CIO Skeptically Examines New Technologies

It’s amazing how the message never changes. Economy good? Buy more tech! Economy bad? Buy more tech! The sales tactics change a bit when budgets get tight, of course. But you can bet that a bevy of tech vendors is dying for a chance to show you their latest low-cost, high-value point solution that practically guarantees an instantaneous return on investment and lower total cost of ownership.

And that means it’s a good time to revive CIO’s Five Uneasy Pieces. Here we round up a quintet of hyped technologies and give you the lowdown on the problems, how the vendors hope to solve them and the facts behind the fiction. Whether you’re contemplating biometrics, business process outsourcing, collaboration tools, grid computing or open-source software, we have some insights to share.