Matthew Hicks

Nordstrom.com LLC on Tuesday will lend more enterprise support for Web services as it announces plans to expand its use of the nascent technology to help bridge the gulf between the systems running the online retailers site and those at majority owner Nordstrom Inc. and other business partners. Nordstrom.com will detail its Web services strategy […]

An IT spending report released Tuesday offers little hope for a rebound in corporate spending on technology next year. The Meta Group Inc. report instead projects that annual U.S. corporate IT spending will fall for the first time ever by between 2 percent and 5 percent in 2002. Spending among non-U.S. companies is expected to […]

Not long ago, Internet visionaries such as Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy were confidently predicting the emergence of smart, Web-connected consumer appliances. You remember the idea: Smart refrigerator detects critically low milk level, sends urgent e-mail to Webvan Group Inc. and, boom, fresh milk on the doorstep the next morning. Breakfast saved. […]

Consider this: each year, more people in the United States die from medical errors in hospitals than from highway accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. This statistic, issued in 1999 by a private Washington-based research organization, the Institute of Medicine, startled health care providers throughout the country. But officials at CareGroup Healthcare System, a network of […]

Having a disaster recovery plan that covers alternative work space is one thing, but knowing that it will work when you need it is another. The only way you can know for sure is to test the plan before a disaster strikes. Too often, though, testing of business continuity plans is an afterthought, experts say. […]

On Wall Street, a week after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, it seemed almost like business as usual. Traders returned to their trading desks and logged on to trading systems that, because of well-executed disaster recovery plans, in most cases returned online with no losses of data. Behind the scenes, however, it […]

Executives at Motorola Inc. were stunned last March when vitriolic e-mail messages began pouring in to the companys customer service department and even the CEOs office. Motorolas supposed crime? Sending out spam, according to angry customers who had received multiple unsolicited e-mail messages from a company that appeared to be a Motorola distributor or retailer […]

When, in June, independent e-marketplace ChemConnect Inc. announced plans to merge with chemical industry consortia-backed exchange Envera LLC, it could have easily been seen as an act of desperation, an admission of defeat. But it was far from that. Although the consortia behind Envera included industry giants, it was actually ChemConnect that came out on […]

Theres no doubt about it. Once the darlings of investors and New Economy gurus, business-to-business e-marketplaces have fallen on hard times. Analysts expect their numbers, estimated at about 1,000 or more last year, to plunge to a few hundred this year. Among the hardest hit have been the early independent players—those e-marketplace companies launched as […]

Even today, with vendors touting web services as loudly as street corner newspaper hawkers, their success will depend largely on the ability of those competitors and software developers to develop more standards on which they can agree, experts say. Its standards, after all, that allow Web services to overcome the barriers of different programming languages, […]