The decade of the 1990s was notable for many significant events in multiple areas of information technology: client/server computing; the evolution of the Internet from an academic and research network into the foundation of e-commerce and e-business; the growth of business intelligence and data warehousing; the emergence of the World Wide Web as a medium for commerce; widespread adoption of packaged software for enterprise applications, call center management, sales force automation, and customer relationship management (CRM); and many other advances that have made information technology, circa the turn of the century, exponentially more pervasive in business and society than a mere decade earlier.