What’s the Deal?

Lease or buy? Finance executives grapple with this decision constantly, whether it’s for office space, furniture, vehicles, maintenance equipment, or scores of other products. Now, thanks to mostly flat sales in many types of computer hardware, the IT market is full of special finance deals. CFOs...

By Bob Violino • April 14, 2004

Offshoring Isn’t Biggest Economic Worry

In mid-March, when CFO.com asked readers what will be the most-discussed issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election, 68 percent replied “offshoring of U.S. jobs.” As President George Bush and his likely Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, might have guessed, that answer far outweighed the ...

By Dave Cook • April 13, 2004

Explore the Trendline➔

The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

IBM Acquires Indian Outsource Provider

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.That’s one take on the policy behind International Business Machines Corp.’s decision to acquire Daksh, India’s third-largest provider of back-office services, for between $150 million and $200 million, according to Reuters.IBM’s acquisition is the largest deal of i...

By Stephen Taub • April 8, 2004

The Big Sleep

In the completely fictional Museum of Business Technology, the displays are amazing. Down one hall they’ve got a Quadricycle, down another the original Telex. One wing is devoted entirely to computers. There, Hollerith Desks, Apple 1s, and IBM 650s sit perched on ivory cubes, encased in acrylic p...

By John Edwards • April 7, 2004

There’s No ”IT” in ”Thrift”

Take a new, young CFO, ensconce him in the downtown Seattle headquarters of a small but growing company with operations in eight western states, and you can be pretty sure that information technology will be an important aspect of his growth strategy.So much for assumptions. Meet Brent Beardall, ...

By Connie Winkler • April 6, 2004

Study: Outsourcing Boosts Jobs, Economy

Offshore outsourcing curbs inflation, increases productivity, and lowers interest rates, contends a study commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America, an IT industry trade association.The study claims that offshore outsourcing has already supplied a boost to the U.S. economy...

By Stephen Taub • March 31, 2004

Why Not Every Job Translates Overseas

When sales of their security software slowed in 2001, executives at ValiCert Inc. began laying off engineers in Silicon Valley to hire replacements in India for $7,000 a year.ValiCert expected to save millions annually while cranking out new software for banks, insurers and government agencies. S...

By Scott Thurm • March 30, 2004

Amazon Finally Clicks

The foosball tables are still there, as are the desks made from sawhorses, plywood, and old doors. And no one wears a tie, not even CFO Thomas J. Szkutak. But if some E-commerce trappings are alive and well at Amazon.com headquarters, others are not. Red ink, for example, has disappeared—at least...

By Russ Banham • March 24, 2004

The Price You Pay

Companies have grown accustomed to using information technology to design, manufacture, and ship products, and to slice and dice the numbers in every conceivable way after the fact. But what’s less well known is the role IT can play in determining the optimum price for a product or service. Since...

By John McPartlin • March 23, 2004

Happy Warriors

In the movie Multiplicity, an overworked Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton) allows himself to be cloned so that he can accomplish collectively what he can’t do individually. It doesn’t work out.Now, technology analysts predict something similar for the typical office worker, only this time multiplicity...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 19, 2004

Offshoring Goes on the Offensive

The big news at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was all of the plasma televisions, digital music players, and other crossover gadgets that Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and other computer giants are using to challenge consumer electronics stalwarts such as Phili...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • March 17, 2004

Stuck on the Middle

It’s no secret—to IT vendors, anyway—that the “midmarket” represents a golden opportunity to win sales as large companies rein in spending. Now, experts say, that opportunity may be even more golden as midmarket firms brace for a spending spree. Small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs), which number 5....

By Anne Stuart • March 16, 2004

Hold That Golden Spike

Rarely has a topic engendered so much agreement yet so little progress as IT/business “alignment.” Last year it topped the priority list among members of the Society for Information Management (SIM), a professional organization of CIOs that has been actively studying the issue for three years and...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 15, 2004

The Cruelest Blow of All?

Here’s a sign of the digital times: in a recent study conducted by Dynamic Markets, technology employees said they thought E-mail outages were more stressful than car accidents or divorces.While the survey provides a glimpse of the strange but beautiful planet inhabited by IT workers, it also poi...

By Simone Kaplan • March 10, 2004

Answering RFQs, PDQ

A cynic, we’re told, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Well, Michael Towe isn’t a cynic, but he does know the price of everything—or at least everything sold by GE Transportation International Pool (TIP) and GE Modular Space (ModSpace). As CFO of General Electric Co.’s Equip...

By John Edwards • March 9, 2004

The 64-bit Battle

The computer industry loves a good bunfight, so everyone is enjoying the current battle between Intel, the world’s largest chip-maker, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), its smaller rival. Intel is currently on the defensive. This week Hewlett-Packard (HP), a computer maker and a close ally of Int...

By Economist Staff • March 3, 2004

The Discreet Charm of the SMB

As a rule, finance executives at small, Midwestern companies tend to be less guarded and less politic than their counterparts at large, East Coast companies. It’s not entirely clear why that is. Some believe it’s because smaller companies usually are closely held, and therefore less subject to sh...

By John Goff • March 2, 2004

Nanotech

Floor tiles that clean themselves. Military uniforms that automatically contract to prevent a wound from bleeding. Beams stronger than steel but lighter than plastic. Sounds like science fiction, but these are real innovations, thanks to the emerging field known as nanotechnology.What It IsNanote...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 25, 2004

Bum Steer?

Call them early adopters. This past December, reports began circulating that consumers in Malaysia were queuing up to purchase pirated copies of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system. This despite the fact that the new OS, code-named Longhorn, is not expected to go on sale until at least 2...

By John Edwards • Feb. 24, 2004

The Great Hollowing-out Myth

Earlier this month, President George Bush’s chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard’s youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producin...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 23, 2004

Outsourcing

Is outsourcing on your agenda for 2004? Make sure your passport is handy. Offshore outsourcing of traditional IT work will grow 20 to 25 percent each year in the next few years, from its current market value of roughly $20 billion, according to Atul Vashistha, CEO of San Ramon, California-based o...

By Polly Schneider Traylor • Feb. 18, 2004

Composite Applications

For decades software programmers have been trying to make themselves obsolete. Some of them, anyway. They haven’t had much success, try as they might to invent software that would let nonprogrammer users create applications as easily as they create documents or spreadsheets. But such programmers ...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 17, 2004

Wireless/Mobile Computing

To a large extent, wireless technology has already emerged. Trouble is, it keeps emerging. From cell phones to personal digital assistants to pocket PCs, wireless devices continue to morph and improve exponentially. As a result, the challenge is not so much to understand what they do or how they ...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 12, 2004

Spy vs. Spy

Any way you look at it, 2003 was a real bad year for network security. Although corporate concern over cyber threats jumped dramatically, so too did the number of cyber attacks against companies and their machines. Indeed, security specialist MessageLabs reports that spam accounted for 50 percent...

By Esther Shein • Feb. 10, 2004

Security

It’s a classic technology dilemma: businesses know they must protect their computers from devoted hackers and disgruntled employees, but how much is too much?During the E-business boom, many large organizations—from AOL Time Warner Inc. to Oracle—appointed chief security officers (CSOs) to implem...

By Joseph C. Panettieri • Feb. 10, 2004