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By Computerworld Philippines on August 9, 2011
By Computerworld Philippines on April 12, 2011
Draft Inside Outsourcing
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 23, 2010
By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines Staff
May 22, 2010
SINGAPORE – Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) announced Friday it is determined to change the global IT market landscape with its new networking portfolio which is a cornerstone of the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy.
Jay Mellman, senior director for HP networking division, told the press during the NetEvents forum in Singapore that HP’s goal is to help companies achieve a converged infrastructure model which promises to change server-based data centers to be managed fully remotely.
“The HP Networking is built on open standards that can work with other technologies or run well in a heterogeneous IT environment,” Mellman said, adding the converged infrastructure model is an expansion of the HP ProCurve solutions and 3Com Corporation’s network switching, routing and security solutions.
Mellman said there is still no exact market value for HP’s converged infrastructure model but described it as a giant move by HP, stressing that it crosses the multi-billion-dollar market for servers, networking, storage and other IT solutions.
“All of HP’s engineering teams, other technical people, sales teams, our channel partners are being trained on how to leverage on HP in the direction of the enterprise infrastructure,” Mellman said. “This is the breadth and depth to this move.”
The new portfolio consists of four product families that address specific client requirements from the branch to data center. “The solutions are supported by HP Services and sold through HP and the 40,000 specialized channel partners,” added Mellman.
He also said the target market for the new networking portfolio includes not only large companies but also small firms but only in a different form.
Amol Mitra, director for marketing, HP Asia Pacific and Japan, said the real value on networking is to address the issues on what should be virtualized in a company and for the creation of greener IT such as cooling concerns and other critical issues.
Having worked with IDC, HP reported about 65% of the budget of businesses are stuck in maintenance and the IT vendor’s goal now is to convert that spending and effort into innovation savings.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
May 20, 2010
Due to prevailing privacy concerns, several Facebook members are thinking to quit the popular social networking site – at least 60% of them – according to a latest survey conducted by IT security firm, Sophos.
In a poll of 1,588 Facebook users, it revealed that the extent of member concerns is over the network’s privacy settings. The online survey showed that almost two thirds of Facebook users are considering leaving, with 16% claiming to have already stopped using Facebook as a result of inadequate control over their data.
Only recently, Facebook has been criticized over changes on how it can share user data across its site and with other websites.
Sophos said concerns have centered on the complexity and the “opt-out” approach to sharing member information with wider networks. Media reports suggest that Facebook is planning to announce changes to its privacy settings within the next few days, but it is unclear as to whether any changes will be substantial enough to address user concerns.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, commented that the poll only shows that majority of users are “fed up” with the lack of control that Facebook gives users over their data.
“Most still don’t know how to set their Facebook privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing,” Cluley said, adding what is needed is a fundamental shift towards asking users to “opt-in” to sharing information, rather than to “opt-out.”
In response to the criticisms of Facebook’s privacy policy, a number of campaigns, including a “Quit Facebook Day” have been launched to increase public awareness of the issues.
“A mass exodus from Facebook seems unlikely, but Facebook members are clearly getting more interested in knowing precisely who can view their data,” Cluley said.
He continued that “people use Facebook to share private information and are unlikely to want their holiday snaps or new mobile number accidentally popping up all over the internet. With this survey showing that only 24% of users aren’t thinking about quitting, Facebook will need to make sure further changes to the privacy policy are clear, concise and in the interest of making it easier for members to know exactly who has access to whatever they chose to upload.”
During the online survey, Sophos asked Facebook users the question “Do you think you will quit Facebook over privacy concerns?” And the results varied from: Possibly, 30%; highly likely, 30%; already have, 16%; no, 12%; and don’t think likely at 12%.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
May 20, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - Reducing energy consumption in data centers, particularly with the prospect of a federal carbon tax , is pushing vendors to explore an ever-growing range of ideas.
Many are saying that biogas may, excuse this, offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers.
Researchers at Hewlett Packard Co.’s HP Labs presented a paper ( download PDF ) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other “digested farm waste” to generate electricity to an American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference held this week.
In the paper, the research team calculates that “a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows” could power a 1 MW data center — or on the order of 1,000 servers.
It’s just an idea sketched out on paper by a research team; no demonstration project has yet been planned. “I’ve not yet submitted a purchase order for cows,” said Tom Christian, an HP researcher, in an e-mail on early Wednesday.
Later today, as the paper attracted more and more attention, Christian sent a follow-up e-mail noting that HP labs had since received two inquirers about building a demonstration project. “The responses have been quite serious,” he said.
Organic matter is already used by farms to generate power through a process called anaerobic digestion that produces a methane rich biogas. HP’s paper looks at how the process could be extended to run a data center, starting with the amount of manure produced by your typical dairy cow and working up from there.
Another trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas.
But there are some practical problems, not the least of which is connecting a data center to the cows.
“What’s the reality of getting 10,000 cows in once place?” said Angie McEliece, an environmental consultant for RCM International in Berkeley, Calif., which makes digester systems. The average size dairy farm in the U.S. includes less than 1,000 cows; farms with 5,000 cows is quite unusual, she said.
McEliece had not seen HP’s paper, but said the power estimates seem correct for 10,000 cows, though the process wouldn’t be practical. She noted that other organic data center energy sources, such as landfills and waste from food manufacturers, be examined as well.
Farms that now use anaerobic digestion system to generate electricity and heat typically get some funding from federal and state grants. In such cases, a payback of four years or less on the technology is likely. Without grants, the payback can be about 10 years, said McEliece.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to this study, estimates that there 125 operating digester projects at commercial livestock facilities in the U.S. In 2008 they produced, in total, 290 million kWh, according to HP’s research.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .
Read more about data center in Computerworld’s Data Center Knowledge Center.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
May 20, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook is fixing a Web programming bug that could have allowed hackers to alter profile pages or make restricted information public.
The flaw was discovered last week and reported to Facebook by M.J. Keith, a senior security analyst with security firm Alert Logic.
The bug has to do with the way that Facebook checked to make sure that browsers connecting with the site were the ones they claimed to be.
Facebook’s servers use code called a “post_form_id” token to check that the browser trying to do something — liking a group, for example — was actually the browser that had logged into the account. Facebook’s servers check this token before making any changes to the user’s page, but Keith discovered that when he simply deleted the token from messages, he could change many settings on any Facebook account.
“It’s like putting locks on a bunch of stuff but not locking them,” he said in an interview.
Keith could make users’ private information public, change or read profile information, even add new contact e-mail addresses, he said. “It’s pretty bad; you can do a lot of damage with it,” he said.
Facebook worked with Alert Logic to fix the bug, known as a cross-site request forgery (CSRF), Facebook spokesman Simon Axten confirmed in an e-mail message. “It’s now fixed,” he said. “We’re not aware of any cases in which it was used maliciously.”
But as of late Tuesday afternoon, Pacific time, after Axten sent his e-mail, Facebook had not completely fixed the issue. For testing purposes, Keith created a Web page with an invisible iFrame HTML element that he programmed in Javascript. When the IDG News Service clicked on this page while logged into Facebook, it made the Facebook user automatically “like” several pages with no further interaction.
That’s pretty much how an attack would have worked, Keith said. A victim would need to be tricked into clicking on a malicious Web site that contained the Javascript code that exploited the CSRF flaw.
Facebook has been under a lot of heat recently by users who feel it hasn’t done enough to protect their privacy, and embarrassing technical glitches like this don’t help the social-networking company’s case.
Earlier this month, Facebook had to temporarily pull its chat feature, after another bug let users eavesdrop on their friends’ private chat sessions.
Robert McMillan can be reached at robert_mcmillan@idg.com. He is on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/bobmcmillan
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Matt Hamblen
Computerworld (US)
May 20, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - The smartphone’s impact on the mobile phone marketplace globally is well-established, but smartphone growth continues its upward trend in fairly astounding degrees, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.
Smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2010 grew by nearly 49% compared with the first quarter a year ago, the biggest year-on-year increase since 2006, said Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner analyst. That rate of growth put smartphones at 17.3% of all mobile phones sold in the first quarter (54.3 million out of 314.6 million) up from 13.6 % in the first quarter of 2009.
Gartner previously projected that the smartphone’s share of the overall mobile phone market would reach 43% globally in 2013 and jump to 70% in Europe and North America. Milanesi said the first quarter results bolster that forecast.
The biggest beneficiaries of the smartphone growth trend are the companies that control the entire smartphone ecosystem, including the operating system, hardware and services, such as Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd. and iPhone maker Apple Inc., Milanesi said in an interview.
RIM only makes smartphones, yet in the first quarter made its debut as one of the top five best-selling makers of all kinds of mobile phones.
RIM sold 10.5 million smartphones in the first quarter, up 46% from 7.2 million sold in the first quarter of 2009, putting it fourth behind top-selling mobile phone maker Nokia. Samsung was in second place and LG Electronics was third. But RIM also finished second in sales of all smartphones, behind the Symbian OS used in Nokia devices, but ahead of the iPhone OS in third, the Android OS in fourth and the Windows Mobile OS.
Milanesi said RIM helped itself in the market about two years ago with a focused marketing program on consumers, following up its strong reputation with business users.
“People generally now know who RIM is, and the experience by consumers in Europe is that it’s pretty cool to have a RIM device,” said Milanesi, from offices in Egham, UK.
But Milanesi said the smartphone competition is “very tough” and Gartner continues to forecast that in 2012, the Symbian will lead in smartphone sales, followed by the Android, and RIM and the iPhone in a tie with 13% market share each.
For the first quarter of 2010, the iPhone sold nearly 8.4 million units, up from 3.8 million in first quarter and increased its market share.
The Android OS joined the iPhone OS as the only two OSes in the top five to increase smartphone market share , Gartner said.
In terms of the smartphone OS wars, Symbian finished with 24 million sales in the first quarter and 44% of the market, while RIM had 19.4% of the market with its 10.5 million in sales. The iPhone OS reached nearly 8.4 million in the quarter, with 15.4% of the market, followed by Android with 5.2 million and 9.6% of the market, Gartner said.
The Windows Mobile OS in smartphones reached 3.76 million units sold or 6.8% of the market, a slight drop from the 3.738 million units sold in the first quarter of 2009 when Windows Mobile had 10% of the market.
Milanesi said that a somewhat surprising market trend has developed around Asian manufacturers of mobile phones, including Hong Kong-based G-Five, which sold 4.3 million phones in the first quarter to garner 1.4% of the overall mobile phone market. G-Five doesn’t make smartphones.
“G-Five has pretty much come out of nowhere and really underlines how some vendors…have been growing in markets such as India and the pressure they put on tier-one players,” she said.
There has also been a rise in the so-called white-box vendors that manufacture phones for other brands, Gartner said. As a group, they commanded 19% of all mobile phone sales, or 60 million of the 314.6 million sold in the first quarter.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld . Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com .
Read more about smartphones in Computerworld’s Smartphones Knowledge Center.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
May 20, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO - Symantec will pay US$1.28 billion to acquire VeriSign’s security business.
The two companies confirmed the rumored acquisition Wednesday, saying it would give VeriSign the opportunity to focus on its more-profitable domain name business, while allowing Symantec to broaden its growing portfolio of enterprise security products.
“There is a real need to be able to know who the user is and what they should have access to… but without the central theme of identity we weren’t able to provide the total solution,” Symantec CEO Enrique Salem said during a conference call to discuss the deal. “IT needs to be able to control the information, and identity matters to be able to provide that solution.”
Reports surfaced Tuesday that VeriSign had been shopping around its encryption technology and service business, and naming Symantec as the buyer.
The VeriSign business unit sells SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates — used to authenticate secure Internet servers — two-factor authentication tokens, fraud detection and public key infrastructure products for government and the enterprise. But the business has grown slowly of late, hurt by dropping SSL certificate prices, a fact that is reflected in the unit’s low purchase price relative to its $371 million in annual revenue.
“If you want to succeed in that market you have to have a lot of services, the platform, large and growing distribution channels — a lot of things that Symantec has,” Mark McLaughlin, VeriSign’s president and CEO, said on the conference call.
Salem said he and McLaughlin had been talking about a possible deal for more than a year, but that things heated up in the past few months when it became clear that Symantec could buy only the security arm of the company.
As the global economy has heated up in recent months, so too have security industry acquisitions. Last month, Symantec announced plans to spend $370 million buying two encryption companies: PGP and GuardianEdge.
Last year, security vendor SecureWorks bought VeriSign’s managed security business for $42.9 million. VeriSign had also been shopping around its iDefense security intelligence business, but has now decided to retain it, McLaughlin said.
The deal makes sense for both companies, according to Lazard Capital Markets, a financial advisory firm. “With its broad security portfolio, Symantec should be able to extract more value from the VeriSign security business than VeriSign currently does,” Lazard wrote in a research note published ahead of the official announcement Wednesday.
Symantec plans to merge VeriSign’s SSL business with its own intrusion detection business, whose products are already widely used in the e-commerce space, according to Francis deSouza, senior vice president of Symantec’s Enterprise Security Group. Symantec also plans to deliver a way of managing digital certificates in an upcoming release of the Symantec Protection Center, due a few quarters after that, deSouza said.
On the consumer side, Symantec will integrate the VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) authentication service, used for two-factor authentication, with its Norton Identity Safe product line, creating a broader user-base for the VeriSign authentication services.
Symantec is also interested in the VeriSign Trusted services, used by Web site operators to certify that their sites are trustworthy. “You can expect to see additional security capabilities under the Trust seal and Trust services umbrella,” deSouza said. Symantec, which acquired the VeriSign “checkmark” brand as part of the deal, plans to add things like Web site malware detection to these products, he said.
About 900 of VeriSign’s 2,200 employees will move over to Symantec, and it appears there will be some layoffs too. “The intent is to have the majority of the team move over,” deSouza said. “There may be some overlap as we look at the integration planning.”
With the security business expected to go to Symantec by September, pending regulatory approval, VeriSign will be able to focus on moving into international domain name sales and expanding its network availability offerings such as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack mitigation services.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 20, 2010
By Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)
May 20, 2010
MIAMI - Google will make a strong pitch to enterprise programmers at its I/O developer conference Wednesday with the unveiling of a business version of its App Engine application hosting service and with new cloud portability initiatives in partnership with VMware.
With the announcements, Google hopes to tap into what it sees as rising demand from enterprises to create and host custom-built applications in a cloud architecture to have more deployment flexibility and reduce infrastructure management costs and complexity.
“What we hear loud and clear from medium and large enterprise customers is wanting that cloud platform to build their own applications on,” said Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise director of product management.
Google launched App Engine two years ago primarily for developers of consumer-oriented Web applications who wanted to host their software on the Google cloud infrastructure.
While businesses liked the App Engine concept, many felt the product lacked some key enterprise features required by IT departments, so Google is now filling those gaps with this new version, said David Glazer, a Google engineering director.
For example, App Engine for Business has a central IT administration console designed to manage all of an organization’s applications, as well as a 99.9 percent uptime service-level guarantee and technical support.
App Engine for Business also lets IT administrators set security policies for accessing the organization’s applications, and features a pricing scheme of US$8 per user per month, up to a $1,000 monthly maximum. The product is currently available to a limited number of customers, but Google hopes to broaden access to it later this year.
Later, Google will let developers host SQL databases in App Engine for Business, offering another option to the Google Big Table data store, and add SSL to protect application communications.
Through a partnership with VMware, Google is working to provide enterprises that use App Engine with portability capacity, so that they can deploy their applications in a variety of Java-compatible settings, whether in App Engine itself, VMware-based private or partner clouds or another hosted application platform service such as Amazon’s EC2.
“App Engine for Business is making the cloud a friendlier place for enterprises to deploy the applications they build, bringing the benefits of the cloud to IT organizations,” Glazer said.
“By working with VMware and by building on standards for how applications run in the cloud, we’re able to bring cloud portability to those enterprises,” Glazer added.
The collaboration includes integration of the VMware Spring Roo rapid application development tool with the Google Web Toolkit, as well as linking the VMware Spring Insight performance tracker with Google’s Speed Tracer technology.
“It’s the beginnings of platform-as-a-service offerings that might interest the enterprise because of the portability and because it’s from large, credible players,” said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.
“Google still has some hurdles to clear with many enterprises about their comfort level with a bunch of things, but this announcement broadens the availability and appeal of platform-as-a-service and gives people who prefer to code in Java, as opposed to Microsoft .Net Framework, an alternative,” Gillett said.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 14, 2010
By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
May 14, 2010
Because of Google’s large market share in the Internet search engine business, hackers developed a vested interest in ensuring that their attacks are effective in poisoning Google results, according to software company Symantec.
“Google’s breadth and speed of indexing also play a role,” added Symantec, a company involved in providing security, storage and systems management solutions.
Symantec reported that search engine results poisoned with links to fake antivirus software have been a constant problem for Internet users. However, it is an effective way for cyber attackers to infect users’ machines.
Based on Symantec’s report on “Rogue Security Software” – the culprits of these “toxic” search results are typically scam perpetrators who use a range of black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to poison search engine results and increase the ranking of their scam websites on search engine indexes. A rogue security software program is a misleading application that pretends to be legitimate security software, but provides the user with little or no protection. In some cases, it actually facilitates the installation of malicious code that it claims to protect against.
Symantec has observed search results constantly and generated statistics on the top search trends every hour and determined how many were malicious (within the first 70 Google search results).
Among the key findings identified between March to April 2010, on Google search results include the following:
• On average at any given hour, 3 out of the top 10 search trends contained at least one malicious URL within the first 70 results;
• On average, 15 links out of the first 70 results were malicious for search terms that were found to be poisoned (had at least one malicious URL);
• On average on any given day, 7.3% of links are malicious in the top 70 results for top search terms (see Figure 1);
• The most poisoned search term resulted in 68% of links leading to malicious pages in the first 70 results;
• Almost all of the malicious URLs redirect to a fake antivirus page.
It is apparent that attackers continue to be effective at poisoning search results. They have an automated infrastructure that is able to automatically collect the latest, most popular search trends and poison the results, the company said.
Symantec advises netizens to be careful when clicking on search result links, especially when searching for hot search topics. The company also advised to follow its Twitter feed to find out the latest news on Internet threats.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 11, 2010
By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
May 11, 2010
All doomsday scenarios predicted to take place last May 10, 2010 in the Philippines turned out to be just wild imaginations, as the country’s citizens successfully carved yesterday their first national automated elections in history.
Both the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Commission on ICT (CICT) described yesterday’s poll automation as “successful,” claiming about 70 to 75% turnout of the 50.8 million registered voters in the Philippines. CICT is Comelec’s advisor for the automated election project.
“Given all the criticism and fear mongering, this (75% turnout) was a very good result,” said Ray Anthony Roxas Chua, chairman of CICT.
Over a radio interview several hours after the elections, Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez said that controversy may have attracted the public to vote using the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines manufactured by Smartmatic Corporation, Comelec’s technology supplier.
“I think many voted also because of curiosity, and all the noise and negatives issues that this project has brought,” Jimenez said, adding the turnout was better than the 80% turnout of 40 million registered voters in past national elections.
“Good elections are not impossible!” Jimenez posted earlier on his Facebook account. He has been opposing poll automation doomsayers since day one.
Jimenez, who announced in the past that election results will be known after 48 hours, announced awhile ago that results will be known in about 36 hours. Many considered this as a remarkable improvement compared to past manual elections where it took several months to know the voting results.
As of writing, four out of nine presidential candidates already conceded, and they are: Sen. Manny Villar (Nacionalista Party), JC de los Reyes (Ang Kapatiran), Gilberto Teodoro (Lakas-Kampi-CMD), and Sen. Richard Gordon (Bagumbayan), who authored the poll automation law.
“Today, we have a victory for democracy with the successful exercise of our first nationwide automated elections despite naysayers and doubters,” Gordon said in a statement after conceding to Sen. Noynoy Aquino of the Liberal Party who continues to lead in the official Comelec tally.
According to Jimenez, the conceding of candidates “gives credence to the Comelec automated count.”
Although there were several reports of election-related violence, vote buying and PCOS machine glitches, Comelec said the election was generally well and peaceful.
Among the main complaints by voters was the long verification queues in clustered polling precincts. Many lined up for hours, enduring the summer heat. In fact, hundreds of voters were reported to have suffered high blood pressures, headaches and heat strokes. There were even reports that many went home as they can no longer bear the overcrowding and waiting.
Critics said Comelec may have improved in the counting of votes and transmission of results but failed in making it easy and convenient for people to vote.
Reports said around 10 people were killed and several others injured in separate incidents in which some are believed to be election-related. A total of eight explosions were also recorded.
Smartmatic recently told Computerworld Philippines in an interview that terrorism, intimidation, coercion, and vote-buying are problems that are endemic in any elections, but unfortunately cannot be addressed by technology alone.
The so-called doomsayers recently warned that the country could suffer a political crisis due to failure of elections caused by malfunctioning voting machines and inaccurate and manipulated election results.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 11, 2010
By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
May 11, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - Last week’s US government report showing an increase of 290,000 jobs in April brought some good news to tech workers as there was a sharp increase in IT hiring.
Perhaps even more important for tech workers, Dice.com, an IT jobs board, reported a sizable increase in the percentage of opportunities for full-time rather than contract workers.
In terms of the broader numbers, TechServe Alliance , an industry group that tracks month-to-month IT hiring trends, reported Monday that tech employers added 17,300 jobs in April, rebounding from a slight dip in March. Alexandria, Va.-based TechServe said the latest numbers, part of a mostly upward trend that started late last year, are a clear indication that momentum has returned to the technology market.
Foote Partners LLC in Vero Beach, Fla., Monday released a report that supported TechServe Alliance’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Foote said its analysis of IT employment saw a net gain of 8,800 jobs in April, representing a swing of nearly 16,000 jobs from March when IT employment dipped by nearly as much.
It’s important to note that that there is no one analysis or set of numbers on the state of IT hiring. The various groups that analyze labor data can pull from different government labor data sets, that can either be broad or more focused on bellwether categories, such as in the case in Foote. But while the approaches may differ, there is usually agreement on the broader trends.
Meanwhile, Thomas Silver, senior vice president, North America at Dice Holdings, Inc., said 62% of jobs advertised on Dice.com in April were for full time positions, up from the all-time low of 56% last October.
The increase in full-time job offers is an indication “that employers are becoming more and more confident about what their needs are going to be,” said Silver.
There are also more employers advertising for help. Dice had some 68,000 job advertisements posted Monday; in June of last year, the low point, there were only 47,000 jobs were listed.
Over the longer term, TechServe Alliance said that employers have added more than 43,000 IT jobs to their payrolls since August 2009, most of them this year.
The good news comes after TechAmerica, an industry group based in Arlington, Va., reported a loss of some 250,000 tech jobs last year, mostly due to the recession.
David Foote the CEO and research officer at Foote Partners, said, in a statement, that while stabilization is occurring in IT employment and salaries, “on the other hand pay and demand for specific skills continues to swing wildly up and down within windows as short as three months.”
Foote believes that “we will never return to the sort of labor marketplace for IT professionals that existed before 2008,” and argues that the downturn has forced many executives to reexamine IT.
“The truth is that IT professionals have a big stake in their companies’ outcomes if they can rise to the challenge their business counterparts have put before them,” said Foote. “The recession has been a wake-up call for many of the laggards, which is why the marketplace for skills will remain volatile for years, not just months, to come,” he said.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .
Read more about careers in Computerworld’s Careers Knowledge Center.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 11, 2010
By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
May 11, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - EMC chief executive Joe Tucci believes IT customers will have their choice from hundreds of viable cloud computing service, and that the cloud market will not be dominated by a small group of vendors, he said at the EMC World conference in Boston Monday.
10% pay cuts for EMC’s Tucci, other top executives
EMC is developing its own cloud service known as Atmos Online, which will offer both storage and server capacity over the Internet, similar to Amazon’s popular Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud.
But EMC is focusing most of its marketing efforts on helping customers build private cloud networks that can interoperate with public clouds.
“We will have tens of thousands of private clouds and hundreds of public clouds,” Tucci said.
Tucci said some industry observers predict the public cloud market will consist of just two or three major cloud networks, but that EMC has “a very different vision … for internal data centers to become private clouds and external data centers, through service providers, to become public clouds, and they will work together.”
Atmo Online, EMC’s stab at the public cloud market, consists of a storage service that is up and running, and a compute service which is in beta.
“We have real customers doing real work now, and we’re forming our marketing plans,” Tucci said.
Tucci made the comments during a Q&A session with media members and during an interview with Network World. He didn’t reveal much about EMC’s technology plans for Atmos Online but said EMC will rely on partners to bolster its compute service.
EMC is obviously a storage company first, but Tucci said “there’s very few applications where you need only storage. Most need storage and compute together.”
On the compute side, Tucci said “my preference is to do it with our partners. I don’t want to compete with our partners. I’d rather work with our service provider partners that have that capability.”
Tucci said EMC and its partners will eventually offer cloud services that are more comprehensive than Amazon’s because “we can address existing workloads that are virtualized.”
EMC, of course, owns VMware, which sells a virtualization platform that it describes as a new type of operating system for cloud networks.
Cloud networks will rely almost exclusively on x86 systems, which VMware virtualizes, rather than platforms like Unix or the mainframe, Tucci said.
With Intel’s latest x86 servers, “on a single server you can get up to a terabyte of memory. You can build one with eight sockets, and with eight sockets you get 8TB of memory. These are incredibly powerful processors.”
Cisco’s Unified Computing System, and other technologies will also be critical to building private cloud networks, he said.
“If you look at the building blocks to stand up a private cloud, you cannot get them all today from EMC,” Tucci said. “We do not make a server. We don’t make networking connectivity.”
On another topic, Tucci discussed how a shift toward centralized storage will hasten the ongoing move from rigid desktop environments to a mobile personal computing experience.
With personal information stored centrally, perhaps in a cloud service, users will be free to pick the hottest device out there, he said. Some may want an iPad and a smartphone, others may choose a laptop and a regular cell phone.
“I think the concept of a personal computer is going to changed dramatically. Obviously it’s going to be much more mobile,” he said. “There will be all kinds of combinations. I look around here, and there’s an amazing number of you that have PCs, with a smartphone next to it.”
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
Read more about data center in Network World’s Data Center section.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 11, 2010
By Shane O’Neill
CIO.com
May 11, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - In the business battle to rule the enterprise office suite of the future, Microsoft and Google both must overcome significant problems.
On Google’s side, despite the Google Apps price advantage and Google’s announcement that 2 million companies are now using Google Apps, various research data still shows Google is losing out in the enterprise. Google Apps adoption not only lags way behind Microsoft but also trails behind OpenOffice and even IBM’s Lotus Symphony. Estimated revenue for Google Apps in 2009 is $50 million, a tiny portion of the company’s $22 billion war chest.
Microsoft, meanwhile, must be competitive with Web apps — but not too competitive, since these apps will presumably drive much less revenue than its longtime cash cow, the traditional Microsoft Office suite. In fiscal year 2009, Microsoft’s business division (of which Office is a major component) generated a healthy $18.9 billion in revenue. Microsoft must also convince customers that it “gets” cloud computing the way that Google does.
If anyone has the cash and the consumer branding power to take on Microsoft, it’s Google, analysts say. But there’s still plenty of explaining to do.
Web Apps By the Numbers
The enterprise today is offered a plethora of productivity tools: There is the big horse, Microsoft Office, followed by lower-cost or free alternatives such as IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Web-only products Google Apps and Zoho’s Office Suite, among others.
Yet although the Web browser may be the most prevalent computing platform for both consumers and businesses, enterprise use of cloud-based alternatives compared to Microsoft Office remains low, according to recent data from Forrester Research.
[ For complete coverage of the Cloud App Wars -- including a complete guide to the business war, the competing products including Google Docs and Office 2010, the implications for users and IT, and more -- see CIO.com's Cloud App Wars Bible. ]
In a March survey of 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB technology decision-makers, Forrester cites that 81 percent are currently supporting Office 2007 — while only 4 percent are using Google Apps.
Moreover, despite Office 2010’s higher price than current alternatives, one-third of survey respondents plan to upgrade to Office 2010 in the next year and one-quarter plan to upgrade in the next two to three years.
So does Google Apps stand a chance against Microsoft Office in the enterprise? Maybe not right away, but Google is in a good position to advance as the enterprise shifts to the Web, say industry analysts.
“Google is a Web company and it has the most resources to bring the enterprise to the Web,” says Sheri McLeish, analyst at Forrester Research, adding that “mixed environments where Google complements Microsoft are the wave of the future.”
[ For complete coverage on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software -- including enterprise and cloud adoption trends and previews of SharePoint 2010 -- see CIO.com's SharePoint Bible. ]
However, McLeish is not convinced yet that Google is fully committed to the enterprise, saying that while Google’s clean and simple user interface caught on with consumers, it may be too limited for businesses.
“For instance, Google Wave seemed like a good idea, but it needed a critical mass and didn’t get it,” says McLeish.
Google Apps and Office 2010: Prices and Features
Google Apps has a price tag of $50 per user per year that includes Gmail with 25GB of storage, Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheets and presentation creating tools) and other apps such as Google Sites and Google Talk. Google’s Postini virus and spam protection also comes with the suite. There is an extra fee for message archiving of $13 or $33, depending on the duration of archiving needed.
Last month, Google revamped its Google Docs editing tool to improve speed and real-time collaboration, an area where Google Apps trumps Office.
[ Thinking about switching to Google Apps? Here's everything you need to know, from the tools it includes to security and privacy features: Google Apps FAQ.]
On the Microsoft Office side, price for the full suite range from $150 to $680 depending which of its many versions you are looking for. With Office 2010, Microsoft will be offering Office Web Apps, free but not fully-featured online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
There will be three versions of Web Apps: One for consumers supported by ads; a hosted version for businesses that pay for hosted accounts on Microsoft Online Services, which is powered by SharePoint; and a corporate in-house version for enterprises with volume licenses for Microsoft Office and a SharePoint server.
Office 2010 will launch for businesses on May 12, but Office Web Apps are not scheduled to launch until mid-June.
Microsoft also has BPOS (business productivity online suite) in its arsenal, a part of Microsoft Online services that includes online versions of SharePoint, Exchange, Office Communications Server and Live Meeting for $10 per user per month for all four apps.
Built for Enterprise vs. Built for Cloud
Despite the cost advantage of Google Apps — an advantage perhaps even more attractive at a time of economic recession and a time when consumers are used to Web apps for home computing — Forrester’s research is not the only data showing Google trailing by a mile in the adoption race.
A survey of 800 IT managers worldwide in January 2010 by ITIC (Information Technology Intelligence Corp.) shows that 4 percent of businesses are using Google Apps for their main e-mail and productivity software. The survey also shows that Google Apps is most widely adopted at small businesses.
The barrier to entry for Google, says McLeish, is Microsoft’s vast experience serving and supporting enterprises. “The foundation has been laid for Microsoft in the enterprise,” she says. “It says a lot that it can still demand high prices for the full versions of Office when Google Apps are free or much cheaper.”
Microsoft is quick to call out that it is a company built for businesses, while Google was built for consumers.
“We’ll ask customers: Are any of these new entrants really committed to online productivity services for the enterprise?” says Ron Markezich, Corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services. “Are they making investments in the enterprise for the long haul? It’s taken Microsoft 15 years to prove that we are committed to serving enterprises and now of course that’s a large part of our business.”
Big Fear: Cannibalize Office, Fail to Kill Google
But even with Google’s tiny presence in the enterprise, it is still a giant brand name with deep pockets and products that most consumers (who also work at enterprises) are familiar with, particularly Gmail.
It may not be a true threat to Microsoft’s enterprise customers now, but Google’s cloud-based productivity apps have forced Microsoft to change its business model. Microsoft has created online versions of its software products, dropped prices and must justify to enterprise customers why they should pay top dollar for Office and Exchange when they could “Go Google” and save money.
This new dynamic has created a difficult conflict for Microsoft where it has to promote cloud-based apps to the detriment of its franchise desktop software products, says veteran tech analyst Roger Kay.
“Microsoft needs to be successful with Web apps, but not too successful,” says Kay. “They’re not getting full revenue from its cloud apps so they need to make them lightweight enough that people will upgrade to the full paid product, which is Microsoft’s cash cow. Microsoft will be reluctant to give up on anything that makes them money.”
This conundrum is not an easy one for Microsoft resolve, says Kay, adding that the worst case scenario for Microsoft is that Office Web Apps and Exchange and SharePoint Online take off and cannibalize Microsoft’s client software, yet still fail to kill off Google Apps.
Google itself concedes that any overnight success in the enterprise is unrealistic, yet remains fully committed to the enterprise, citing rapid growth in Google Apps’ short three-year life span.
“Google Apps have only been in the market since 2007 and we’ve gone from zero to two million business customers,” says Rajen Sheth, Google’s senior product manager for Google Apps. “There’s so much potential here and we’re in it for the long haul.”
Where Microsoft is trying to migrate its products into a cloud environment, Google is fundamentally a cloud company, says Sheth, and has gone to great pains to build extremely large data centers designed specifically for nimble Web-based applications.
“It will be tough to build up the cloud expertise that’s been built into Google’s DNA since day one,” Sheth says.
Would Microsoft Be All In for Cloud if Not for Google?
Still, the reality of today’s enterprise is that Google Apps are simply not a wholesale replacement technology for Microsoft Office, says Ted Schadler, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
“You may see enterprises move to Google for e-mail, but rarely will you see them replacing Microsoft Office with Google Docs,” says Schadler, adding that Google Apps collaboration features such as Google Sites and Google Talk will likely be used only to enhance Microsoft Office.
“Google Apps will continue to have success with its collaboration and mobile features that augment Office in the enterprise. But I don’t see it displacing Microsoft Office in any meaningful way,” he says.
One thing is for sure though — Google is heavily invested in its enterprise cloud play and although it may not have a critical mass behind it yet, it has forced Microsoft to adjust its entire business model.
It’s worth asking: Would Microsoft be “All In” for cloud computing if there were no Google?
Shane O’Neill is a senior writer at CIO.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter at twitter.com/CIOonline.
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By Computerworld Philippines on May 11, 2010
By Matt Hamblen and Nancy Gohring
Computerworld (US)
May 11, 2010
FRAMINGHAM - Analysts say it’s no sure bet that Hewlett-Packard Co. ’s planned $1.2 billion purchase of Palm Inc. will prove successful.
In fact, an IDC research note gives it only a one in four chance of working out. At the close of the deal, expected by July 31, HP will gain a struggling smartphone business and the means to create a tablet to take on Apple Inc.’s iPad , though such a project would take at least a year.
“HP needs a strong presence in mobile, but Palm doesn’t deliver that,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Golvin said HP would have been better off — and spent a lot less — by simply trying to hire away Palm’s top engineers. By acquiring the company, HP gets the Palm brand and its intellectual property, neither of which it needs, he said.
And, Golvin added, Palm’s WebOS mobile operating system is probably not “viable in the long term in the face of competition.”
Analysts also cited the smartphone makers’s lack of success in Europe, and the dearth of WebOS applications — fewer than 4,000 apps have been developed for Palm’s operating system, while 150,000-plus iPhone apps are now available through Apple’s App Store.
Gartner Inc. estimates Palm’s share of the U.S. smartphone market to be 4.3% and its European share a barely visible 0.2%. Nonetheless, the combined company will have to quickly find ways to better compete worldwide against handhelds running Google Inc. ’s increasingly popular Android mobile operating system, market leader Nokia Corp.’s top-selling Symbian-based devices and the iPhone.
After announcing late last month that the deal had been struck, HP executives said the company will quickly increase Palm’s $190 million research and development budget while funding new sales and marketing activities.
“We intend to invest heavily in product development and go-to-market capabilities to drive this market,” said Todd Bradley, vice president of HP’s personal systems group and a former Palm CEO.
Steve Hilton, an analyst at Analysys Mason, suggested that HP should build WebOS-based smartphones for corporate users. HP could “dislodge RIM and Nokia” by taking advantage of its powerful corporate sales and marketing organization, he said.
Bradley noted that HP is also looking to use Palm’s technology in its effort to make inroads in the fledgling tablet computer market. WebOS currently runs only on mobile phones. “We see opportunities beyond smartphones,” said Bradley. IDC estimates that about 7.6 million tablets will be sold this year and that sales will reach 50 million by 2014.
Analyst Jack Gold at J.Gold Associates LLC said a strong tablet offering could significantly boost HP’s revenue. “Since tablets are primarily front ends to the Internet, it allows HP to deploy many cloud-based services from which it can generate revenue,” he said.
Like other HP acquisitions overseen by CEO Mark Hurd, the integration of Palm will likely involve a lot of operational oversight, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Research. People in Palm’s marketing and sales groups will probably lose their jobs, but the engineering talent will likely be highly valued, he said.
Judging from the way HP handled its acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems and 3Com, King said, “I believe they will keep the folks on board who understand the product, and they’ll maintain the brand.”
Palm is best known for creating the PDA market with the iconic PalmPilot, which came out in 1996. The company lost its footing when the PDA business stalled and it was slow to move to smartphones. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, best known for his role in developing Apple’s iPod, will stay with the company.
Gohring is a reporter for the IDG News Service. Agam Shah and James Niccolai of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.
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