 FT-IT and FT Telecoms - Complete forward schedule
Updated: April 17 2002
Here are synopses for the next few months, and summaries of later issues of the FT-IT Review and FT Telecoms, with an updated list of contributors and correspondents. Please note: this is the only document we release which gives writers' names, where they have been decided.
The FT-IT Review and the FT Telecoms supplements are published on a regular twice-a-month format, appearing on the first and third Wednesday of each month. FT-IT takes up three of every four slots. FT Telecoms will take up the fourth slot (i.e. the third Wednesday of alternate months).
NB: The inclusion of an article in the synopsis does not necessarily guarantee the article will appear in the newspaper, because of occasional space constraints. The associated web sites, www.ft.com/ftit and www.ft.com/fttelecoms, are published on the same day as the newspaper version and carry the full list.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
Background information and suggestions for articles or themes that have not yet been assigned to individual writers should be sent, by e-mail only please, to itsurveys@ft.com where they will be considered by Andrew Baxter, FT-IT editor. Please do not use individual e-mail addresses, fax numbers or post.
Once articles have been assigned, please send information directly to the writers concerned, but PLEASE THINK BEFORE YOU SEND - SPAM IS AN IRRITATION. All the writers are on e-mail, please see list of freelance writers at the end. (FT staff writers are all on firstname.surname@ft.com) Information should arrive six weeks ahead of publication.
PICTURES, ILLUSTRATIONS:
Pictures, illustrations and charts can also be sent to itsurveys@ft.com - as JPEGs, PDFs etc.
FT-IT - May 1 2002
First theme: web services
1. Overview
Are web services the next big thing in business computing? Judging by the range of big-name vendors piling into the space, it would seem so. There may be plenty of hype surrounding what may at first seems to be a passing fad, but the various web service technologies now emerging are part of a fundamental change in the way the internet works, and in the way that web applications will be written for e-businesses. Web services are a set of internet standards that provide a complete architecture enabling companies to integrate disparate computer systems, without having to purchase enterprise application integration (EAI) software or middleware. Touted as the equivalent of standardising railway tracks to facilitate nationwide commerce, web services are expected to make the integration of computer systems across firms much easier, and hasten the era of the so-called "real-time enterprise." However, there are some doubts that this dream will become a widespread reality quickly, because of the turf battles going on among major vendors, and security issues remain a concern. But some interesting pilot applications are emerging. Nuala Moran
2. The jargon explained
XML, SOAP, .NET, J2EE, WDSL, UDDI - all these abstruse acronyms and several more have relevance to the emerging world of web services. Here we explain what they all do, why they are important and how they relate to each other. Phil Manchester
3. Standards
The plethora of industry heavyweights pushing their version of web services is one reason why standardisation remains such a big issue. Microsoft has its .NET framework, launched two years ago, while Sun has its Sun One web services division. IBM, with its WebSphere product, is also active in this space, along with Oracle and BEA. It is yet to become clear which vision for web services, if any, will prevail. Now a new body called the Web Services Interoperability Organisation is striving for a broader consensus on this evolving technology area. What can it achieve? Geoff Nairn
4. Business benefits
In a web services environment, businesses should get far more choice and flexibility when buying applications. Indeed, users should be able to rent applications by the hour or even the minute. Web services should finally turn the ASP dream of remote "application hosting" into reality, ushering in an era where applications and functionality are provided on tap. Just as importantly, businesses could cheaply and easily unite all the separate "islands of automation" (different databases and applications) created by different software developers and scattered around the enterprise into one, smart information system. The big problem, however, is that the user dream of true interconnectivity could become a nightmare of commoditisation for vendors, who will do all they can to keep their software proprietary. Douglas Hayward
5. Security issues
Web services represent a new security threat for businesses since they increase the number of potentially vulnerable links in the chain that leads to the rolling out of any particular service, and also make it much harder to track how services are being used and by whom. Here we look at the possible solutions. Mark Vernon
6. View from the Top
Verisign's chief executive, Stratton Sclavos, talks about his company's approach to web services. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Verisign is the leading provider of digital trust services that enable secure e-commerce and communications, and is keen to exploit this expertise in the emerging web services space. Andrew Fisher
7. Sector profile - financial services
Banks and financial companies are looking at web services with enthusiasm. As one of the first industries to adopt computing across the business, banking has more than its share of legacy systems. These are expensive to maintain and update. Yet banks have a pressing need to integrate more fully with the Internet, not least to cut the cost of dealing with customers. And if web services can provide better links between existing applications, the result should be quicker processing, fewer errors and in time, a lower IT spend. Are these expectations realistic? Stephen Pritchard
8. Sector profile - manufacturing
In manufacturing, there are a few examples of early web services in action, though most of these are about streamlining already-existing supply chain processes. Popular areas for web-services projects right now include logistics, purchasing, and sales/service functions, particularly those that extend between organisations. In general, users are mostly starting with XML data-exchange technology to link existing systems. Examples cited as early adopters include Ford Motor, Dell, LG Electronics, Kraft Foods, among others. Ford Motor is using XML and the Microsoft BizTalk data-transformation package to link its systems to those of UPS and its car dealers, Dell uses a web services application to publish new manufacturing schedules to its factories every two hours. Douglas Hayward
9. Case study - Live Information Models
Real-time data is becoming a must in financial services and this new financial research product is an early example of a use of web services. Live Information Models embeds live data streams into desktop applications, enabling users to build simple and flexible analytical models and share them with other users. For financial analysts tracking companies it thus provides so-called active business intelligence, allowing users to aggregate, view and manipulate live data from multiple sources such as enterprise systems and trusted third parties via the Internet. Mark Vernon
10. Case study: Business Travel International
BTI, a subsidiary of Hogg Robinson that manages corporate travel, is the UK's largest purchaser of hotel rooms. BTI HotelBooker was launched in January with two customers and is adding one per month. It takes XML data from Galileo and Amadeus, two of the big global distribution systems for he travel industry, and combines it with maps, weather and driving instructions. This makes it easy for travellers to select and book a hotel and then find it. Flightbooker and CarBooker were due to follow in April and a foreign currency booker after that. Rod Newing
11. Case study: Newtrade
Another web services technology user in the travel trade is Canadian-based Newtrade, which builds portals for the travel industry. Newtrade is using Jini network technology and XML adapters to enable hoteliers' legacy systems to communicate with its inventory management system. When a hotel updates its internal information system, the Newtrade technology network is able to retrieve the new data, parse the XML content and execute the instructions contained in the XML message. In practical terms this has meant that portal set-up costs are minimal: very small hotels with quite basic information systems are able to compete with much larger hotel chains. Kim Thomas
12. Case study - Marks & Spencer
The UK foods and clothes retailer has successfully completed a trial of a credit card fraud detection application, built using Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. The application will help detect stolen or cloned cards from the company's 2m customer transactions per day. The Profit protection .Net application allows 24/7 live searches of the Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse, and instantly alerts loss prevention investigators to potential problems via SMS or e-mail. M&S has already recouped the development cost of the system and apprehended many offenders who have been prosecuted. Alan Stewart
Second theme: grid computing
13.Overview
Grid computing is little known outside the IT and scientific community at present, but its backers believe the concept could be of fundamental importance for the development of IT over the next few years, They foresee an environment in which we will be able to access computing power and resources with the ease we associate with electrical power. Grid computing enables sharing, selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources, allowing them to be used as a single, unified resource. This is achieved with grid computing software, which pools these various computer resources together. As Sun Microsystems, one of the major corporate backers of the concept, puts it, grid computing provides resources on demand, increasing the utilisation rates of underused IT assets. It says the reality of grid computing has always seemed out of reach, except to the large research institutions, but now it is available to enterprises too. Individual scientific and commercial grids will be linked together over the next few years to form a global grid, which will help people and organisations take part in "peer-to-peer" computing. According to IBM, commercial backers of the grid are not too far off. Paul Taylor
14. Vendors round-up
While the blueprint for the grid has come from the open-source community, some of the IT industry's heavyweights, notably Sun and IBM, are also getting heavily involved. IBM committed itself to grid computing last year, and says it wants the grid, which it sees as the "next critical step in the evolution of the internet," to move from academic research into the commercial mainstream. Sun is also very confident of the benefits of grid computing, and has developed a range of hardware and software products to power the grid. Smaller companies involved in grid computing include Platform Computing, Entropia, Avaki, United Devices, Data Synapse and Parabon. Paul Taylor
15. Scientific applications
Scientific researchers working to solve many of the most difficult scientific problems have long understood the potential of shared, distributed systems such as is represented by grid computing. The gigantic quantities of data involved in genomics or in the molecular modelling of new drugs can overwhelm even a supercomputer, but tasks can be reduced to a matter of hours through the use of a P2P-style grid computing architecture. At Durham University in the UK, for example, the cosmology engine performs 465bn arithmetic operations per second on a Sun cluster grid, the simplest form of grid. Future developments emphasise the importance of the grid model - for example, CERN's next particle accelerator, due to come on stream in 2005, will generate thousands of billions of bits of data that will need to be analysed by universities worldwide, and these amounts of data would swamp the current internet. Clive Cookson (clive.cookson@ft.com)
16. Case study - Datasynapse
Finance is a tough market for grid computing as few firms are willing to let outsiders access their servers. Nevertheless, Datasynapse a US startup, believes the grid computing model can be made to work behind the firewall and thus overcom security concerns. It claims institutions that once relied on supercomputers can achieve the same performance a fraction of the cost by tapping into the unused resources of their employees' PCs. Geoff Nairn
Other articles and regular features
17. News update - Geoff Nairn
Simply click on a a link to read a synopsis.
FT Telecoms - May 15 2002
FT-IT - June 5 2002
FT-IT - June 19 2002
Themes for 2002
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