Stories by Mark Broatch

Monitoring the business gets easier

If you've never heard of business activity monitoring, don't worry, you will. Coined last year by analyst firm Gartner, BAM could be the IT tonic you never knew your business needed.

Auckland pair eat own cooking

Two Auckland companies have shown how the proposed ITANZ e-government application centre might create marketable products.

SMEs: IBM wants you

If you’re a subcorporate-size business, expect to get a knock on the door from IBM or one of its resellers over the coming year.

Looking for the yo ho ho

Piracy is bad, right? This we know without question. It denies the producer of intellectual property legitimate rights to the revenue, ownership and distribution of their products.

BNZ lets staff help themselves

The 4500 staff at the BNZ are to gain access to a range of employee applications and web-based forms thanks to an HR portal that’s been developed by the IT department of its parent, the National Australia Bank.

Stats Watch: Who's king of the web?

A new survey of web domains shows a decline in the number of sites running Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. Not surprising, when we remember that research super-heavyweight Gartner issued a report in late 2001 suggesting users should consider alternatives given the holes it presented to the Code Red and Nimda worms. Gartner gets listened to.

When good IT goes bad

Last year ended with us wondering about ICT, information and communications technology, and whether we could build a sector worth $10 billion by 2012, boasting 100 companies turning over $100 million each, as a high-powered taskforce suggested.

Stats Watch: It's no game

As it’s the last issue of Stats Watch for the year, we thought we’d look at a few numbers on what IT execs really want to know for Christmas: what’s happening in the games console market. (Yes, we read your column, Jim Swanson - see A month of Fridays draws in.)

Stats Watch: Losing jobs overseas

The counterpart to foreigners filling our IT vacancies is the outsourcing of roles such as software development and call centre operations to much cheaper but capable professionals in countries far afield.

Stats Watch: Measuring I(C)T

Just how big are the information and communications technology industries? The government's ICT Taskforce wants the country to build 100 x $100 million local ICT companies -- 84 more than at present -- and have ICT contributing 10% of the country's gross domestic product by 2012, up from 4.3% now.

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