News in brief

BonerNet.com Inc. sets up web development center at Calcutta

BANGALORE: The US-based BonerNet.com, Inc. has set up their interactive web development center in Calcutta through a wholly owned subsidiary BonerNet.com Pvt. Ltd. The Internet company will offer web-based solutions to their clients in the US and India. Sudeep Banerjee, CEO, BonerNet.com, Inc, comments, "India has a competitive advantage of producing well qualified technical skills that can quickly adapt to the web environment with new technology. We will use the local skills by leveraging the Internet to execute more value services from India to US. The core technical product development will be done out of the Calcutta office."

The company recently launched its web portal ‘BestCoolSites.com’, which is generating a unique audience of over 20,000 per month. The site has affiliate partnerships with over 150 e-commerce sites including amazon.com, PlanetRx.com, e-toys.com, disney.com and others.

BonerNet.com launched the Interactive Service Division in November 1999. There are plans to set up a core development team to provide high-end value-added web development applications and solutions services to global clients. The company has already bagged orders from E-Med Inc., MD Peel, O2Health and others. BonerNet expects revenue of $3 million by the end of its first year of operations and ramp up to $100 million within the next three years. The company plans to have an IPO in Nasdaq in 2001.

HP’s Openview Express to improve performance and availability of NT

BANGALORE: Hewlett-Packard has introduced HP OpenView Express which unites application, network, system and storage management with cross-discipline integration, implementation services and affordable support to create a complete Windows NT management solution. It facilitates quicker problem isolation and resolution by integrating information across management disciplines in such areas as event correlation, thresholds, alarming and reporting. The result is a solution that delivers a fast return on investment through rapid deployment, integration, and improved performance and availability of Windows NT environments.

HP OpenView Service Desk extends the HP OpenView Express solution into the help-desk arena by delivering flexible, customizable help-desk capabilities and proactive support to increase customer satisfaction. According to a July 19, 1999 Dataquest study--"NSM Middleprise Market: Bloom, Boom, or Bust?"--middleprise (small- to medium-sized businesses) market opportunities are expected to grow to $5 billion in 2002, with between 75,000-100,000 US-based companies falling into this category in 1999. The study also highlights that middleprise companies have the same systems and network problems as enterprise companies, but many lack the IT resources to solve their IT problems.

NEW DELHI: Cognos, a vendor of enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions, has introduced Cognos BI Lifecycle, a new technical course that teaches BI consultants, analysts and project leaders to plan, build and deploy cost-effective, flexible and scalable enterprise BI solutions. The BI Lifecycle packages and expands Cognos’ expertise to ensure partner and customer success with the adoption of fast, enterprise-wide deployment of Cognos' Web and Windows-based BI solutions for better decision-making and bottom-line impact.

"The Cognos BI Lifecycle allows our partners and customers to shorten their deployment of informational systems, maximizing the return on their business intelligence investment," said Donna Sparks, Cognos vice president of worldwide customer support. "Cognos' commitment to its channel partners and customers and the depth and breadth of knowledge in the business intelligence marketplace puts us in the unique position to train our partners and customers so they can work with their clients to turn information into business solutions."

The BI Lifecycle has been designed to reflect the entire BI application development lifecycle--from analyzing user requirements to data mart design to deployment. It is designed for technical project leaders and developers to acquire a fundamental overview of data modeling, data warehousing and scorecarding--techniques needed to build successful, integrated BI applications. It is intended to help them ask the right questions to the end-user community, and translate those requirements into a valuable BI application. The BI Lifecycle also emulates real world situations through role-plays and hands-on workshops. The four-day course covers the following topics: gathering user application requirements; identifying key performance indicators; understanding the concepts of data warehouse dimensional modeling required to design and build integrated data marts; building a prototype of a flexible, scalable BI application; and developing checklist-style project management skills.

Integra launches document management solution for small users

BANGALORE: Integra Micro Systems, a Bangalore-based IT Solutions and Services provider, has launched FIDO2001-LITE, a document management system for the benefit of small users. This has features similar to FIDO (Flexible Indexed Document Organizer) Standard. FIDO2001 provides a powerful and fully scalable imaging solution for storing, retrieving and accessing small to large volumes of information that could be either texts or images. The information is stored in a structured hierarchy, organized into cabinets, folders and pages with associated indices for easier and faster retrieval.

The FIDO2001 has a read only browser incorporated on the archived CD, which helps the end-user access information anytime, anywhere at his convenience. The CD is completely self-sufficient and contains everything needed to view the database, including a database engine. Its multi-level security ensures that no unauthorised access occurs. And also the scalable architecture of the product helps it to support a variety of mass storage systems.

According to V. GopalaKrishna, Director R&D, Integra Micro, "We have spent close to 1,50,000 manhours of research and development on finding how to help organizations address the issue of storing tons of information. And the outcome was FIDO2001." Integra has been in document imaging since 1990.The other products from Integra’s imaging family includes IDEA, Credential, Scancom, iSCAN and IFRS. The company has recently taken up distribution of Red Hat’s Linux.