financial services

Getting the mobile channel to where enabling CRM through accessing applications or web sites a.k.a. mobile CRM is as seamless from desktops is akin to taking young children on a long ride who then inevitably ask: "are we there yet?" The answers will depend to some extent on the nature of the journey being taken. If the trip is for work, such for field sales staff and support reps, the destination is in sight.

The Verizon Business Risk Team reviewed more than 500 corporate data breaches between 2004 and 2007 and found that 87 percent could have been prevented -- if only the companies had the proper security measures in place at the time of the breach. After four years of forensic research involving more than 230 million records, the "2008 Data Breach Investigations Report" found that 73 percent of breaches resulted from external sources, while 18 percent were caused by insiders.

Even after IBM Corp. surprised Wall Street with a healthy profit in the third quarter and a reaffirmation of its earnings outlook for the rest of the year, the broader technology sector dived again Thursday. There's just not enough of what lifted IBM to go around.

Tech stocks were pummeled Thursday, and IBM ended the day down as well. Analysts expressed fears that Armonk, New York-based IBM could see trouble in the fourth quarter and into 2009 if the lending and spending climate worsens as expected.

Figuring out the best way to transform a frozen pizza into a perfectly warmed pie, gooey on top and crispy on the bottom, is as much a computer problem as a work of culinary art.

General Mills, maker of the Totino's and Jeno's brands of pizzas, would prefer not to whip up a thousand combinations of mozzarella cheese, tomato paste, crust and chemicals and blast them with microwave radiation. It's a lot less expensive and easier to model different pizzas using a sophisticated computer and only cook up the best candidates.

A new deal between Microsoft and Cray may speak to major changes in the supercomputing market in the years ahead.

The companies on Tuesday introduced the Cray CX1 supercomputer. It comes preinstalled with Windows HPC Server 2008, and the various models carry price tags that range from $25,000 to more than $60,000.

It's a small world after all. As the Internet continues to connect peoples across the globe, individuals and groups drawn to destruction find new ways to wreak havoc on communications and services. Now, government leaders are coming together with each other and the private sector to form a united front and fight back because a vulnerability in any region can wreak havoc globally. A new multilateral federation is combating cyberthreats and cyberterrorism, creating greater security in developing networks and stopping dangers before they spiral out of control.

Many large companies, especially those in the financial services, utilities and telecommunications industries, have cut their technology budgets this year because of the economic slowdown.

In a report released Tuesday, Forrester Research Inc. found that 43 percent of large U.S. and European businesses it surveyed have cut their overall spending on technology products and services in 2008. Some companies, meanwhile, have put discretionary spending on hold and others are planning to negotiate lower rates for information-technology services.

Analysts are still assessing Hewlett-Packard's announcement Tuesday that it will acquire Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion. Together, HP and EDS will be a tech-services behemoth with 210,000 employees worldwide in 80 countries and revenues of more than $38 billion. That figure more than doubles HP's service revenues.

HP's plans are simple: To establish a new business group. That group will be called EDS -- An HP Company. EDS Chairman, President and CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer will lead the group.

Faced with a difficulty finding skilled employees, one of India's leading outsourcing companies is going out to find prospective workers -- on a bus.

Firstsource Solutions Ltd.'s orange-and-white recruitment bus has been touring Mumbai, India's financial capital, over the last few days inviting potential workers to "Step in to step ahead."

While the bus may be a recruitment gimmick, it shows the lengths India's outsourcing companies -- which have been leading India's economic boom -- have to go as the industry grapples with a serious shortage of skilled labor.

IDC researchers predict that spending on the Linux ecosystem will rise from $21 billion in 2007 to more than $49 billion in 2011, driven by rising enterprise deployments of Linux server operating systems.

Linux server deployments are expanding from infrastructure-oriented applications to more commercially oriented database and enterprise resource-planning workloads "that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Windows and Unix," noted IDC analysts in a white paper commissioned by the nonprofit Linux Foundation.