Stats Watch - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Stats Watch: The real cost of that ERP upgrade

  Where are the real costs of your ERP project? It depends if you're upgrading.

• Stats Watch: Microsoft muddies message as 3GL demand flatlines

  It's looking a pancake-flat market for 3GL tools for the next year or so and only those which greatly boost the productivity of developers or cut product time to market are likely to be considered.

• Stats Watch: A snapshot of the Linux bogey

  There’s little doubt Microsoft is a mite perturbed by the bogey that is Linux. Even if only half the stories about special fighting funds, disinformation campaigns and helping SCO battle IBM’s Linux strategy have a few milligrammes of truth, it’s apparent the movement toward open source licensing and collective bug fixing has Redmond spooked. But should it? Is Linux really entering the enterprise that quickly, and what’s happening to the rest of the OSes?

• Stats Watch: 'Solutions' find budget cash

  Finally, some good news. You’re continuing to open your collective wallets, this year finding a healthy billion dollars among the receipts and old ticket stubs for what IDC calls “IT solutions”.

• Stats Watch: IT services suffer

  Last year was not a happy one for many in the IT services market, though outsourcers are likely to keep their heads above water.

• Stats Watch: Email: popularity leads descent

  Sixty billion emails will be sent daily worldwide in 2006, says IDC, up from 31 billion last year.

• Stats Watch: Apps, skills hold Linux back

  IBM might be claiming that increasing availability of Linux applications is helping the open source OS hit an adoption “sweet spot”, but users don’t yet appear to be convinced.

• Stats Watch: Surfing the CRM curve

  You might be wondering what that nonsense was I wrote last week about satisfaction rates for CRM efforts at big companies being near to 75%. Well, put on your sceptic's hat and let's take a ride along the customer management highway.

• Stats Watch: Size matters

  In an earlier Stats Watch (Measuring I(C)T) and editorial (When good IT goes bad), I suggested we might be better creating a swag of $10 million companies rather than the 100 $100 million IT and telecomms organisations the ICT taskforce thinks we should aim for by 2012. Others went the opposite way and thought 10 billion-dollar companies would be better.

• Stats Watch: IT heads put vendors through cycle

  Many companies are reducing the number of IT suppliers to simplify purchasing and trim costs. So software sales reps face tougher times and longer sales cycles.

• Stats Watch: Portal storm

  Portals are going to be bigger than Iraq this year.

• 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.

• 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.