CIO News View

HP UK MD Nick Wilson on the economy, government, G-cloud and life after EDS, 3Com and Palm deals

Martin Veitch — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:50:47 GMT

For readers of the business pages, it's been hard in recent days to avoid news of former HP CEO Mark Hurd. For obvious reasons, I didn't expect to get a new insight on that particular topic but even with that...

Microsoft SenseCam/Vicon Revue interviews and (not so) shocking pictures

Martin Veitch — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:55:09 GMT

In a recent blog, I scribbled down some early impressions of the Vicon Revue, a wearable camera that snaps pictures automatically to document the owner's day. Since then I've continued to be impressed by the product, especially given that it...

Premier League sponsors in 2010/11 dominated by money, tech and gambling sectors

Martin Veitch — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:08:11 GMT

OK, fair enough, no need to shout and make that face. I know that a cursory examination of the Premier League's shirt sponsors for the new season is no dependable panoramic view of the state of the macro economy. But, given...

Microsoft SenseCam/Vicon Revue intrigues but needs finesse

Martin Veitch — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:51:22 GMT

For the past several days I've been playing with the Vicon Revue, an intriguing device that is based on Microsoft Research's SenseCam technology. It's a camera you wear around your neck that shoots wide-angle snaps a few times a minute...

Q&A: MIME guru Nathaniel Borenstein on why email isn't dead (or even dying)

Martin Veitch — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:26:06 GMT

Almost 20 years ago Nathaniel Borenstein, then working for Bellcore, proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) the notion that a new protocol be used to swap multimedia data, rather than just ASCII text, over email. Today, that protocol,...

In business, creative differences can be positive

Martin Veitch — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:54:13 GMT

It is said that a house divided against itself cannot stand and yet there are many cases that disprove the famous phrase that was coined by Abraham Lincoln, parsing the Book of Matthew. Internal division can even be turned into a...

If Great Episodes in IT Were Cheap Novels

Martin Veitch — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:49:39 GMT

It's been a while since we imagined a fanciful scenario whereby phenomena of the information technology industry were magicked by some strange alchemy into something very different. It's a Kafka-esque (some say Borgesian) approach that has paid a rich dividend...

Britain the sickie man of Europe? Give us a break, then

Martin Veitch — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:07:41 GMT

In a moment of weakness this morning I picked up the Metro free-sheet newspaper from Whitton railway station, enticed perhaps by the large picture of a renascent Amy Winehouse emblazoned across its cover. Metro is a paper born of distribution...

Ocado and the complex web of online shopping history

Martin Veitch — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:23:09 GMT

For some years now, the supermarkets and grocers have provided a useful Greek chorus commentary on the development of e-commerce, providing insights as to what works, the growth curve of the web, mainstream acceptance, distribution, fulfilment and much else. Some...

Rise of the Info-junkie: this not-so-rare breed of men

Martin Veitch — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:26:30 GMT

Experts are not sure how the phenomenon occurred or precisely when it began, but if you're in a public space and you look around now there's an excellent chance you'll spot one. Once a rare breed but now seemingly everywhere,...

Will SSD be the next RAM in PC upgrades?

Martin Veitch — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:31:48 GMT

When executives of Kingston Technology recently told me that they are appealing to CIOs to upgrade their client devices to solid state drives (SSDs), I was, frankly, sceptical. Number one, most real CIOs don't tend to get overly involved in...

CIO poetry contest winners named and shamed

Martin Veitch — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:34:19 GMT

I'd like to thank the hundreds of you who sent in your poems for CIO's First Annual Poetry Prize. I'd really like to, that is, but since only about a dozen people bothered, I'm unable to do so. Furthermore, the...

Red Hat's Werner Knoblich on lock-in, Oracle/Sun, IBM, cloud, JBoss and public sector

Martin Veitch — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:29:20 GMT

Before rushing off to watch the tennis at beautiful SW19, I enjoyed a half-hour phone conversation with Werner Knoblich, VP and general manager for EMEA at Red Hat. This is an unusual company in several ways, the most significant being...

Six Characteristics Of Highly Successful CIOs

Martin Veitch — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:33:09 GMT

The Times' excellent business writer Sathnam Sanghera had a fine piece published last week suggesting the real qualities needed to be a CEO*. These weren't so much the vision, empowerment and other guff often cited by management gurus, he suggested,...

Fabio Capello: saying 'sorry' might have been a start

Martin Veitch — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:29:39 GMT

With his inept attempt to swerve the blame and direct it to a Uruguayan referee, Fabio Capello might well have made his farewell speech from the England football team. With a large cheque winging its way to him, he will...

Chunk up government IT to save spend

Martin Veitch — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:48:18 GMT

As I've noted in this space before, I'm a sceptic when it comes to economics, a form of betting with way too many variables to justify having a punt on the likely outcome. It's also seemingly a field susceptible to...

Apple iPad success shows PC firms need to pursue Stella Artois tack

Martin Veitch — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:18:58 GMT

Apple's success since the Second Coming of Saint Steve has effectively rewritten much of what we thought we knew about the computer industry. Back in 1997, Michael Dell could quip that Apple should give shareholders their cash back without serious...

The PC can boom again thanks to the freebie era

Martin Veitch — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:14:29 GMT

A new Forrester Research report on the future of the PC suggests tablet devices will in five years represent almost a quarter of all sales. Maybe, but there's plenty of room for other form factors as the personal computer becomes...

ITV's missing World Cup goal is a reminder that outsourcing doesn't make problems go away

Martin Veitch — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:25:44 GMT

Not to get too Michael Barrymore about this but executives, like kids, say the funniest things, one of which is that ancient smug pseudo-solution that is expressed thus: 'We outsourced the problem'. Ideally you solve a problem. Alternatively you might ignore a...

After Philip Clarke at Tesco, is the fabled 'CIO to CEO' switch about to become reality?

Martin Veitch — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:48:39 GMT

A couple of you have written to suggest that my recent blog about Philip Clarke's appointment as Tesco CEO was unnecessarily downbeat, a cynical croak when a joyous hymn might have been more appropriate. So allow me to clarify a...

Tesco CEO choice may be template for CIOs

Martin Veitch — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:23:21 GMT

The news that Philip Clarke is to replace Sir Terry Leahy is wonderful news at the very least for event marketers who have tried to sell seats at conferences entitled From CIO To CEO or some such optimistic guff. Some...

Will iPad plus video equal failing networks?

Martin Veitch — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:50:05 GMT

The arrival of the iPad prompts a question that has been asked many times before but deserves serious attention: will our networks be swamped by internet data traffic? Perhaps scared of being branded as doom-mongers, pundits seem remarkably quiet on...

Royal Mail: The IT supplier model is broken; we need cloud computing for pay-as-you-go

Martin Veitch — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:50:08 GMT

It's interesting the way memes develop in the media. I'm not sure when I started to write regularly about something called "cloud computing" and nobody has come up with a solid claim on having invented the term. It's just out...

But how much does it cost? Pricing remains a dark art in IT

Martin Veitch — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:10:22 GMT

One of the tricky things when writing about the IT industry should be, in theory, one of the simplest. At any press conference for a product launch a journalist will ask, if the question hasn't already been answered, 'how much...

Are the 'Lucky 7' state CIOs earning more than the PM overpaid?

Martin Veitch — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:52:42 GMT

My rightly esteemed fellow-employee Anh Nguyen has written an interesting news story on Computerworld today, highlighting the point that seven government IT directors are paid more than the PM's salary. Of course, to you and me -- a hack toiling...