Edward Cone

All the hype around blogs in the enterprise obscures some nagging questions about the reliability of blogging services. Some of the biggest blog providers have had trouble dealing with scale, raising red flags about downtime and responsiveness for corporate IT managers who are considering high-volume blog projects. Performance issues are common at Google Inc.’s free […]

Just what does “Web 2.0” mean, anyway, and why should a CIO care? A lively debate on those subjects is playing out on any number of blogs, appropriately enough, and on other Web sites, too. The benefits are supposed to include faster development and deployment of software, better information-sharing among a broad range of parties, […]

As Avnet expands in Asia, it is sure to run up against a familiar competitor: Arrow Electronics, its longtime rival for market leadership in North America and Europe. Arrow also sees growth opportunities across the Pacific, naturally, and the race to consolidate the global industry’s last great frontier has already started. At about the time […]

Avnet wrote the book on corporate acquisitions. But it’s still working on the happy ending. The “Cookbook,” as the in-house reference guide is known at Avnet, an $11 billion electronic-components distributor, is actually a set of documents stored on a file server. At more than 1,000 pages, it represents Avnet’s accumulated wisdom on integrating newly […]

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even […]

It took a while, but Microsoft Corp. executives finally got the memo. After years of talk about software as a service from customers, competitors and industry experts, Microsoft is now officially embracing the coming revolution. In a pair of recent e-mails written by Bill Gates and Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie, they proclaimed a new […]

Pete Solvik knows a thing or two about rapid growth. As a senior executive at Cisco Systems Inc. from 1993 to 2002, including a seven-year stint as CIO (the company’s first), he was part of a management team that took sales from under $500 million a year to almost $20 billion. He ended his tenure […]

Frank Sinatra sang that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. Scott Montgomery, an adman from Indianapolis, thinks he can make it in New York from anywhere. Using commercial broadband services, off-the-shelf collaboration software, and some well-equipped rental space in Manhattan, the Indiana ad agency Bradley and Montgomery is […]

Tyler Jones wants to build something that is to the megachurch roughly what massively parallel processing is to the supercomputer. “We don’t desire to be a 20,000 member church, but, rather, to influence 20,000 people,” says the pastor of the Vintage21 church, in Raleigh, N.C. “Our goal is to plant hundreds of churches, not build […]

“Reach hither thy finger,” says Jesus to Thomas in the Gospel according to John, and on a recent Sunday morning at Willow Creek Community Church, in South Barrington, Ill., a group of middle-school students appears to be taking that particular bit of scripture to heart. What they’re reaching for as they enter the massive building […]

Allan Z. Loren has a rare perspective on business strategy and technology management. He has seen big business from the vantage point of both CIO and CEO, and he’s worked in both capacities to jump-start growth by aligning technology and business strategy. After a career that spanned four decades in senior management at some of […]

Steven Troccoli signed on as director of IT at Precious Moments Inc. just as the company was starting to plan its rapid transition into an operating concern. That made him its second operating employee, only two months before its licensing agreement with Enesco ended. Troccoli originally scoped the transition from licensor to distribution and fulfillment […]