Tom Venetis

A push for greater productivity among executives will drive growth in 2005 IDC Canada predicts.Hundred executives interviewed by the analyst firm between last November and December placed productivity at the top of their corporate strategic agendas for 2005, making it more prominent than ever before in corporate IT decision making.

Dan Fortin, a 27-year veteran with IBM is the new president of IBM Canada, replacing Ed Kilroy.Kilroy resigned earlier in January to become the chief executive officer of the Mississauga, Ont.-based Symcor Inc.Fortin recently headed up IBM

Banking is about customer relations. The better a bank is in reaching out to customers the more likely that bank will retain customers and get new ones. Bank of Montreal went to IBM

Last year, Canadian businesses did $45.4 billion in export and domestic sales, up 13 per cent over 2003. Much of this business would not be possible without the assistance of the Export Development Canada (EDC), a Canadian financial institution providing trade financing services to Canadian exporters.

On the surface, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) seems a hard concept to wrap one

Stepping up to combat spyware, Microsoft Corp. acquired Giant Company Software Inc., a provider of anti-spyware and Internet security products.

Oracle Corp. committed itself to fully supporting PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards customers for the next decade now that the protracted and, at times acrimonious, merger with PeopleSoft has been completed.

The merger of Symantec Corp and Veritas Software Corp., announced late last year, will create the fourth largest independent software company focusing on providing information and security integrity across enterprises.