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Improving RFID systems for specific applications and industry sectors -- along with mandates from governments and large companies with extensive supply chains and logistics needs -- is spurring adoption by a wider range of small and medium-sized businesses in the public and private sectors. SMBs nee...

RFID has been a highly touted technology in recent years, but concerns about high costs and actual benefits have hindered its adoption. That's gradually changing as developers and vendors focus on systems design, development and interoperability of specific applications in the public and private sec...

Organizations large and small are increasingly able to make use of service-oriented architecture and Software as a Service, employing a mix of in-house, on-premise, vendor-supplied and hosted on-demand applications and platforms to meet the need for fast, flexible application development and deploym...

While use of on-demand Software as a Service is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years, organizations for a variety of reasons continue to prefer in-house application development and on-premise deployment to support a range of key business functions and processes, as is discussed in Part 1 o...

Organizations continue to innovate, develop and distribute applications in-house, taking a cautious approach to the adoption of Software as a Service and associated service-oriented architecture. Greater ease of integration, stronger tool sets for customization, a greater range of applications and t...

From all indications, the Software as a Service model of developing and distributing applications is gaining traction and is poised for a phase of rapid growth, whether it be in small and medium-sized businesses or large-scale enterprises. Estimated worldwide revenue for on-demand CRM applications i...

Opposing tensions are much in evidence in the legal wrangle over individual privacy rights and security in the digital environment. The dizzying pace of technological innovation continues as individuals and organizations public and private struggle to come to grips with its implications and ramifica...

Although in its infancy, the market for on-demand application systems, including Software as a Service, is taking root and growing rapidly in East Asia, as was seen in Part 1 of this series. Springboard Research sees SaaS revenues in the region growing 80 percent annually between 2006 and 2010 from ...

Software as a Service, also known as "on-demand software," is making inroads across East Asia as organizations large and small become comfortable enough with Web services and network application delivery to risk using them for a variety of business functions. The regional SaaS market will grow more ...

Outsourcing continues to grow at a healthy rate. As the market expands to include a wider range of business processes, competitive cost opportunities in emerging markets are pressuring management decision-making. Currents counter to this trend are in evidence, however. Among the challenges associate...

Some 90 percent of brand owners outsource at least some of their manufacturing, according to AMR Research. In addition, more than half of them expect to increase their use of contract outsourcing over the next two years. While it's been shown that outsourcing adds significant value -- and jobs -- to...

The stage is set for further growth in VoIP communications with technological advances, telecom market deregulation and a growing web of fiber optic and wireless networks. India is now recognized worldwide as a center for offshore call centers, but a range of companies in other emerging market count...

Business intelligence is a fast-growing segment area in the on-demand market. BI solutions help enterprises track performance, understand business drivers, and manage an organization's overall operations. "BI is a large, complex set of technologies, processes and methodologies that address all of th...

2007 enterprise software budgets are showing a 10 percent year-over-year increase, according to a recent Forrester Research survey, with software-related spending expected to account for 30 percent of the total. Companies are looking to spend that money on improving integration between applications,...

Organizations of all types are increasingly turning to business intelligence applications -- a combination of data mining, statistical and numerical analysis and data visualization -- to better manage and make sense of the ever-growing amounts of data they are collecting. Continuing the mantra of Pa...

The use of RFID technology in the retail industry has been increasing, albeit tentatively. Meanwhile, proponents are finding that RFID adoption is easier in the manufacturing sector and upstream in the supply chain, in areas such as asset tracking and inventory management, as well as security relate...

Thanks to the increased processing power of today's microprocessors and significantly improved data access and storage technology, it has become easier than ever to apply some rather sophisticated statistical analyses to better understand both business processes and customer behavior. However, the r...

In late November, AT&T's Sterling Commerce acquired Comergent, a competitor in the e-commerce/order hub management platform market, for $155 million in cash. The merger brought together two industry leading companies, though they operated on different orders of magnitude. In this interview with ...

Technological development is fueling the transformation of economies and production processes around the world. Just-in-time manufacturing -- an industry-shaking innovation when Japanese manufacturers applied the methodology on a wholesale basis back in the early 1980s -- is now a best practice acro...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...