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Computerworld - ...eBay miscreants who peddle unauthorized IT gear. "It's cat-and-mouse PI work to catch them, but we do get them," boasts Joe Loomis, president of Net Enforcers Inc. in Coral Springs, Fla. His company is hired by firms trying to protect their brands and their authorized resellers and distributors by cracking down on sales outside official channels. San Jose-based eBay Inc.'s Web site is the Mecca for gray-market sellers -- and a magnet for many corporate IT buyers looking for good deals. "There's more gray-market activity on eBay than legitimate," Loomis claims. Alec Campbell, director of business development at BuySafe Inc. in Alexandria, Va., concurs. "It's the biggest area of fraud recognized online," he says. BuySafe offers sellers of legitimate goods a policy that insures buyers for up to $25,000 on anything they purchase via the popular auction site. "We've done due diligence on the back end to ensure that the merchants are legitimate and trustworthy," Campbell says. The gray market for computers has existed for decades, but eBay makes it easier to sell the gear from unauthorized sources at prices not approved by the manufacturer. EBay didn't return calls for comment.
CA sticks its toe in the waters...
...of integrated IT management. Talk about counterintuitive. While rivals such as IBM and Compuware Corp. bought companies to help them deliver IT management dashboards, Computer Associates International Inc. -- known for buying just about any company with bits on a disc -- settled for a partnership and not a marriage. According to Shari Shore, a vice president of product marketing at CA, a deal announced last month with Niku Corp. in Redwood City, Calif., will provide "out-of-the-box integration" between Niku's Clarity 7.5 software and CA's Service Desk, Configuration Manager and Business Process Manager tools. Expect to open such a box sometime in Q2. Until then, CA and Niku offer customized hooks from CA's IT management apps to Clarity, a tool used to translate IT operational activity into financial metrics that chief financial officers and CEOs can comprehend. In a report about the deal, Forrester Research Inc. analysts called CA's move "positive" but observed that "CA crawls where it should be jogging."

Shari Shore, a vice president of product marketing at CA

IT certification training takes a cue from...
...the digital entertainment industry. IT managers have been complaining to certification authorities that "book learning isn't enough," says Martin Bean, chief operating officer at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Inc. in Anaheim, Calif. New Horizons, which has 255 training centers in 55 countries,