The Customers Always Write

Two years ago, as customers and prospects began to use E-mail to contact Verisign Inc., the Mountain View, California-based software company came up with what it thought was a slick way to respond: It kicked back a file that contained the answers to the 10 most frequently asked questions it recei...

By Alix Stuart • July 1, 2001

Taking License

Taking LicenseWhen technology firms promise to simplify your life, be careful. On October 1, new software licensing rules go into effect at Microsoft Corp., which touts the “simplified” program as a way to streamline the smorgasbord of licensing options currently available to most corporate custo...

By CFO Editorial Staff • July 1, 2001

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

How Cook County Standardized on J.D. Edwards

In the heart of Chicago’s Loop sits the block-long, 11-story monolith of 118 North Clark Street, the nerve center for the city and county governments.For the last 18 months, the late nineteenth-century building has housed an IBM AS/400 server that runs J.D. Edwards’ OneWorld enterprise- resource-...

By Joseph Radigan • June 27, 2001

Can Senate Democrats Relieve E-Commerce Tax Deadlock?

In the topsy-turvy world of E-commerce taxation, nothing is ever as it seems, and with the change of control in the U.S. Senate from Republican to Democrat, an extension of the current moratorium seems little closer to realization than it was at the beginning of the year.Back in January, it appea...

By Joseph Radigan • June 26, 2001

Profit from Peer-to-Peer

For the past year or so, the term peer-to-peer (P2P) has become synonymous with Napster, the controversial file-sharing program created by a 20-year-old software whiz called Shawn Fanning and now the subject of numerous lawsuits. Napster, much like its close cousin, Gnutella, allows users to tran...

By Economist Staff • June 21, 2001

Computing Power on Tap

Imagine that every time you plugged in a toaster, you had to decide which power station should supply the electricity. Worse still, you could select only from those power stations that were built by the company that made the toaster. If the power station chosen happened to be running at full capa...

By Economist Staff • June 21, 2001

Has PeopleSoft Bridged the CRM ERP Gap?

There’s nothing like starting out with a bang, and PeopleSoft certainly has sought to make a loud impact with the rollout of the customer-relationship-management portion of its PeopleSoft 8 system.The Pleasanton, Calif.-based software developer says the launch earlier this month integrates its CR...

By Jackie Cohen • June 20, 2001

GE Capital Offers Business Credit for B2Bs

GE Capital is determined to grab a big chunk of the credit market for B2B E-marketplaces, even if it has to literally beat the brushes for every last piece of business credit history.Online credit checks for consumers are one thing: It takes little more than an instant for a bank to issue a credi...

By Joseph Radigan • June 19, 2001

What’s Oracle’s CFO Up to?

Well. Is he or isn’t he?Is Jeff Henley, Oracle’s CFO for the past decade and last year’s winner of CFO magazine’s CFO Excellence Award for Managing External Stakeholders on the verge of leaving the database software company?“It’s completely untrue,” an Oracle spokeswoman told CFO.com. The spokesw...

By Joseph Radigan • June 18, 2001

New Openings at Your Company

In the past few months, there’ve been a number of press reports about the security of wireless networks. Mostly, the stories have asserted that they’re a snap to break into-not exactly a comfort to companies that installed them as a less cumbersome alternative to their wired counterparts.So why a...

By John P. Mello Jr. • June 15, 2001

The New You

Back in the spring of 2000, back at the height of the E-commerce boom, executives at the Potomac Electric Power Co., or Pepco (www.pepco.com) were looking for a way to coin it off the digital craze. At the time, share prices of Internet businesses were going through the roof, and analysts were pr...

By Russ Banham • June 15, 2001

Bar Codes for Workers?

These days, the worker who claims that the boss follows his every move might not be exaggerating. Unlike a passive ID badge that employees use to gain entrance into a room — but, usually, not to leave it — active badges continuously transmit signals that are read by computer-based mapping program...

By John P. Mello Jr. • June 15, 2001

Who Needs a Factory When You Have a Printer?

Printing has developed a third dimension, a dimension not of height or width but of depth. Next stop: no, not the Twilight Zone, but a 3D printer that creates spare parts, architectural and medical models, toys — even electronic components — with the touch of a button.Also known as desktop fabric...

By John Edwards • June 15, 2001

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

Corporate travelers have many stories to share about the exorbitant premiums they’ve paid when making a reservation fewer than seven business days before departure. One example: Last June, a reporter for eCFO booked a round-trip flight from New York to Los Angeles — hardly wilderness outposts. Th...

By Esther Shein • June 15, 2001

Did Siebel Steal PeopleSoft’s CRM Thunder?

With PeopleSoft’s unveiling earlier this month of its long-awaited customer relationship management system, PeopleSoft 8, the competition in this already hot software market is reaching a fever pitch just in time for summer.The version unveiled this month relies on a Web-browser interface for bot...

By Joseph Radigan • June 13, 2001

Why This Railroad B2B Needs $8 Million

Railmarketplace.com has its technology house in order. Its management team is almost in place, and now all Mark Davis, the B2B exchange’s interim CEO, wants is $8 million to ensure the entity’s survival through the end of 2002.Davis’ day job is head of E-commerce at Union Pacific, one of the seve...

By Joseph Radigan • June 12, 2001

Will Microsoft Push Great Plains into the ERP Market?

Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, the accounting software maker had no significant presence among large corporate users. Is this about to change? Is Great Plains ready to use its newfound financial clout as a Microsoft subsidiary to shift its strategy in the enterprise resource planning market?...

By Joseph Radigan • June 7, 2001

Can Web Traffic Be Turned into Gold?

Did SAS Institute’s unveiling this week of its IntelliVisor SM for analyzing Web sites’ traffic data give the Web analytics field a level of sophistication it’s lacked?Several analysts who cover the business intelligence software market told CFO.com that until recently most of the programs for an...

By Joseph Radigan • June 6, 2001

Can PricewaterhouseCoopers Cure the High Cost of Drugs?

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ consulting arm has taken a look at the tens–if not hundreds–of millions of dollars pharmaceutical companies spend every year on research and development, manufacturing, and regulatory compliance, and says it may be able to carve a huge chunk out of those costs.The company ...

By Joseph Radigan • June 5, 2001

VoIP: Crossed Wires

How many times have you picked up a phone in your office and found no dial tone? Probably rarely, if at all. How many times have you tried to surf the Web while at work only to find the network is down? Probably once a week. If you are lucky, that is.This, in a nutshell, explains why companies ha...

By Anthony Sibillin • June 1, 2001

Affiliates Attack!

Cable modems, digital subscriber lines, and other high-speed highways aren’t the only routes to the local Internet drive-in. iBlast (www.iblast.com), a Los Angeles-based network representing 246 local television stations around the country, wants to bring movies to PCs the old-fashioned way: thro...

By Russ Banham • June 1, 2001

Storage Networking

About the only time we willingly think about storage is when we assess the closet space in a prospective house or apartment. The rest of the time, “out of sight, out of mind” pertains. That is doubly true of computer storage, which, while it may be essential to business, elicits about as much ent...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2001

Great Plains Commits to Microsoft .Net

Fresh off the heels of its acquisition by Microsoft, Great Plains is furiously working on new versions of its key accounting software products that will be tightly integrated with the software giant’s Internet strategy, Microsoft. Net.By the third or fourth quarter of 2002, Great Plains’ Dynamics...

By Joseph Radigan • June 1, 2001

Data, Data Everywhere

About the only time we willingly think about storage is when we assess the closet space in a prospective house or apartment. The rest of the time, “out of sight, out of mind” pertains. That is doubly true of computer storage, which, while it may be essential to business, elicits about as much ent...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2001

Mixed Signals for Wireless

Earnings disappointments and layoffs at major wireless-device makers constitute just some of the bad news emanating from a technology sector widely viewed as the next big thing. Yet all is not bleak. Leading cell- phone maker Nokia cut its projected unit sales from as many as 540 million to as fe...

By Alix Stuart • June 1, 2001