Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

All the top stories from March 2008

Heathrow Airport’s IT-centric Terminal 5 failed to take off. Most notably, the baggage-handling system proved a spectacular failure, with 28,000 items of luggage reportedly lost. Hundreds of flights were cancelled and many passengers were stranded overnight. The baggage-handling system is supposed to be capable of tracking 12,000 bar-coded items an hour.

Prime minister Gordon Brown acknowledged the threat to the nation’s Internet infrastructure from criminal factions in his inaugural National Security Strategy, and pledged to strengthen the UK’s defences against cyber-attack. “I can confirm that to meet future security needs we have set aside funds to modernise our interception capability,” he said.

A serious fire at a warehouse belonging to Korean battery manufacturer LG Chem in March triggered a worldwide shortage of laptop batteries. Companies including Dell and Hewlett-Packard said that this will impact their product pricing. LG Chem expect to lose $85 million in revenue following the fire. It will return to full production capacity after three months, the company said.

One of the US’s largest waste disposal companies, Waste Management, is suing German applications-maker SAP after investing $100 million in software that it says has turned out to be a “complete failure”. Waste Management says in a lawsuit that the US version of SAP’s applications package for the waste disposal industry was “undeveloped, untested and defective”, and is seeking to reclaim costs plus damages.

Oil giant Shell announced a $1 billion outsourcing deal with IT services provider EDS, one of the largest ever global outsourcing contracts. EDS will manage Shell’s end-user computing services, affecting an estimated 150,000 users in over 100 countries.

In other outsourcing news, Siemens’ IT services division, Siemens Business Services, suffered the unusual humiliation of being sacked from a government IT contract. The £59 million project to develop a new payment and accounting system for the Department for Work and Pensions, signed in 2006, was due to continue until 2010. Reasons for the termination were not revealed.

Technology standards body ISO granted official standard status to software giant Microsoft’s Open Office XML format (OOXML) after more than two-thirds of its member organisations gave their approval. Microsoft’s energetic lobbying of the ISO member organisations in the lead-up to the ruling has been criticised. The European Commission is currently looking into the company’s OOXML campaign as part of a wider antitrust investigation.