John Lamb's week: WWW inventor goes wireless

Integration has been a bugbear for big business for some time and there's a booming market in tools and services to help multinationals hook up incompatible systems across their empires and press ahead with plans for global domination.

The business opportunity offered by the urge to integrate has persuaded Kalido, the Shell IT spin-off, and Accenture to collaborate on these mega integration projects. On Monday the dynamic duo will be formally tying the knot on a partnership intended to enable multinationals to get a single view of their data.

Kalido will be providing the software tools, while Accenture chips in the manpower and management expertise. All of this begs the question of why the IT industry hasn't come up with standard interfaces that do away with all this expensive bodging to get systems to work together. After all they've been talking about it for 30 years.

Email systems are increasingly important conduits for moving company data around the world. So, BT Cellnet has been taking an interest in what people do with their email. The company has been measuring the number of emails people get and the time they spend on looking at their correspondence, replying to it and so on.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the research will show first that other people send more emails than you do and second they are quicker about it.

Fresh fuel has arrived to stoke up the internet gravy train as Cisco shovels in another load of statistics this Monday. The somewhat shop-soiled darling of the internet has been delving into the attitudes of small to medium-size businesses to online trading.

Fortunately the company, whose products run the internet, finds that there has been a significant shift in attitudes at board level in UK companies. A survey published on Monday will reveal that 25 per cent of IT spend among mid-range companies now goes on Internet technology with a projected 31 per cent increase in spending between 2000 and 2004. We can relax then.

Also stoking up the new economy is IDG Ventures Europe, a recently formed European venture capital fund put together by IDG, the company that made a fortune from publishing mind numbingly detailed statistics about how companies use IT. All those reports should come in handy in picking winning start-ups. The company announces its first investments on Tuesday.

Proponents of wireless systems have been bewailing the lack of killer applications recently. With the focus firmly back on company use of wireless communications, the launch of a new mobile data system from Teleware is timely. The mobile telephony firm is announcing a system that connects mobile workers with a central system that manages work schedules and provides information to workers in real time.

Transacsys is a UK company specialising in what it calls internal transaction management: the form filling and authorisations that employees in big companies need to do their jobs. On Tuesday the company will be making an intriguing announcement that features the co-inventor of the world wide web, Robert Cailliau of nuclear research laboratory CERN.

Mid week will see further activity in the wireless market when specialist journalists are briefed on a significant tie up in Europe between mobile phone operator Orange and XandMail. XandMail supplies front-end email technology for messaging services with millions of users run by telcos, ISPs and portals.

Search-engine company Verity suggests that by 2003 around 85 per cent of Global 2000 blue-chip firms will have an enterprise portal. The question is, asks senior vice president of development Ashok Chandra, will knowledge workers be able to find what they are looking for quickly and accurately?

By Thursday Verity thinks they will when Chandra unveils K2 Enterprise, the company's portal search product designed to help office workers comb through the usual out of date company newsletters and reports in search of data relevant to their current tasks.

Finally, this week sees another milestone in the road to e-government. The Office of Government Commerce will announce the completion of the first government tender processed entirely via its on-line tendering service OGC TenderTrust. The tender is part of the pilot that will lead to the award of a contract to roll out TenderTrust across government departments.