Stories by Robert L. Mitchell

Solid boost to I/O speed

FRAMINGHAM (09/25/2003) - The Unisys Corp. mainframe at Greater El Paso's Credit Union had run out of steam. Response times had slowed to unacceptable levels as transaction volumes climbed to 135,000 per day, and completion times for nightly batch-processing jobs stretched to seven hours. Meanwhile, new regulations forced the credit union to keep systems online longer, leaving only a six-hour window to complete those jobs. "We needed to do it faster," says Rudi Kuehne, senior vice president of data processing.

Innovation is the object

Innovation is a concept in danger of being permanently devalued by overuse and relegated to the realm of marketingspeak. As our Innovative Technologies special report in the following pages shows, what IT managers see as innovation has nothing to do with hype. It's all about making their companies run more effectively and efficiently.

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