Why SAP’s Cash Makes a Difference to Commerce One

Peter Pervere, Commerce One’s CFO, says the high-tech industry may have been doubting the strength of the relationship between the business-to-business marketplace provider and SAP. But the $225 million SAP spent to gain a 20 percent stake at the end of June should all but erase those doubts.The ...

By Joseph Radigan • July 10, 2001

Customer Caution Slams NCR’s Sales

Computer maker NCR says its Teradata data warehousing division is getting slammed by a trend among its current customers to delay plans for upgrading their systems.Customers with more than $60 million of data warehouse upgrades postponed their decision during the second quarter, many in the perio...

By CFO Editorial Staff • July 9, 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

Computer Associates Fires Back at Wyly

Computer Associates’ chairman Charles Wang and CEO Sanjay Kumar used the firm’s annual user conference, CA World, as a forum to blast Sam Wyly, the Texas-based shareholder who is trying to unseat management.Wyly’s challenge to Wang and Kumar burst on the scene in early June, when he accused the c...

By CFO Editorial Staff • July 9, 2001

E-tailers Sell Data to Make up For Lost Revenue

Companies are using retail Web sites to test and monitor customers’ purchase patterns, gauge demand for products, and send that information back to the companies’ brick-and-mortar stores to make entire retail operations more efficient, according to a report Monday in The New York Times.E-tailers ...

By CFO Editorial Staff • July 9, 2001

How One CFO Made the Web His World

As any cost-conscious, tech-savvy CFO knows, it’s just not good business practice to let an enterprise resource planning system rest on its laurels. That’s why David Ferguson, CFO of PBD Worldwide Order Fulfillment Services, has pushed the envelope with the J.D. Edwards World ERP system that supp...

By Esther Shein • July 5, 2001

Will IBM’s Deals Mean More Web Services?

IBM was busy making hay in June, building on existing alliances with SAP and J.D. Edwards. For corporate users, the computer giant’s revamped product-development and marketing agreements promise to add to the Web-oriented features of the software companies’ enterprise resource planning systems.As...

By Joseph Radigan • July 3, 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

Taking License

When 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 customers.But many ...

By Tim Reason • July 1, 2001

Heads Up

Last May, 150,000 employees at the Ford Motor Co. waved goodbye to the Microsoft Windows interface that they had grown accustomed to seeing when they logged on to their computers every day. No, their IT department hadn’t succumbed to Apple Computer’s slick marketing campaigns and forsaken all the...

By Anthony Sibillin • July 1, 2001

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

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

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

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

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