Data & Analytics

CA Inc. has agreed to buy application management software vendor Wily Technology Inc. for US$375 million in cash, the companies announced Thursday. Wily's software monitors the performance of applications and lets IT managers diagnose bottlenecks and other problems. CA, formerly called Computer Associates International Inc., said the acquisition will extend its own line up of management software, which is focused mainly on managing computer hardware and user identities.

The year 2005 saw many movements in the industry as technology convergence and vendor consolidation were the trends that plagued the newswires throughout the year. Most notable of which was Oracle Corp.'s spate of acquisitions geared at enhancing its technology prowess beyond database management and into the vast enterprise application space - from the high profile, US$10.3-billion acquisition of PeopleSoft Inc. to the less prominent Retek and ProfitLogic buys, to the most recent Siebel Systems Inc. purchase

Although it won

The lifeblood of the modern enterprise is information. This isn't news. But as organizations collect more and more information from different sources and applications, it's increasingly difficult to deal with that information.

The dream of effortless BI deployment has always been sweeter than the reality. Some of the most significant barriers arise during acquisition. Combing through the components to figure out which ones you must buy to get the features you're looking for can feel like rummaging through a really expensive, very high-tech flea market.

What are the key elements of an effective data management strategy? And what can SMBs learn from the experience of large enterprises, some of which have been tackling these issues since the 1970s? This is the first in a series of articles that investigates this issue comprehensively.

Business intelligence (BI), like too many technologies, was over-hyped in its early days. Again, as with many other technologies, this hype was rapidly followed by some very public implementation failures, before everyone settled down and realized, as usually happens, that BI is not the be all and end all that it was often claimed to be.

EMC Corp. announced a new line of bundled networked storage packages targeting the midsize enterprise and small-to-medium-size business (SMB) marketplace that include lower pricing, a greater emphasis on channel sales and a Web portal tool that expedites the process of configuring and ordering products.