Wharton Tech Blog

On the 10th anniversary of its inception, Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategy+Business magazine picked the 10 most enduring "conceptual breakthroughs" that appeared in the publication over the last 10 years. Of the 10, two are technical at heart: Customer Relationship Management and Disruptive Technology.

Would a survey across all business media of the last 10 years yield a significantly different list of enduring business ideas? Though nobody likes to dwell on the negatives, I can’t help but think that "executive accountability" has to be up there in the top 10 after the scandals that rocked corporate boardrooms and Wall Street and sent denizens of both to jail. Oh, and to bring it back to technology for a second, "The Internet" should probably be on there too. Sure, it had its roots long before 1995, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that companies really began to use its potential in a major way.

Wharton has an incredible array of tech services, from email servers, to class document and collaboration tool called webcafe, to a variety of custom made simulation and teaching  software. Almost all of this went down sometime on Friday. Most services were restored yesterday morning, but the most critical one for us students — email — is still down. Apparently Microsoft on-site engineers are helping the Wharton Computer Consultants’ team to recover Exchange.

The outage has keep us from @wharton email since Friday, which leads me to wonder about setting up a fail safe forwarding service that gets engaged after X-hours of outage and mail is automatically routed to your prefered email like @yahoo, @hotmail or @gmail.

I’m also wondering what went down and how was the response from software vendors, Microsoft especially, or hardware vendors?

Some good tech stuff in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Check out Project Avalanche, a Creative Commons type approach for businesses to share their software assets.

Also, BEA and Veritas announce an engineering and marketing partnership to deliver utility computing solutions (surely an effort to remain competitive with larger software vendors over stagnant IT budgets).