Patrick Thibodeau

Major IT vendors are encouraging employees to start blogs to reach out to users in new ways and help make the companies seem less impersonal. But so far, the blogging conversation is mostly one-sided.

At its quarterly product-launch announcement in Washington, D.C., this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. touted the fact that there have been 1.3 million downloads of Solaris 10 since the operating system was released last November. Sun officials said they are pleased with the pace of the downloads. But John Loiacono, executive vice president of the company's software group, said in an interview that it's difficult to know precisely what users are doing with the operating system.

Dell Inc. last week announced a three-year contract to manage 57,000 desktop and laptop PCs in the U.S. for Honeywell International Inc., expanding a deal under which Dell already manages 16,000 Honeywell PCs in Europe.

Hewlett-Packard Co. users were quick to offer advice to new CEO Mark Hurd, who assumed the role on April 1. Hurd is a 25-year veteran of NCR, a supplier of retail point-of-sale hardware and software. He was named president and CEO of the Dayton, Ohio, company in 2003.

India's technology firms plan to launch an employee registry program by mid-June designed to provide initial screening of tech workers for that country's burgeoning offshore industry.

India's technology firms plan to launch an employee registry program by mid-June designed to provide initial screening of tech workers for that country's burgeoning offshore industry.

Success in globalizing IT means building a workforce that understands and adapts to the needs and expectations of co-workers and business partners

Demand for certain types of disk drives used on Intel-based servers may be running ahead of industry supply. At least that's been the case for Hewlett-Packard Co., which has been forced to delay shipments of some servers. HP customer Al Angarita, director of IT and administration at the Baltimore Community Foundation in Maryland, an organization that distributes and manages millions of dollars in charitable funds, placed an order for two ProLiant servers on Dec. 29.