Stories by John Edwards

Emerging technologies make storage easier

Tasty Baking Co produces more than 4.8 million cakes, doughnuts, cookies and pies each day. The Philadelphia-based snack food giant also manages to generate another crucial commodity — computer data — in equally impressive amounts. "It's something to be concerned about," says Brendan O'Malley, Tasty Baking's vice president and CIO.

Financial crisis: tech innovation at risk

September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money — in some cases, fortunes — and ordinary US taxpayers could find themselves funding an industry bailout costing a staggering US$700 billion (NZ$1.05 billion) — Congress permitting..

Who provides what in the cloud

The news that US telecommunications provider AT&T has joined the rapidly growing ranks of cloud computing providers reinforces the argument that the latest IT outsourcing model is well on its way to becoming a classic disruptive technology.

Unified comms equals constant contact

Robert Fort, CIO of music retailer Virgin Entertainment Group, would have liked to wave a magic wand to give key employees the ability to easily transition between voice, instant messaging and video conferencing technologies.

Use it and lose it

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, hand-wrought nails were so precious that when a house burned down, the owner and his friends would sift through the wreckage to retrieve the hardware. Today, thanks to modern mass-production techniques, nails are disposable items.

[]