Stories by Peter Fabris

Thanks to the Web, CIOs now can rent enterprise applications instead of buying them. Charles Warczak had one of those career make-or-break decisions that most CIOs face at least once. His company, Sunburst Hospitality, was being spun off from Choice Hotels International. Warczak's task was to create an IT infrastructure to ensure Sunburst's 87 hotels in 27 states keep accurate books and pay bills on time. Warczak could spend several million dollars to configure and install his own financial system or he could make a bolder move on a new concept: rent the application over the Web on a monthly basis.

An automotive industry-wide VPN gets a wrench on costs that were always just out of reach.

Dale Mead looked over 23,000 pages of documents in the Bay Networks database. There were product specs, price sheets, sales presentations, competitive intelligence reports, white papers, press releases, news stories and dozens of other kinds of information. And they were, in Mead's mind, a mess.

Experts say outsourcing Web hosting is the smart way to go, yet every day more companies move hosting in-house. Are corporate control freaks making a big mistake?

When Firing an IS Staffer, Make Sure You Don't Get Burned

Microsoft's Windows NT platform has tremendous momentum in its bid to wrest network server market share from Unix vendors. In this article, readers will discover - The strengths and weaknesses of the NT and Unix platforms - How CIOs can guard against NT penetrating their IT infrastructure without their knowledge - Industry opinions on how the NT versus Unix battle will play out