In early 2001, hardware and software vendors and telecom service providers began what has remained a long line of disappointing financial results, in countless cases blaming the economy.

But there's something to be said for execution, even in an economic climate that's this difficult.

Look no further than Manugistics Group Inc., which this week delivered financial results that were significantly better than expected. The bad news is that the company's still losing money.

Still, Manugistics' revenue, both in software and overall sales, was up significantly from the previous quarter. Yes, it was still down from a year ago. But a 70 percent sequential increase in software revenue is no small feat, especially when you consider the company's average sale is $1.2 million. Manugistics' results would seem to refute tech vendors' assertions that enterprise IT spending remains all but shut down. The company even notched big customer wins in the automotive industry. Further bucking the trend, Manugistics said its visibility into future results is good.

In a further indication that things could begin looking up in the tech sector, Forrester Research Inc. revised its IT spending forecasts upward for 2002 and 2003.

Forrester now predicts IT spending will grow 3.9 percent this year. While it's still a modest number, it's significantly stronger than the 2.2 percent Forrester predicted previously. The intense slowdown in IT spending that has hurt so many tech vendors will create pent-up demand that propels corporate IT spending to a robust 10.4 percent increase in 2003.

The week's other major high-tech business development was the latest salvo in the HP-Compaq merger soap opera. On Thursday, Walter Hewlett signaled that he won't go away quietly, even if the shareholder vote on the merger works out in Hewlett-Packard management's favor. Hewlett filed a lawsuit against HP over the way votes were solicited.

The week's biggest technology news by far emanated from the JavaOne show, which generated more interest than usual as the Java camp raced to add Web services protocols to Java-oriented platforms and tools. The slip of the Web services-rich next release of the Java Enterprise platform, J2EE 1.4, into next year generated some charges that the Java platform was falling behind Microsoft's .Net.

But the complaints appear misguided. J2EE releases are designed to stabilize, not be a launching pad for, vendor releases. And last week just about every major Java player under the sun, from Oracle to IBM to Hewlett-Packard, not to mention smaller vendors like Systinet, AltoWeb and Iona, delivered major Web services infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Sun responded to criticism from the open-source community, especially the Apache group, that it should allow open-source implementations of Java specifications. This week, Sun responded with a letter of intent plus more concrete future plans to let developers build open-source versions of any Java spec. Enterprises will likely continue to buy from the big vendors, but a richer open source development community pulling and tugging at the Java platform will likely benefit all users.

There were noteworthy developments in the supply chain realm as well. Healthcare products distributor Owens & Minor Inc., a leader in the use of supply chain technology and best practices, said it's now participating in the Global Healthcare Exchange. The company said it's just one more medium in which to serve customers, along with other e-marketplaces in which the company participates.

The Stride Rite Corp., a marketer of children's footwear, said it's embracing a set of retail automation applications from JDA Software Group Inc. aimed at giving it better merchandising capabilities for its soft-lines goods.