Paula Musich

In what is traditionally a quiet period between major holidays, IBM Global Services last week announced a whopper of an outsourcing contract with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. valued at more than $5 billion. The seven-year contract is “the largest computer services deal in the financial services sector ever,” declared Eric Ray, vice president of […]

Little-known software testing provider Shunra Software Ltd. later this month will introduce a tool for applications developers intended to help them understand how their applications will work across real-world WANs before they are deployed. The new Shunra/Stratus software, made up of a server and agents that reside on the developers workstation, allows applications developers to […]

IBM Global Services this morning announced that it has won the much-anticipated J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. outsourcing contract, valued at over $5 billion. The seven-year outsourcing contract is “the largest computer services deal in the financial services sector ever,” declared Eric Ray, vice president of financial markets for IBM Global Services in Somers, N.Y. […]

When it comes to making sure applications and systems are running optimally, IT attitudes in the last three years have changed dramatically, even if some bad habits remain. A new study by market research company Newport Group Inc. found that many more IT shops today continually seek feedback on the performance of their applications and […]

Freshwater Software on Monday extended its SiteScope active Web site monitoring tool to cover Web services. The wholly owned subsidiary of Mercury Interactive Corp., based in Boulder, Colo., added SiteScope monitors that can monitor the availability of Web services without using agent instrumentation. The new SiteScope monitors, which generate synthetic transactions to test availability and […]

Desktop management provider Altiris Inc. advanced the backup and recovery tool it acquired with Previo Inc. with a new release of its Altiris Client Recovery Solution. Version 5.1 of the tool, formerly called eSupport Essentials, adds a handful of ease-of-use features intended to limit the impact of backup and recovery functions on end users–including remote […]

Avaya Inc. continued its quest for dominance as IP telephony provider to small and medium-sized businesses Monday with the latest release of its IP Office product suite. IP Office, which combines support for IP and digital phones with messaging, contact center, firewall and router functions as well as call routing or processing into a single […]

As more enterprises try to dissect system failures and performance problems, IT Masters Inc. is readying updated tools that can automatically show the impact of IT trouble on services and business processes. The companys newest MasterCell product, Version 3.0, includes new services modeling functions that allow the status of services to be correlated with the […]

Cisco Systems Inc. is making its first foray into integrated Web caching and content delivery networking in an effort to tap into enterprises trying to reduce WAN costs. The San Jose, Calif., company has created modules for its 2600, 3600 and new 3700 series of access routers that deliver integrated caching and content delivery networking […]

Alcatel last week fleshed out its LAN switching family with a pair of new switches for the network core and edge. Alcatels eBusiness Networking Division, in Calabasas, Calif., unveiled the OmniSwitch 8800 core switch, designed for high-availability Layer 3 switching, along with the OmniSwitch 6600 virtual chassis switch, which brings chassislike functions to a stackable […]