CIO Power Is Fading Along With ...

Computerworld - ... client/server technology, claims Steve Savignano. Years ago, when client/server was king, says the CEO of Ketera Technologies Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., it made sense to put a company's intellectual property (i.e., custom code and configurations) into application development. And where a company puts its "IP," as business folks dub intellectual property, therein lies corporate power, justifying the C-level title and a fancy-schmancy office. With the arrival of software as a service, the breadth of IP under a CIO's wing is shrinking. "The power is returning to the business units," Savignano argues. No longer are sales, human resources, accounting and procurement executives dependent on the CIO's whims. Instead, they can rent fully functional apps online without giving the CIO a thought. "Instead of deciding what they should outsource," Savignano advises, "CIOs should be looking at what they need to own by where they can add IP. If they can't, outsource it." And just so you know, in April, Ketera will be adding a service procurement module to its online spend management software so you can better manage those software-as-service contracts.
• Bill Gates got the usual limelight with his much-anticipated announcement at last week's RSA Conference of the yet-to-be-delivered Caller ID scheme to stop spam. You go, Bill. But there are things users can do right now. For one, they might want to look down to stop spam. Down the Open Systems Interconnection seven-layer stack to Level 3, where routing occurs. Filtering, which most companies do, works at Layer 7 and "has not solved the problem," says Lucinda Duncalfe Holt, CEO of TurnTide Inc. in Conshohocken, Pa. The vendor's antispam router identifies a spammer from routing data and then turns the fire hose spewing spam from its server into "a straw," she says. Not unlike technology described here last month , the antispam router can slow spammer output to six messages an hour, according to Duncalfe Holt. "The economic model for spammers is then broken," she concludes. Six Internet service providers are already using the combined product and service. (You rent the router with a service contract, much like you would a cable modem. Although at $20,000 a year for the enterprise edition, it's a tad pricier.) And sometime in the second quarter, TurnTide will add a suite that won't just let service providers stop spam from passing through; it will stop spam originating from their customers.
• Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., argues that a single-minded effort to fight spam is shortsighted. You