According to the latest Netcraft survey, there are more than 60 million web sites on the Internet. Netcraft's reported that the March 2005 survey received http responses from 60,442,655 sites.

The monitoring authority says that the milestone comes just nine months after the survey crossed the 50-million mark in May 2004, as the growth of the Web continues to accelerate, approaching the dizzying pace at the height of the Internet boom.

During the year 2000, the number of sites found by the Netcraft survey doubled from 10 million to 20 million in just seven months. More recently, it took 13 months for the Web to grow from 40 million to 50 million sites.

Another research authority, IDC, reported in the FutureScan results for March that buyer expectations for IT spending growth over the next twelve months have taken a decidedly optimistic turn. After February's sober outlook of less than 7% growth, the business and IT executives polled by IDC are now expecting IT spending increases of more than 9%.

A new global survey of over 100 retailers and consumer products companies released by IBM (www.ibm.com) Business Consulting Services reveals a major disconnect between the views of retailers and the priorities of consumer products companies.

According to the survey released in the middle of the month, consumer products companies are facing a dramatic shift, moving from the consumer as the primary focus to an expanded view that elevates their retail customers to a place of equal importance.

The biggest event of the month was Verizon Communications Inc. (www.verizon.com) acquisition of MCI, Inc. (www.mci.com). Verizon has agreed to acquire MCI for $4.8 billion in equity and $488 million in cash.

In the security field, Postini (www.postini.com), a provider of email security and management for the enterprise, announced that directory harvest attacks (DHAs) by spammers against corporate email reached record levels in February.

Postini also reported that unwanted email has remained virtually unchanged at 88 percent while only 12 percent of all email is legitimate. Postini's findings are based on the 14.8 billion messages it processed in February.

"February was the worst month ever for DHAs," said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing for Postini. "In fact, the five worst days ever recorded by Postini were in February."

In the technology sector, the release of Microsoft's Software Solution can be noted as another milestone. At 3GSM World Congress 2005, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of the Microsoft® Connected Services Framework, an integrated software solution that allows telecommunications operators and service providers to deliver converged communications services across multiple networks and a range of device types.

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