Stories about: SAP

Budget dollars may be tight for most companies, but that doesn't mean enterprise IT departments can do without the technology skills, talent and certifications they need to better navigate a down economy.

Conventional wisdom and decades' worth of IT project failures and less-than-desirable outcomes tell us that every tech-related investment-from a massive SAP ERP rollout to a small Salesforce.com SaaS CRM deployment-comes with some amount of risk.

Oracle's announcement of its intended US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun has certainly shaken up the hardware and server operating system (OS) business markets.

I've been immersed in the world of technology, IT vendors and business software for nearly 13 years, and there are lots of things to love and lots of things to hate. But there also many bewildering things about the tech world that still make me scratch my head in amazement.

M&A industry veteran Paul Deninger, a vice chairman at Jefferies & Co., has made a living advising companies on mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and the like. But even he acknowledges that too much industry consolidation isn't a good thing for technology innovation. I spoke with Deninger this week about the state of the M&A market and what’s likely ahead.

The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

Role management software enables the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise job roles, according to Forrester Research. It does this by discovering and logically grouping application-level, fine-grained authorizations and entitlements into enterprise job roles, which can then be assigned to people by rule-based provisioning or request-approval workflows.

Faced with looming regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Craig Shumard, chief information security officer for healthcare provider Cigna, knew he needed better tools for role-based access control.

What are some of the challenges in deploying NAC? What are the alternatives for LAN security?

For DuPont, Gary Min may have seemed a model employee. A research chemist at DuPont's research laboratory in Circleville, Ohio, Min was a naturalized U.S. citizen with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania who had worked for DuPont for 10 years, even earning a business degree from Ohio State University with help from his employer. But Min's veneer of respectability began to crack on Dec. 12, 2005, when he told his employer he would be leaving his job.