to a recent study commissioned by the information technology industry.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The job market may not be booming. But for many in the college class of 2004, it won't be quite as dismal as it was for last year's grads.
As painful as the labor market has been lately, what's even more painful is that many of the 2.5 million jobs lost in the past few years are never coming back.
IBM's Research Labs have long been known for hard-tech breakthroughs like the invention of the disc drive and the relational database. Lately, though, Jim Spohrer and his 18-member team of anthropo...
The strength of the American economy over the next 20 years depends largely on our ability to keep our productivity growing. And productivity grows when a large set of novel technologies changes bu...
Marc Andreessen is scribbling so furiously that he's about to tear through the paper into the table below. He whips off a few oblong shapes. "Somewhere in here is where we are now," Andreessen says...
Andrew Tomkins, a British computer scientist, is pretty much your typical ivory-tower egghead. He's spent his entire adult life either in academia--he earned advanced degrees from MIT and Carnegie-...
There's nothing like a punchy headline (see above, for instance) to get an article some attention. A recent long piece in the Harvard Business Review shockingly labeled "IT Doesn't Matter" has garn...
It may be the most sophisticated factory ever built. In a cavernous building the size of several football fields, rows of multimillion-dollar machines loom over white-suited workers. Air scrubbed f...
Behind every pitch for business software lies a kind of quiet extortion. If you don't buy this product, maybe your competitors will. Maybe they will then go on a sustained surge in productivity and...
Paul Wick has run the Seligman Communications & Information fund since he was 25. The fund manager now oversees the biggest tech-centric mutual fund in the country, with $3.5 billion in assets, and his tenure is one of the longest in the tech fund business.
Pick up the latest FORTUNE, Forbes, or Fast Company--gosh, they're all thinner, aren't they?--and you'll know that knowledge management is what we all must do better, you value-added knowledge work...
Who cares how many taps of a pen or clicks of a jog dial it takes to get a phone number on a PDA? Who cares whether a Website's shopping basket clearly confirms a purchase? Who cares whether a mode...
The dilemma is so sharp, it almost hurts: Companies are desperate to cut costs as the economy slows--Wall Street will murder them if they don't--yet reducing Net-related spending could put them at ...
I know this may sound obscure but, dear reader, I simply must tell you about metadata! Metadata presents the biggest challenge the tech industry faces in delivering the ubiquitous, ever present, ne...
As far as the information technology industry was concerned, the 1990s were "The Bill and Andy Show." The kingpins of Wintel not only dictated the bits, bytes, and business models of computing but ...
Shares in Electronic Data Systems got clobbered in June after the company warned that its second-quarter sales wouldn't meet analysts' expectations. The stock shed a quarter of its value in a matte...
As the mercury rises this summer, Jim Fitzmaurice will feel the pressure build. A 28-year veteran of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, Fitzmaurice rose through the ranks of linemen inspecting overhea...
The Gartner Group has always billed itself as "the world's leading authority on information technology." That's a weighty claim, but it's nothing compared with what fans of Gartner's stock once sai...
The Internet changes everything. We've heard that phrase so often in the past couple of years that it has ceased to have any shock value. Of course the Internet changes everything. Why else are Web...
Outside, the building could not be more ordinary--it's indistinguishable from hundreds of other offices dotting Silicon Valley. You'd never suspect that inside are computers running services, like ...
Data storage has always been a sideshow in information technology--the main action has been computers themselves. Now a storage-liberation movement is afoot. New technology and customer needs are g...
Today's Internet poster boys are retail Web companies like Yahoo, Amazon.com, and eBay. But another class of Net company--one that matters more to your business--is starting to get respect and win ...
Pat Zilvitis is chief information officer at Gillette in Boston and a huge IBM customer. But it's not the quality of Big Blue's PCs, servers, and mainframes that draws him. "I often don't know if I...
Bill Gates has a lot on his plate. As Microsoft's chairman and CEO, he's managing a galloping company that sees no bounds to its growth. There's also the pesky distraction of the company's ongoing ...
EMC Corp. may not be a household name, but information about your household is almost certainly stored on EMC's enterprise data systems. When you pay taxes, make a phone call or buy a CD on the Int...
Who'll be the leader of the packet? Cisco Systems is the top dog in data networking equipment--the machines that route Internet traffic and connect computers on far-flung corporate networks. Lucent...
Pity the folks in staff jobs. In the '80s they got dumped on for being overweening, ham-handed meddlers, worse than Congressmen, who wouldn't know how to meet a payroll if their grandmother's mortg...
LOUIS V. GERSTNER JR.'s ongoing makeover of International Business Machines Corp. has altered the $72-billion-a-year company--No. 6 on this year's FORTUNE 500 list--in all sorts of interesting ways...
LOOKING BACK, weren't we naive to think we had only to drop nearly $1 trillion of computer hardware into the slot, wait a little while for the machinery to clank and grind, and, presto, a big produ...
If Hollywood gave an Oscar for economics, the person who figured out how to measure productivity more accurately would be a sure winner. It's a tough role -- no one really knows what the new econom...
Technophobes have long warned that computers would be the undoing of the American worker. And indeed, new research suggests that when companies invest in information technology (IT), their average ...
SOON AFTER you switch on a new computer, it starts to sprout cables like branches and peripherals like leaves. Time-lapse photography would show how quickly the typical personal computer can strang...
Air-Vet ships drugs, medical instruments and other equipment worth $7 million to $8 million a year -- hundreds of packages a day -- to veterinarians all over the U.S. Yet you won't find any stock c...
1994 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY GUIDE
THE HONORABLE Chester Cadaver, a character in the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe, once said that trying to figure out the complex world of the future is ''a little like having bees live in your hea...
THOUGH BARELY out of its infancy, information technology is already one of the most effective ways ever devised to squander corporate assets. Year after year, the typical large business invests as ...
EVERYBODY'S DOIN' IT, doin' it, doin' it. Business process reengineering is the hottest trend in management. The mint should coin money as fast as the consulting firms that peddle reengineering, se...
AT ITS HUGE manufacturing complex in Rochester, New York, Eastman Kodak operates its own steam, electricity, and water purification plants. Kodak firefighters stand on call at Kodak firehouses. Bri...
RECESSION and intensifying competition have put a ring akin to a hangman's noose around the white collar, menacing the fastest-growing segment of the work force with layoffs and hiring freezes. Bel...
The brainchild of controversial billionaire H. Ross Perot, Electronic Data Systems -- now a subsidiary of General Motors -- has matured into a premier growth company, analysts say. Since GM took ov...
IT WAS AN AWFUL MESS,'' recalls Gene Wirsig, a technical services manager for the western division of Potlatch Corp. The FORTUNE 500 forest products company ^ owns 600,000 acres of timberland in no...
AMERICAN executives feel a sense of vast impending change, and they ought to. Take a look at what they can already foresee in the Nineties. Companies will be forced to develop products and make dec...
VITTORIO CASSONI sometimes lies awake at night worrying that orders for AT&T's computers aren't piling up fast enough. Small wonder. When the fashionably tailored native of Parma, Italy, arrives at...
WITH SOME KICKING and screaming along the way, the business managers of the Western world have long since adapted to computers. No sizable capitalist enterprise could be competitive nowadays withou...
''WE'VE got the products,'' says John Sculley, Apple Computer's president, ''but the big question is, have we got the ability to sell them? Is Apple a credible enough name for large corporations? O...
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