By Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld (US)
March 11, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The unabated plundering of online bank accounts belonging to small and mid-size businesses is raising significant questions about the authentication and fraud detection mechanisms now used in financial institutions.

Such cyberthefts have led multiple businesses to file lawsuits against their banks, and prompted government regulators to call on financial institutions to improve security systems.

The FDIC recently disclosed that during the final 2009 quarter alone, cyberthieves stole mre than $150 million from small and mid-size business accounts.

In most of those cases, the FDIC said, thieves obtained a business’s valid banking login credentials by illegal means. The hackers used the stolen credentials to send money from the accounts to overseas bank accounts via wire transfers.

Banks, by and large, have mostly contended that the thefts occurred because the victims failed to adequately protect their banking credentials.

Since banks are not required to reimburse commercial accounts for losses resulting from such thefts, most of the impact on them has come from a public relations standpoint.

On the other hand, the thefts have led to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for numerous small businesses, which now have little hope of recovering the money. Some have filed lawsuits against banks charging that they failed to detect and stop transactions that were patently fraudulent.

Earlier this month, for example, Hillary Machinery Inc filed a lawsuit against its bank, PlainsCapital, after online crooks used stolen credentials to transfer more than $800,000 from its account last year.

The bank later recovered about $600,000 of the stolen funds, but has so far refused to pay the remaining amout to compensate the Plano, Texas-based manufacturing firm for the remainder.

In its lawsuit, Hillary charged that PlainsCapital did not stop wire transfers that involved foreign bank accounts and dollar amounts completely out of norm for Hillary. The company claimed that it had a reasonable expectation that its money would be properly protected by the bank. The company also argued that a small business cannot be expected to hold significant expertise on data security issues.

In a similar case, a Sterling Heights, Mich.-based manufacturing firm is suing its bank after online crooks stole some $560,000 from the company’s online bank account via a series of unauthorized wire transfers last year. The lawsuit that Experi-Metal Inc. filed late last year blamed the theft on loss on Comerica Bank’s alleged failure to heed signs that should have alerted it to the fraudulent activity.

Though it’s unclear yet how courts are going to rule on such lawsuits, the attacks have prompted many questions about the authentication and fraud detection mechanisms used by many banks.

As far back as 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council issued guidelines to banks on implementing stronger authentication for online transactions. Among other things, the Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment report called on banks to upgrade current single-factor authentication processes — typically based on user name and passwords — by adding a stronger, second form of authentication by the end of 2006.

The unceasing attacks on small business accounts shows that many banks, especially small community banks, have still not deployed such controls, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

“The good news is there are plenty of effective fraud detection and authentication solutions that can and are thwarting these attacks when employed by the banks.” she said. “The bad news is that many banks are not using these solutions and the bank regulators are not paying adequate attention to this.”

Regulators such as the FDIC and the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have so far not enforced their own recommendations for strong authentication. “The bank examiners are really behind the 8-ball on this,” Litan said.

Paul Smocer, vice president of security at BITS, an industry consortium representing the 100 largest financial institutions in the U.S, said there’s been a “real uptick in sophistication” in cyberattacks targeting commercial accounts over the past six months or so.

Such attacks are seriously testing token-based authentication measures used by banks for many years, Smocer said.

“Until fairly recently, token-based authentication was considered to be very strong,” he said. However, as banking malware get increasingly sophisticated, “token methodology is not as strong as it has been historically.”

Smocer said there is a rapidly increasing need for context-aware and out-of-band authentication tools as well as monitoring tools that are capable of detecting fraud by comparing current transaction patterns against historical behavior. “We are starting to see a lot of our members move in that direction,” he said.

BITS has started advising members on ways to identify accounts where so-called “money mules” have moved to transfer stolen money to overseas bank accounts. “By working with law enforcement we are seeing patterns beginning to emerge with regard to the nature of the activity that mules often engage in,” Smocer said.

The attacks are pushing bodies such as the American Bankers Association to ask members to review internal security controls.

In a February alert, for example, the ABA asked banks to be on the alert for funds-transfer fraud involving small and medium-sized businesses. The alert specifically cited “large-value” payments to previously unknown payees, unusual international payments and new accounts “with high-value, high-volume transactions [and] previously unfunded accounts with large-value incoming funds that are cashed out as soon as funds are cleared.”

The bankers association is “strongly recommending” that banks review existing controls, such as their anti-money laundering tools, to determine whether features can be added to fulfill the recommendations, said Doug Johnson, senior policy advisor at the ABA. The ABA is also advising members to implement multiple layers of security for detecting fraud in much the same way that credit card companies have been doing for years, he added.

“Cybersecurity is always an arms race. It is incumbent upon financial institutions to be vigilant. If the exploits change the defenses have to change with them,’ said Johnson who is the ABA’s representative on Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council. “We are obviously very much concerned about the potential for these exploits to really damage the relationship between the customer and the bank and we will do everything in our power,” to alleviate the situation he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld . Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan , send e-mail to jvijayan@computerworld.com or subscribe to Jaikumar’s RSS feed .

Read more about security in Computerworld’s Security Knowledge Center.

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By Agam Shah
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
March 5, 2010

NEW YORK - Gartner has raised its worldwide PC shipment forecast for this year, predicting growth of 20 percent compared to 2009, partly driven by growth in shipments of mobile devices like laptops and netbooks.

The analyst firm in December predicted worldwide PC shipments to grow by 13.3 percent this year. Gartner is now saying PC shipments will total 366.1 million units in 2010, compared to 305.8 million units shipped in 2009.

“The PC industry will be overwhelmingly driven by mobile PCs, thanks to strong home growth in both emerging and mature markets,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, in a statement. Shipments of netbooks, which Gartner calls mini-notebooks, will also grow in 2010, but not at the rate of previous years. The devices could face competition from next-generation tablets and new laptops with ultra-low-voltage processors, Shiffler said.

Mobile devices accounted for 55 percent of all PC shipments in 2009, and will account for close to 70 percent of shipments by 2012. By comparison, desktop PC shipment growth will be minimal and limited to emerging markets. The market will remain robust over the next few years as consumer demand for PCs increases and companies open up budgets to upgrade PCs.

Gartner also said its “initial thinking” is that vendors could ship up to 10.5 million traditional, keyboard-based tablets and next-generation tablet devices this year.

Apple’s iPad is one of many new devices coming to market that could change the PC market, Gartner said. The iPad bundles Web surfing, multimedia, e-book reading and gaming into one device. It is due to ship later this month.

Users may no longer need a PC to access Web applications, and the emergence of new devices is changing the way PC makers think about the market, Gartner said.

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By Howard Wen
Computerworld (US)
March 4, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world’s most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla’s Firefox browser has given Microsoft’s Internet Explorer strong competition over the years.

Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone?

After all, it’s possible today to design a device — including its electrical and mechanical architecture — on a personal computer with CAD and schematic design software, order nearly all the components needed for it online, and then process the manufacturing of a prototype through a low-cost supplier. So the idea of organizing an open-source project online to build a device isn’t far-fetched, nor is it one that requires millions in start-up funding.

But can such gadgets succeed against those developed by established commercial manufacturers with deep pockets? Mark Driver, a Gartner analyst who specializes in open source, thinks that open-source gadgets have the best chance in markets where the technology has matured to the point that it is commonplace.

“Open source is about commoditization,” Driver says. “These products are taking a market where there really isn’t a lot of concrete differentiation … between what’s out there and providing an alternative, which is exactly what open source does right. Linux got wildly popular not because it did something new; it’s because it did what Unix did, but did it in a much more open fashion.”

Defining open-source hardware

While there are numerous open-source computer and electronics components available today, only a handful of complete tech gadgets are being developed under an open-source philosophy. However, what exactly defines a hardware project as being open source remains … well, open.

Generally, hardware that is “open sourced” means at least some of its plans have been made available to the public, thus allowing others to contribute to its development or, if permitted by its creator, to manufacture the device themselves or even modify the plans to create a new device.

Always Innovating Inc., for example, encourages outsiders to contribute to the development of its ARM-processor-based tablet/netbook hybrid, the Touch Book. Weighing 1.8 lbs., the device features a touch screen, a removable keyboard and a customized Linux operating system distribution. It can run for 10 hours on a single battery charge.

The schematics for the Touch Book are freely available on Always Innovating’s Web site. “We also provide advanced support and consulting services for companies who want to build their own devices starting from our design,” says Chief Operating Officer Alexandre Tisserant.

“This is the way we are following: Build reliable, innovative products, and by opening them, you will get the necessary feedback and contributions to improve them and design new ones faster and easier,” Tisserant says.

That’s the open-source ideal, anyway. On the flipside, “the worst-case scenario would be a project emerging using an open-source moniker, and it ends up being nothing more than a marketing gimmick,” says Gartner’s Driver. “If it’s only from one vendor, or one source of support, those kind of things are the weakest forms of open source.”

Who’s in the market for open-source gadgets?

Unsurprisingly, the kind of user such gadgets are geared toward — and appeal to — the most is the tech hobbyist. The Touch Book has so far sold mainly to this crowd, says Tisserant, who says “several thousand” units have been sold. Yet his company is looking now to sell it to vertical markets. Because the Touch Book is highly customizable, it could easily be integrated into taxis or police cars, or connected to a hospital’s private network as an “always on” portable device for medical staff, Tisserant says.

Then there’s the Frankencamera, a Linux-based digital camera that can be programmed to control exposure, flash, focus settings and more. The camera is being developed by a team of graduate students at Stanford University and is meant for academic use.

“Specifically, we want to make this easy for graduate students doing research that could use a programmable camera, or undergraduate CS students doing courses in programming,” says Andrew Adams, one of the lead developers of the Frankencamera. “We’re graduate students ourselves, and this whole project is born out of our frustration with trying to program cameras to do what you want them to.”

A consumer-oriented open-source project that has so far failed to catch on is the Neo FreeRunner smartphone and its supporting Linux-based platform, called Openmoko. The project was launched by Openmoko Inc., with both the operating system and the design plans for the internal electronics and housing available for others to use and improve on.

The company officially stopped supporting the project in April 2009, according to Product Manager William Lai. “As time and technology progressed, the funds involved in competing with the likes of Apple, RIM, Android, etc. were out of our scope, and we soon realized that the technology outpaced our ability to deliver on a timely basis,” he says.

However, the Openmoko platform and FreeRunner phone are still being developed by a volunteer community.

Distributing and testing hardware is difficult

With software, anyone can download a copy of an open-source program and try it out practically instantly. It’s equally easy to give feedback to its developers and contribute code to fix bugs or add features.

The open-source model in software development thrives on this constant distribute-and-test process: The more copies of the code you can get into the hands of other people, and the quicker you do so, the faster the project’s developers can field feedback in order to fix and improve the software for its next release.

But applying the open-source model to hardware isn’t as straightforward. Copies of prototypes can be expensive to produce and distribute to fellow developers for evaluating and testing, so development doesn’t progress as quickly.

Tisserant calls this “the cost of the test”: “When you get your first piece of homemade hardware, you can do some modifications. But you will have to order a new piece with your new design. This takes time — a few weeks — as well as money.”

In order to seriously challenge the traditional proprietary model of developing hardware, a manufacturing time frame of less than one week would be ideal, says Tisserant: “The easier and faster you can test, the easier and faster you can learn.”

Turnaround time could be lessened with the use of affordable rapid prototyping or fabrication machines. For example, the body of the Frankencamera is laser-cut acrylic. So anyone with access to a laser cutter can take the plans for the Frankencamera’s body and make their own.

A device like the RepRap, a 3D printer for rapid prototyping, could play a significant part in open-source hardware development. The RepRap is itself open source. While commercially available 3D printers cost around $20,000 at the low end, the RepRap’s design is freely available to anyone who wants to build one. (Its developers estimate that the materials cost around $480.) What’s more, the RepRap can replicate many of its own parts, with the rest of its parts cheaply available, so you can build another one using the first.

“Someone with a RepRap or a laser cutter and a soldering iron can put together something. Open hardware designs combined with rapid fabrication gets at exactly the original intent of open-source software — if the design is open, you can modify it to meet your needs, and freely share those modifications with others,” says Adams.

Although the RepRap and other rapid-prototyping machines can speed up prototyping, they’re not an end-all solution since their capabilities are meant for creating only the housing or external case for a gadget. Such a machine can help build prototypes of, say, a netbook’s outer shell faster, but most of the device’s internal electronics still need to be sourced out for manufacture.

Nevertheless, opening up a device to the public (especially during its early design phase) encourages the formation of a community that can propose and contribute improvements. This can help reduce the number of prototypes that need to be built, saving money and time.

The lack of open-source culture among component makers

A device that is open source does not necessarily mean every component within its design schematic is also open source — in fact, it probably uses several proprietary parts.

Any consumer tech device is built with many smaller components. The makers of these parts are usually secretive about revealing their inner workings, unless it’s to a paying client. This can be a challenge for anyone trying to develop open-source hardware if their device’s design plans are to be released publicly.

“In the software world, there’s a rich culture of providing basic open-source building blocks like compilers, editors, support libraries and operating systems,” says Adams of the Frankencamera project. “Unfortunately, chip manufacturing is an inherently expensive business, and there’s far less room for the kind of altruistic sharing that seems to be the major motivator behind a lot of open-source contributors. Having to sign [non-disclosure agreements] to even see how to use a part like an image sensor is common.”

Although he and his fellow Frankencamera developers have encountered hesitation or refusals from companies they’ve approached to acquire information to help them build their digital camera, they have come across some willing to contribute — in particular because of the open-source aspect of their project. (Most of the Frankencamera’s electronics are commodity parts that anyone can buy. A few components, such as the camera’s power circuitry, were specially designed by the project’s team.)

“Companies that are hard to extract information or parts from don’t care whether you’re planning something open source or commercial — they’re equally reticent. People and companies that are willing to help are usually more willing to if it’s going to be open source; they know they’ll be able to benefit from any results too,” says Adams.

The issue of intellectual property

A big question swirling around open-source hardware projects is the legal issue of intellectual property — who owns what (including the whole and the individual parts) in an open-source device, especially if several people are contributing designs? Brendan Scott, a lawyer who specializes in IT law and runs the Web site Open Source Law, strongly advises the creators and lead developers of such projects to address this matter before anybody agrees to make anything.

As for how this should be handled, he says there is no one-size-fits-all answer. “In some cases, it will be better for individuals to retain intellectual property [in what they contribute]; in others, it will be better to transfer it to some holding entity. The main thing about intellectual property in a project is to turn your mind to the issue before you start — or soon after you start — rather than when you finish. By not addressing the issue, you may discover that the issue has been decided for you, perhaps in a way you are not happy with.”

Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of the TechCrunch blog, might agree. In July 2008 he announced plans to create a low-cost Web tablet, later dubbed the CrunchPad. While the hardware development process wouldn’t be fully open, Arrington’s idea was to “design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them,” as he wrote in the announcement.

The project got off to a promising start as TechCrunch partnered with Singapore-based Fusion Garage to develop and manufacture the CrunchPad. In late 2009, however, the agreement fell apart when Fusion Garage announced its intention to sell the CrunchPad without TechCrunch’s involvement. Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan claimed that his company had sole intellectual property rights to the device, while Arrington said both companies shared IP rights.

Fusion Garage plans to sell the device as the JooJoo tablet, and TechCrunch has filed a lawsuit against Fusion Garage. As of this writing, Fusion Garage has been taking pre-orders for the JooJoo, which the company’s site says “will ship in 8 to 10 weeks.”

Asked what legal steps or counsel he and his Frankencamera developer colleagues have taken to protect their hard work, Adams says, “In this regard, life is easier when there’s no money to be made. Because everything we do is as students of Stanford University, we have pretty good legal avenues available to us if someone should try anything nefarious. So far, though, the vast majority of what we have heard from the general public is interest, encouragement and offers of help.”

Applying current open-source licenses to hardware

Another legal matter is whether current open-source licenses apply to hardware, at least suitably enough. Most were drafted in the context of software, and this is evident in their wording: The commonly used GNU General Public License refers to “the Program.”

Scott of Open Source Law postulates that with a generous reading, existing open-source licenses could be applied to hardware projects without modification. “It is not too far-fetched to think of hardware plans and component lists as the source from which an ‘object’ — literally — is ‘compiled’ or ‘assembled,’” he says.

“The intellectual property landscape for hardware is a little different from that of software,” Scott continues. “Copyright applies to copies of software, but does not typically apply directly to copies of hardware, particularly for items for which their form is functional — although making a copy of hardware can result in an infringement for the plans from which the hardware is made.”

Scott anticipates that, over time, licenses will be customized or amended in order to cover issues faced by hardware created under open source. For example, the TAPR Open Hardware License was specifically designed for hardware projects. And the Arduino project, an open-source electronics platform with both hardware and software components, uses a license for the designs of its hardware that is separate from the license for its firmware (the operating software that runs on it).

Making money (or not) from open-source hardware

Always Innovating’s Tisserant acknowledges that hardware companies going the open-source route might have lower profit margins, but he says they can benefit from lower research-and-development costs and shorter development cycles. “The goal is not to keep your secrets and live on endless royalties, but to share the knowledge and grow upon fast innovation,” he says.

Although Openmoko Inc. no longer supports the FreeRunner phone and Openmoko smartphone platform, Lai says the company isn’t through with open-source: “For the last year, Openmoko as a company has been focused on bringing open source in front of an audience of mass appeal. We want to continue to design products using open-source elements,” such as the WikiReader ($99), a pocket reader preloaded with Wikipedia content, says Lai.

As far as the developers of the Frankencamera are concerned, they have no business plan because their project isn’t meant to sell an end product. Their goal is to get the schematics of Frankencameras into the hands of students at other academic institutions, so they can build their own at minimal cost to use in their coursework and research.

In turn, they hope their project will “convince camera manufacturers that letting end users program their cameras is something that actually adds value and makes people want their product more, because there’s a community of enthusiasts constantly adding new features to it,” says Adams.

“How successful would the iPhone have been without the app store? Now why can’t you write and download apps to your camera? Our personal goals are to do interesting research, and give other people the tools to do interesting research, not to make money,” Adams says.

Selling open-source gadgets beyond the techie crowd

Jeff Orr, a technology analyst with ABI Research, thinks for an open-source hardware project to succeed in the marketplace against proprietary, commercial products, it still needs “some ownership — some individual, some entity — that is providing the workforce to assemble and distribute these products … Once I’ve bought it, what’s the support like? Is there a warranty if something goes wrong?”

Still, he is cautiously optimistic about the potential of open source at gadgets’ R&D stage: “Could [the open-source model] challenge the commercial research and development process? I think so … because you create a larger pool of knowledge that any individual or organization could learn from.”

But will an open-source gadget ever take off in the same way Firefox and Ubuntu have, becoming a household name among mainstream gadget users? Open-source gadgets will become more common, Gartner’s Driver predicts, but he is unsure if we will see one that appeals to a wide user base and can challenge an equivalent proprietary product.

“Will we see the same kind of revolution in those kind of devices that we saw in software? That’s probably a much less likely occurrence to happen, at least for the foreseeable future,” Driver says.

Howard Wen is a frequent contributor to Computerworld

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
March 4, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The already heated online search war cranked up a notch in recent days as Google officials openly blamed Microsoft for triggering the European Commission’s antitrust probe into its activities.

Analysts say that if true, Microsoft’s decision to seek an EC antitrust investigation into Google activities would mark the latest move in its continuing effort to knock the high-riding search vendor down a peg or two.

The EC announced late last month that it had launched an antitrust investigation of Google based on complaints from three firms, two with connections to Microsoft.

Over the past year or so, Microsoft has been spending a lot of money and development resources to capture some of Google’s 60% share of the search market. But while the release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine last summer did garner a lot of attention, Google still maintains the dominant position it has held in the search market for years.

Now Microsoft appears to be taking a different route — creating a legal storm that would distract Google officials and keep them from focusing on the future of the business.

“Against Google’s level of control,” any effort to compete directly in the search business “could take [Microsoft] a lot of years and a massive investment,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “This approach [using legal means to distract Google] potentially shortens their time and the investment.

“The disparity in market share is simply too large for them to close the gap unless Google makes a massive sustained mistake or is hit by a successful antitrust action,” he added.

Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said it’s no surprise that the Microsoft-Google battle would enter a new realm, in this case the courtroom.

“I think that search is the most important crossroads in the history of information,” Andrews said. “I expect the striving conflict among the most powerful companies and countries in the world to intensify.”

In a conference call with journalists last week, Julia Holtz, Google’s top antitrust lawyer, blamed Microsoft for sparking the probe. “Microsoft is our competitor, and that explains many actions,” she said.

She noted that the three companies whose complaints triggered the investigation included Ciao, a German company acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

“Ciao [was] a long-time AdSense partner of Google’s, with whom we always had a good relationship,” Holtz said in a blog post. “However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao in 2008, we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels.”

She also noted that a second complainent, Foundem, a U.K. price comparison site, is a member of of a trade group called iComp , which is largely funded by Microsoft.

French legal search engine ejustice.fr was the third company whose complaint against Google is under investigation by the EC.

Microsoft responded to Holtz’ charge by contending that Google responded to the EC investigation by pointing fingers rather than answering the charges.

Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, added in a blog post that “Google hasn’t been shy about raising antitrust concerns about Microsoft in the last few years. Ultimately what’s important is not who is complaining, but whether or not the challenged practices are anticompetitive.”

Enderle noted that in the past, Microsoft frequently complained that rivals like Oracle Corp., Sun Microsoystems Inc. and Google were behind antitrust probes that targeted its actions.

Stuart Williams, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said users shouldn’t assume that Microsoft’s apparent legal challenge to Google indicates that it’s decided that Bing is not up to the challenge of taking on the search giant. It simply means that Microsoft is using all the tools in its arsenal.

“Both vendors have strong search technologies; the cases are not indications that either is throwing in the towel,” said Williams. “Large corporations can fight in the market as well as in the courtroom.”

The analysts do note that no matter who prompted the antitrust investigation, Google should prepare itself for the legal challenge.

“If you think about it, the validity of the charge should be based on the validity and substance of the evidence, not on whether a large competitor brought it to the enforcement agency’s attention,” said Enderle.

“I think this is a natural progression. Google’s should have been to anticipate that the fight they helped start with Microsoft would likely come back to haunt them. It’s like firing a nuclear bomb with the belief that the other side won’t turn around and use it against you.”

The antitrust action appears to be the latest battele in an escalating battle between Google and Microsoft on several fronts, from enterprise applications to operating systems and now especially to the burgeoning search market .

Nancy Gohring and Paul Meller of the IDG News Service, contributed to this article.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld . Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin , send e-mail to sgaudin@computerworld.com or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed .

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

It started out as a clever tale of unintentional and spontaneous humor, but the people behind Team Manila—a local graphic design merchandise collective—didn’t expect that printing the words “Payong na Itim” (Black Umbrella) on a, well, black umbrella, would pique the curiosity of its 3,000 followers on popular microblogging site Twitter so much that they haven’t stopped producing the distinct merchandise ever since.

What was once just an experimental venture is now a mainstay offering of their store, a solid proof of the much-hyped idea that social networking sites—or social media in general—indeed has its roots planted even in the enterprise sphere, if corporate heads have the mind and will to muster its potentials.

For Team Manila, a group of young graphic designers specializing on Manila-themed merchandise and lifestyle items, their business is heavily entrenched in the tangled web of the Internet given the young demographic of their customers.

And investing heavily on this group of Internet-savvy consumers sure had its payoffs. In November 2009, a Twitter link to a promotional graphic uploaded on the team’s Flickr account garnered much interest that as much as 1,333 viewed it within a few hours after posting.

But page views are nothing if they can’t be converted to actual product sales, and Jowee Alviar, half of Team Manila’s creative team and co-founder of the collective, was only more than happy to report that “many people turned up during our Saturday sale, which was only promoted through Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and our website.”

Team Manila, however, is no stranger to the unique social aspect of their product marketing. Before Twitter and Facebook were even conceived, they were already engaging their customers regarding the products they sell. “We would upload a number of designs on our mailing list, and members get to choose which ones they like,” narrates Alviar. “The top six designs are the ones that get printed and sold in our stores.”

This democratic inclusion of the customers in the planning and production stages of their merchandise was carried over to Twitter, which only expedited the process. “Through social media, we are able to include them [in our decisions as a company], especially because we want to be accessible to them,” Alviar says.

For its more than seven month run on Twitter, engaging with the customers has been the key to Team Manila’s social media success. “We want to establish a relationship with our clients, to connect with our market,” Alviar says. This is the reason why, aside from marketing promotions, Alviar—who handles the account—posts updates ranging from the mundane to the utterly nonsensical. “We want to find ways for them to re-tweet our posts, which further increases our reach,” he adds.

Zeroing In

Yet for all intents and purposes, the audience flocking Twitter—captive as it may seem—remain to be a niche segment of any company’s market. For Pepper Lunch Philippines, a local food outlet serving do-it-yourself grilled steaks, engaging with customers via social media meant zeroing in on a particular group of customers.

“Twitter is a way to connect with a certain customer group of Pepper Lunch customers. We have a lot of different customers and Twitter is a way for us to get close to this particular group,” says Jeroen van Straten, owner of the food franchise.

Since October 2009, van Straten says they’ve been posting promotional materials, information on upcoming events and store openings, and opportunities for customers to bag free items, food, and gift checks on their Twitter account. “It is a way for us to connect with our loyal customers,” he adds.

One particular time, van Straten shares, he posted updates about a new menu dish on the store. “People immediately re-tweeted the message and many have come over to the stores ordering the item, telling the cashier that they came over because of the Tweet!” he explains, adding that Twitter offers a unique new form of instant advertising for companies.

Realizing the potentials of the Internet in promoting their offerings, van Straten decided to shift to guerilla mode and has since been hunting feedback and comments about his venture online. “We monitor and follow all traffic, posts and comments on blogs and social networking sites that write about Pepper Lunch and answer them personally,” he says. “We use Google Alerts to notify us about all Pepper Lunch related stuff going on online. “

This “turning of the tables” is the immediate product of the social networking boom, with companies keen on hunting out the dingy corners of the web for conversations that can prove beneficial for their companies.

Every day, customers are talking about products and services over the Internet. “We need to listen to that conversation. When people are talking about your products and services to their friends, how can we take that info, and do something about it for the good of the company?” says Shivanu Shukla, industry manager, ICT practice for Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, in an earlier interview.

Facing the Music

Turning into an all-seeing eye is exactly what Globe Telecom, one of the country’s three telecommunications companies, is hoping to achieve. After seeing the apparent impact of social media over the lives of Filipinos—down to even the ones who don’t have Internet access—during the calamitous period when twin typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng hit the country’s capital, the company went full throttle into the social media landscape.

“[The year] 2009 saw the rise of social media presence in the Philippines when Ondoy and Pepeng hit. Of all possible channels to reach loved ones and authorities, people turned to social media to seek help, refuge, and action,” relates Philip Caballes, social media manager of Globe Telecom. “This validates our observation that social media is no longer just a trend in the country but a reality.”

For Globe, latching on to this reality meant being present in every social media channel available. “Globe is present in all major social media channels such as Facebook, Friendster, Multiply, Twitter, Plurk and in some up and coming Web 2.0 destinations. Globe uses these channels in different ways depending on what the site is good at doing,” Caballes explains.

Globe has more than 17,000 fans on its Facebook page, over 10,000 contacts in Friendster and Multiply, and at least 2,000 followers on Twitter as of writing. Harnessing the potentials of this vast audience, however, required heavy investment on Globe’s part, which upper management was more than willing to provide. “Social media investment this year has increased from 5% to 25% of our digital marketing budget from 2008 to 2009,” Caballes says.

But even if social media in general can greatly benefit a company through marketing or PR means, the different platforms available possess unique intricacies that, when leveraged properly, can raise these benefits exponentially. “We are present and active in [most social channels available]. The most effective channels for us are Twitter for handling customer engagement issues, Facebook for topical conversations, Multiply for publishing and Friendster for broadcasting,” Caballes clarifies.

But Globe isn’t only present on these popular and public social media platforms. Caballes says they also have presence in proprietary social media assets developed internally, such as Gloo.com.ph—a collaboration tool—and Minglr.ph—a social media feed aggregator.

Establishing presence, however, is merely the first step. Globe backs this up with quick and efficient response to queries and inquiries, which Caballes says “ranges from quality issues to network inquiries and the occasional compliments.”

Globe takes no longer than 48 hours to respond to feedback, Caballes says. “Twitter interactions tend to be faster, though,” he adds.

And what does Globe get out of this? “We measure ROI for social media activities differently. It is not measured against a media buy but on the level and depth of engagement we get with our customers,” Caballes explains.

A Curious Case

But another kind of engagement got the Manila Electric Company (Meralco), the capital’s electricity provider, jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. As if jolted by the immediate and massive effects of social media, Meralco’s PR department woke up to a start during the recent typhoons when a deluge of false information being spread around washed up on their doorstep.

“We already had plans to setup a Twitter account, but mostly just as a supporting platform for our corporate blog,” narrates Kirk Campos, part of Meralco’s external communications group. “A day before Typhoon Pepeng (international codename: Parma) made landfall, a message circulated around Facebook claiming that Meralco will shut the metro’s power down by nine in the evening.”

Campos said people were already spreading the information around thinking it was accurate, which created more problems on their part. “I had to go on air and clarify the matter. We had to categorically state that there was, and there will be, no such incident,” explains Joe Zaldarriaga, the external communications group head of Meralco. “Aside from traditional media, we came up with almost a spontaneous move to go to Twitter.”

Meralco’s back-breaking crisis PR didn’t stop there. A week after the incident, a transmission facility operated by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) suddenly broke down, causing intermittent brownouts in some portions of Eastern Manila. “There was someone on Twitter—who goes by the handle of @manilaelectric— delivering a blow-by-blow account of the incident, even implying that a ‘Meralco substation exploded,’ which is not the case at all,” Zaldarriaga says.

That moment, he says, the PR team of Meralco got in touch with Nick Nichols, a power sector consultant who initially set up to reserve the Twitter handle @meralco because he “wanted Meralco to have its own Twitter account.” “After we got in touch with him, he verified our identities for due diligence, after which he turned the account over to us,” Zaldarriaga relates.

The PR Team then linked the Twitter account to the official website of Meralco, and announced subsequently the opening of the account over broadcast media, to give credence to the account. “We have around 1,500 followers right now, who mostly deliver queries and inquiries about power interruptions in their areas,” Campos says.

Evolve or Die

The massive explosion of social media reverberated throughout every aspect of society that choosing to ignore its business value can potentially spell misfortune for firms that do not harness its powers.

Analyst firm Gartner puts it boldly in saying that “resisiting social media is futile,” and that firms opting to resist or ignore it is still making a decision—of shutting their organization from a vast pool of valuable information.

Meralco, a 106 year-old company, has paid heed to this advice, and is slowly reaping the benefits. “You have to adapt to the changing environment, and keep researching, finding out, what are the new trends in the information field, what are the new channels being opened to further engage the consumers,” asserts Zaldarriaga. “Learning is a process, it’s an everyday process. You learn, and you have to adapt accordingly. You should always be in step with the development in the field.”

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By Dan Nystedt
IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)
February 26, 2010

TAIPEI - The global chip industry will rebound sharply from the global recession and post 20 percent year-on-year growth in 2010, market researcher Gartner said Thursday.

The growth forecast is slightly higher than others have predicted but is in step with bullish forecasts for the global semiconductor industry this year. Strong demand for a variety of chips has contributed to strong earnings growth at chip makers from microprocessor giant Intel to memory chip king Samsung Electronics.

Strong growth in PCs and memory chips will be primary drivers for semiconductor revenue to reach US$276 billion this year, up from $231 billion last year, Gartner said in a statement. Worldwide chip revenue declined 9.6 percent last year.

“We have seen clear evidence that the semiconductor industry is poised for strong growth in 2010,” said Gartner analyst Bryan Lewis, in the statement.

Gartner expects 20 percent more PCs to be produced this year than in 2009, a major boon for chip makers. DRAM makers will benefit from a 55 percent rise in revenue this year, making the chip segment the fastest growing “by far,” the market researcher said. Most DRAM chips are used in PCs.

The full-year chip industry growth target is slightly higher than that of in-house forecasters at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker. TSMC last month said it expects the global semiconductor market to grow 18 percent this year, after contracting 9 percent last year, due mainly to strong PC and mobile phone sales.

The company plans to spend a historical-high $4.8 billion on new factories and production lines this year to keep pace with fast chip industry growth, and to make up for slower spending during the recession.

Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chip maker, predicted last month that strong PC sales will raise chip revenue 10 percent to 20 percent this year and that prices of DRAM and NAND flash memory chips will remain strong.

Gartner warned Thursday that a correction might be needed for the chip industry in the near term in order to head off an inventory glut. The researcher said that according to the data it tracks, there is a need to re-balance chip sales with system sales.

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By Matt Hamblen
Computerworld (US)
February 16, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - In separate announcements from Barcelona today, three traditional powerhouses in computing and communications — Microsoft , Intel and Nokia — kick-started major revamps to their technology to adapt to a quick-changing smartphone and mobile device market that’s increasingly dominated by Google and Apple . 

“Microsoft is in a bigger ’start over’ penalty box than Intel and Nokia, but it really is a start over for all of them,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates about the announcements made at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “Microsoft does have a much steeper road to climb to get back into the game than Nokia/Intel does.”

Intel joined Nokia in unveiling Meego , a Linux -based open operating system to be used in smartphones, netbooks, connected TVs and tablets. Meego combines features from Intel’s Moblin OS and Nokia’s Maemo OS. Devices using Meego are expected to arrive in the second half of 2010. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touted Windows Phone 7 Series software that’s expected to be running on smartphones due out by the 2010 holiday season on a variety of carriers globally, including AT&T in the U.S.
Ballmer said the new version of Microsoft’s operating system for mobile phone will bring “more consistency in the hardware platform and in the user experience” than earlier versions.

In both announcements, it was obvious that the three companies are adjusting to the market success of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and the coming iPad tablet, as well as Google Inc. The search company is behind a host of software applications for a variety of upcoming Android OS smartphones and devices that it helped create in its sponsorship of the Open Handset Alliance.

Gold said that Microsoft has “basically had to nuke its existing OS and start over,” while Intel and Nokia could blend most of the existing code in Moblin and Maemo to create Meego.

Ballmer did not describe Windows Phone 7 Series as a start-over, of course, but implied it comes in reaction to past criticism of Windows Mobile OS and its decline in sales in late 2009.

“We have a chance to make a major impact on the [smartphone] market… (with the new OS),” Ballmer said. “We had to step back and recast.”

Ballmer also didn’t go as far as he did last fall when he told investors that Microsoft had “screwed up with Windows Mobile” and had shuffled its Windows Mobile team to regain lost ground. 

Updated user functions in Windows Phone 7 include concepts such as “hubs” that display a page of contacts called “people,” for example. Other hubs will be labeled “office” for note-taking and synchronizing documents with a PC; “games,” for integrating with the Microsoft Xbox live online community; and “music+video” for synchronizing the smartphone with Microsoft’s desktop Zune jukebox and music store software.

Windows Phone 7 will also provide a touchscreen Qwerty keyboard as in some Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, Ballmer said.

Even with new innovations, Microsoft will continue to employ a licensing model where phone manufacturers pay a fee for Microsoft software, Ballmer said, offering no details. He also argued that “free” software in open operating systems such as Android might not really be free.

Gold called the Meego announcement a positive for both Intel and Nokia. It will help Nokia make a “direct assault” on the enormous momentum behind Google’s Android and Chrome, and will help Intel attack the ARM chip architecture used in smartphones and other smart personal devices, he said. ARM chips, developed and licensed by ARM Holdings, are used extensively in smartphones and mobile phones; Intel has developed the Atom chip to compete directly with ARM.

But Gold said “it remains to be seen if anyone besides Intel and Nokia will embrace Meego.” He believes Nokia will hold onto its existing Symbian OS for lower-end mobile phones, but needs something like Meego for higher end smartphones down the road.

Nokia dominates the smartphone market today with its Symbian OS, but Android is projected to catapult to the No. 2 spot behind Nokia by 2012, according to Gartner Inc. and IDC. 

While Apple’s total share of the smartphone market is well behind Symbian’s, the company’s growth year-over-year — and excitement over next month’s arrival of the iPad — that make it such a challenge for traditional companies like Microsoft, Intel and Nokia. 

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@matthamblen or subscribe to . His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com .

Read more about mobile and wireless in Computerworld’s Mobile and Wireless Knowledge Center.

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By Denise Dubie
Network World (US)
January 5, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - After a year of hiring freezes and layoffs, IT professionals in 2010 will face a challenging employment market and the search for IT talent will grow beyond in-demand high-tech skills to also include industry-specific business savvy.

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IT professionals still smarting from the pain of the economic recession inflicted in 2009 won’t find immediate relief in a booming employment market for 2010, analysts say. Companies will be rebuilding IT teams, but the majority of them will return to pre-recession levels as IT executives examine different sourcing options while working to help their businesses recover from the downturn.

“Companies looking to fill internal IT roles will focus more on crucial business-facing positions. There is no longer a blurring between IT and the business; those barriers are broken down now. IT will be expected to take more of a leadership role and make decisions for the business,” says Lily Mok, vice president of Gartner’s CIO Research. “IT needs to look for opportunities to really help the business transition from recession to recovery. IT needs to do more than support the business now; it needs to prepare an organization to return to growth and show how technology can be used to help the business shine.”

That means managers and recruiters are on the lookout for IT pros with vertical-industry knowledge in areas such as healthcare, insurance and government, as well as experience with business process re-engineering. Yet technology-specific skills around emerging areas such as cloud computing and software-as-a-service will drive the need for savvy vendor management approaches, while security, virtualization and data center technical know-how will continue to be sought after among the pool of available IT pros. 

“Data shows that the combination of deep technical IT skills with project management or leadership experience, as well as looking at the intersection of IT and risk management for the business, are the areas in highest demand,” says Jeff Schwartz, principal of human capital at Deloitte Consulting.

Know your vertical
The stereotype of IT existing in the back office and not facing the business is gone. In years past, industry watchers have advised high-tech workers to better communicate with the business, but now the task is to become a critical player in the success of the business — and not only by taking direction. IT professionals will be expected to take a leadership role in 2010 and take initiative in making decisions in the best interests of the business.

“Even with all the new technologies going on, the job market for IT pros is about the application of the technologies to the business. The skills required going forward will be multi-faceted in ways they haven’t been in the past. Technology workers need to understand the business and provide a diverse set of technical skills to become the go-to person to deliver the right technology for the business,” says Rich Milgram, CEO of recruiting and strategic staffing provider Beyond.com.

Some vertical industries in particular will see a huge spike in demand for high-tech workers. For instance, healthcare is expected to see demand for 70,000 new IT positions in the next 12 months, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association. The increase in open jobs is due in part to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which includes billions in provisions for healthcare IT. The expected uptick in demand is driving industry organizations such as CompTIA to find the best ways to educate and train IT workers on healthcare-specific skills.

“We are working now to determine what kind of IT roles should be supported in certifications from CompTIA,” says Terry Erdle, senior vice president of skills certifications at CompTIA.

Also associated with economic stimulus plans, insurance companies and government agencies will experience a significant increase in demand for high-tech talent.

“There is little question that the healthcare sector, regardless of what the outcome of healthcare reform will be, is going to continue growing. From an industry perspective, healthcare is at the top of the list followed by government agencies in terms of demand,” Deloitte’s Schwartz says.

This sharpened focus on business knowledge will also drive demand in IT governance, business processes engineering, project management and architect positions, high-tech talent experts report.

“The skills within IT that are process-centric are clearly more in demand today,” says Sean Ebner, regional vice president of Technisource. “The blurring of lines between business process engineers and technology engineers has happened and companies want to hire candidates that will be able to apply governance, to implement and modify systems in a more cost-efficient manner using process engineering and knowledge automation.”

Understanding the business, being able to re-engineer processes in such a way to streamline operations and optimizing IT projects will be top of mind for many hiring managers, IT industry watchers agree.

“Those coming from the business side or being very well versed in the business processes are in good positions,” Gartner’s Mok says. “Combining the knowledge of the technical systems with business processes will help IT professionals get and keep key positions.”

Secure next-generation nets
It’s no surprise with multiplying headlines around data leaks and cybercrime that security skills remain sought after, even in a down employment market. Yet the type of security professional in demand ranges from technical skills acquired via certifications to executive-level risk managers, analysts say.

“Security continues to be in demand, in both operational and strategic positions. Information risk management is seeing growth as well as those positions that require a tactical technical focus,” says David Foote, co-founder, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners.

Foote Partners data shows that while many certified and noncertified skills experienced pay decreases throughout the recession, IT professionals with security certification on average experienced a nearly 2% pay increase through the third quarter of 2009. Over the past two years, IT security certifications overall saw average premium pay increase by more than 3.6%, trailing only architecture/project management certifications, which experienced a 5% compensation increase in the same timeframe.

“If you know how to keep your company’s data secure, you were in demand yesterday, are in demand today and will be in demand tomorrow,” says Tom Silver, senior vice president with Dice.com.

CompTIA in late 2009 polled some 1,537 high-tech workers and found 37% intend to pursue a security certification over the next five years. Separately, nearly 20% indicated they would seek ethical hacking certification over the same time period. And another 13% pinpointed forensics as the next certification goal in their career development.

“When you add the results, you will see that about two-thirds of IT workers intend to add some type of security certification to their portfolio,” says Terry Erdle, senior vice president of skills certifications. “This trend is driven by two factors: one, security issues are pervasive, and two, more and more people are moving to managed services and software-as-a-service models, which involves more complex networking. That level of non-enterprise data center computing has people look more closely at their security infrastructure.”

Acquire open source skills
Open source software is gaining steam among enterprise companies that find the flexibility and low cost appealing and now can pick and choose among commercial support packages. Certified skills and experience in the realm of open source packages are already on recruiters’ radar, according to IT talent experts, who report that companies in 2010 will seek candidates with open source skills.

“We are seeing a ton of demand for skills around open source technologies and frameworks. Demand for Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP development skills far exceeds the number of people available with skills,” says Michael Kirven, co-founder and principal of IT resourcing firm Bluewolf. 

The online job resource for technology professionals, Dice.com, also reports seeing increased interest in open source skill sets. Silver says the Web site has seen a growth in interest around programming skills such as Ruby on Rails and Python as well.

“There are about 1,000 jobs open looking for such skills and we expect open source technologies are an area employers will be looking to hire,” he says.

Yet keep in mind the interest in these technologies is at an enterprise level, from employers looking to hire IT professionals that can help them run data centers more efficiently and cost-effectively.

“Hiring managers want to see more than people playing around with open source in a sandbox environment. People that get trained and certified on these open source technologies will stand out when their resumes fall on recruiters’ desks,” Kirven adds. 

Understand the hype
Emerging technologies, perhaps shrouded in a bit of hype, have garnered attention from hiring managers as well. With vendors touting cloud computer, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and social networking tools as a productivity, operations and economic problem solvers, enterprise IT leaders will want staff who can navigate through the fluff and find the substance in such offerings.

Gartner recognized cloud computing, mobility, social networking and virtualization as top technologies for 2010 and in turn, that means hiring managers will be seeking skills in those same areas, according to Mok. That is one reason the research firm identified Java, .Net and other Web development technologies as a sought after skill set.

“The demand for such skills is not about the amount of available IT pros that know Java, it is more with the quality of the skill sets people have in those areas,” Mok explains. “The future is the Web via social computing and those are just extensions of a variety of multimedia and Web skills. It is directly related to how businesses can use the Internet to better connect with customers.”

While Web development skills aren’t new, cloud computing, for instance, is being presented as a new technology, though many would argue it is based on previous models for delivering technology. Still such confusion around cloud services could be quickly cleared up but a high-tech worker well-versed in the market who knows what moves might best benefit the company. Such knowledge is going to get IT leaders’ attention, IT talent experts say.

“Anyone looking for work in the IT space should be well-versed in what cloud means to the company they want to work for. It means many different things, everyone is throwing cloud into their product pitches,” Bluewolf’s Kirven says. “Hiring managers want to see people that have done cloud before and understand how it can be used and how it can turn into a disaster. They want the best possible talent in house to try to drive these new initiatives.”

Vendors such as IBM are even getting in on the cloud skills action. The company in fall 2009 launched its IBM Cloud Academy, which it describes as a “global forum for educators, researchers and IT personnel from the education industry to pursue cloud computing initiatives, develop skills and share best practices for reducing operating costs while improving quality and access to education.” CompTIA also in the fall of 2009 acquired MSP partners, which Erdle says, is helping the industry organization “baseline requirements for a set of certifications around managed services, SaaS, cloud and virtual skills.” 

“We get several calls per week around SaaS, cloud and virtual skills that companies want guidance on considering we are the vendor-neutral party,” Erdle explains. “CompTIA is working now on building certifications programs to release in 2010 and get in front of this growing demand.”

Deliver advanced data centers
In the wake of the recession, companies won’t abandon the lessons learned from over-provisioning or spending needlessly on excess infrastructure resources, for instance. Designing and delivering cost-efficient, consolidated data centers will top the list of many IT leaders and finding employees experienced in the areas of virtualization energy-efficient computing will be critical to their success during the economic recovery.

“There is huge demand right now for a lot of the skills around data center moves and consolidations. There are skills lacking in virtualization technologies and even network technology that they need to understand to support next-generation data centers,” Bluewolf’s Kirven says. “Add data center security and disaster recovery skills to that list and the ideal candidate would need to be very well versed in the many technologies that make up data centers of the future.”

As companies continue to invest in virtualization, the demand for IT professionals experience in designing virtual data centers will also grow. According to Foote Partners, virtualization continues to land on the research firm’s hot list of technologies and related skills.

“There has been a lot of spending around virtualization skills already,” Foote says.

Companies today are seeking talent in virtualization and employment watchers expect the existing numbers to only continue to grow.

“We have more than 1,000 jobs on the site right now that call for understanding virtualization and how that technology can be applied to a company’s infrastructure,” Dice.com’s Silver adds, “If you have experience in virtualization, if you essentially know how you can help your company’s data center run more efficiently, then you are already in demand.”

Looking ahead
Industry watchers report IT staffs could remain lean in the coming months and that economic recovery might not indicate a full job recovery to pre-recession numbers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t opportunity for IT professionals to expand their careers and take advantage of the opportunity to become a critical part of their company’s business in the long-term, according to Gartner’s Mok

“IT departments during the downturn were very cautious about where they reduced and more organizations plan to keep staffing levels flat for a period of time. As the recovery continues, they might not even add too much, so I don’t think we will ever go back to the big IT departments of 2000 or 2001,” she says. “But companies realize today that these business-savvy technology skill sets take time to develop and they are doing a better job of workforce planning and training staff on the technologies they feel their business will need in the future.”

Some IT watchers argue that high-tech remains a successful career option for many. The fact that many jobs remained open during the recession points to a continued need for high-tech talent, and job seekers should consider this a positive sign going forward, researching in what vertical market the skills they possess are most in demand.

“We’ve seen throughout the recession the interesting phenomenon of unfilled jobs even though people are actively looking for work. That is just one measure of the skills gap,” Deloitte’s Schwartz says. “The job market is different than in boom time, and the problem remains to be about matching available skills to open positions.”

And while some say the future for IT professionals continues to look promising, they are quick to point out that it also looks very different from the past.

“Market influences such as outsourcing and budget strain is forcing clarity on how money is spent on high-tech talent,” says Adam Lawrence, vice president of service delivery at Yoh Talent Solutions. “Ultimately it comes down to the worker to move up the value chain from being a great coder to becoming an architect savvy in the business, for instance. Technology workers must know how the business is intricately underpinned with technology and use their technical talent toward making the business a bigger success.” 

Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter.

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
December 18, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The worldwide semiconductor industry hit such a slump in 2009 that it will likely go down as one of its steepest sales declines since 1985, according to Gartner Inc.

The Stamford, Conn. research firm issued a report this week projecting that worldwide semiconductor revenues will total $226 billion in 2009, 11.4% — or $29 billion — less than in 2008. Gartner noted that the 2009 results mark the first time ever that semiconductor sales declined two years in a row.

“Revenue dropped precipitously in the first quarter of 2009, continuing a deterioration which started in the last quarter of 2008,” said Stephan Ohr, semiconductor research director at Gartner, in a statement.

Gartner’s projection comes about a month after investment house Morgan Stanley cut its rating on the semiconductor industry from “attractive” to “cautious,” while also downgrading the likes of Intel. Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Micron Technology Inc.

At the time, Morgan Stanley analysts Mark Lipacis and Sanjay Devgan wrote in a note that rising inventories and concerns about PC component sales drove them to be more cautious about the industry.

This is particularly bad news for industry watchers who have been predicting that the semiconductor market will lead the U.S. economy out of the mire it’s been in the past few years.

Gartner noted that the industry saw a slight uptick toward the end of the first quarter and realized quarter-over-quarter growth throughout the rest of 2009. But that growth still wasn’t enough to lift the industry out of the doldrums, it added.

Just last month IDC had reported that worldwide computer chip shipments skyrocketed in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. The IDC report noted that after chip makers had struggled through quarter after recent quarter over the past couple of years, third quarter PC microprocessor shipments jumped 23%.

Nonetheless, the full year wasn’t a good one for semiconducor makers.

“Yes, it was a bad year for the semiconductor segment,” said Dan Olds, an analyst for The Gabriel Consulting Group. “However, it’s interesting to note that the pain was not universal.” He cited Gartner’s projection that Samsung’s 2009 sales will grow by 2.55% while Intel’s sales will decline by “only” 5.4%, “while others like STMicroelectronics and Renesas were down much more.”

Gartner said that Hynix Semiconductor and Qualcomm also showed revenue growth of 2.3% and 0.4% respectively.

The companies hit the hardest this year were Infineon Technologies, whose sales are expected by Gartner to fall by 46.5% drop, and Renesas Technology, whose decline is said to total 19.9%. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is projected to take a 10.1% hit this year, according to Gartner.

“AMD and Intel were definitely impacted by lower demand in PCs and servers,” said Olds. “However, I think there is a chance for a recovery in 2010 as demand picks up. I think that consumer sales will pick up if confidence returns. Business sales will recover a bit in any case, as businesses have postponed purchases that they will have to make at some point.”

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
December 4, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Flash-based storage will quickly become one of the most important technologies in the data center, Gartner said this week.

Flash-based solid state memory is still 25 to 30 times more expensive than spinning disk drives on a per-gigabyte basis, and there are questions about its durability, but it carries several advantages over traditional storage devices, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said at the research firm’s annual data center conference.

“If you compare it to disk drives it’s a lot faster,” Claunch said. “It’s small. It’s very rugged so you can put flash memory in something where a rotating disk drive would fail because of the shock.”

There are technical limits that place a ceiling on the number of times you can rewrite data to a particular location with flash drives, but clever use of software that controls how, where and when data is written is extending product lifespan.

“The reality today is you can create flash that lasts about as long as a real disk drive,” Claunch said. “We’re really getting to the point where this is interesting.”

The biggest strategic reason that flash is gaining prominence in the enterprise is that, for years, server processor speeds have improved exponentially while disk access speed has improved at slower rates. “The gap between the two keeps getting wider,” Claunch said.

Using RAM cache and other mechanisms can help eliminate performance penalties, but enterprises are still struggling with erratic application performance because of slow disk drives, Claunch said.

Flash should not replace disk on a one-to-one basis because of the cost, but applications can be sped up dramatically if files and bits that are critical to system performance are moved onto flash, Claunch said.

Flash was one of several products Gartner listed as among “the most important technologies in your data center future.”

Others include green technology, new types of client computing, virtualization, the cloud, and data center pods and zones.

Gartner is also forecasting a major change in how servers are built, from today’s blades to a fabric-based approach that treats memory, processors and I/O cards as interchangeable elements.

Vendor profits have gone down as servers have become commodities, but development of new fabric-based systems can give customers more flexibility in the data center while giving vendors a reason to charge more money, Claunch said.

Future fabric-based servers “will treat memory, processors and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs,” Gartner has said.

Vendors such as 3Leaf Systems and RNA Networks are working on building data center platforms that offer some of the flexibility of Gartner’s predicted fabric-based servers, and there is plenty of venture capital money out there for vendors with an innovative approach, Claunch said.

“Fabric is a wonderful opportunity,” he said. “It’s in the best interests of the server vendors to get there.”

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By Tom S. Noda
Published in the CWP November 2009 issue

As the Internet continues to evolve and improve with technologies such as Web 2.0, the expectations of the growing number of netizens are also changing as they expect improved features from websites they patronize—putting pressure on companies with online storefronts and a market opportunity for technology providers.

A big reason for the heightened expectations is that sites like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and Facebook continue to push the envelope in terms of new features and the online experience in general, says Gene Alvarez, Gartner’s vice president of e-commerce and CRM research.

In fact, Gartner reports that although IT budgets are shrinking anywhere between 5% to 25%, companies are expected to sharpen the online shopping experiences of their companies’ customers.

“That’s the real big challenge here for e-commerce organizations: The bar keeps rising despite the economy,” says Alvarez. “Whether in business-to-consumer or business-to-business e-commerce, as customers are exposed to new capabilities, they expect those at all other Web sites.”

The demand for new features in websites has not gone unnoticed by many technology providers who have launched software and services that aim to improve the online storefront of companies.

Only recently, Google launched its Google Checkout store gadget that can be embedded in any website without the need to engage in “complicated coding.” It helps people create an online store “in a matter of minutes” with the gadget application using Google’s Checkout electronic payment service and its Docs spreadsheet application.

In the Philippines, a number of technology vendors are currently moving towards the development of e-business applications both in the B2C and B2B space.

For example, ePLDT, Inc. a local ICT firm and wholly-owned subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), is now in the process of developing a suite of business applications that will be available online. It will be a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type of service which the company will announce probably by the 1st quarter of 2010.

Meanwhile, two other firms, DataOne Asia Philippines Inc. and Ripple E-Business International, Inc., are both offering products and services for business organizations to benefit from e-commerce. DataOne claims to empower company websites, while Ripple claims to be one of the fastest-growing software companies catering to the retail and distribution industry.

Jojo Colina, head of the product management and development group at ePLDT, explains the difference between e-commerce and e-business. He says the placing of one’s information online for promotions is already e-business. But when one starts selling online, it crosses the line of e-commerce.

“Marketing and site optimization all fall under e-business but it may still be called e-commerce but e-commerce is very specific. It is the negotiation of the exchange of value of goods. And that’s the traditional definition of e-commerce,” says Colina.

E-BIZ PARTNER
Servicing a wide range of enterprises across various industries, ePLDT has tools that enable e-commerce and e-business, says Colina. He describes ePLDT at present as more of an infrastructure-enabler type.

Colina explains ePLDT’s portfolio of products is all Internet-related and everything the company offers can be employed in an e-business infrastructure.

“We do not yet make our services available in an e-commerce form, where you go to a portal and click to just sign up for services,” he says. “But our services right now are more geared towards enabling those who are into the e-commerce and e-business fields.”

Colina says from its security certificate authority services, ePLDT has its own payment gateway services and a hosting data center facility.

He says ePLDT is affiliated with the largest certificate authority (CA) firm VeriSign, Inc., a known issuer of digital certificates worldwide. It offers trust services that accelerate the deployment of secure e-commerce applications.

However, for its payment gateway services, ePLDT offers the GetLoaded online PIN purchasing portal that allows an entity to accept online payments. And for its hosting facility, it has its own data center called Vitro.

“As an affiliate of VeriSign, we offer all sorts of certifications. We also provide managed security, firewalls, antivirus, and anti-spam which are all essential to any entity that wishes to participate in e-business,” says Colina.

Colina adds ePLDT can go as far as providing application development as well.

“We have right now customers in the banking sectors and companies that have online stores that use our certificate authority to ensure the authenticity of the transactions,” Colina says, although declining to name the clients.

Colina advises that when selecting a vendor for e-business or e-commerce solutions, one must look for a vendor with a track record and financial capability.

“There has to be a relationship of trust, and that is usually established by an e-commerce site employing the services of a trusted certificate authority that will issue a certificate to verify that it is a real organization and it has gone through some process of verification of its identity,” he says. “It’s a matter of statistics, whether your IT service provider will be there or not.”

EMPOWERING WEBSITES
Meanwhile, DataOne, which envisions itself to be the leading provider of the so-called “new generation telecommunication services” aims to cater to companies engaged in e-business.

“Our company is supported by a carrier-grade technology which offers flexible and innovative solutions to deliver all the potential of convergence,” says Cyril Rocke, president and CEO of DataOne.

Rocke says DataOne offers VoiceOne solution and the WebTalk service, two technologies that are not only meant to aid companies in e-business but to others as well who are involved in sales and customer service, firms with toll free hotlines, multinationals with extensive channel distribution, corporations with global customers, and other companies with extensive mobile workforce.

“VoiceOne goes beyond the traditional voice-based system. It serves as the voice service provider to the enterprise, outbound, inbound, and domestically,” he says. “It’s the converging of voice and data over a single network.”

Rocke explains what VoiceOne does is that it eliminates complexities such as integration with legacy systems and also voice quality problems. It is a solution that offers PBX-like features without the high costs of purchasing and maintaining PBX systems.

However, Rocke claims companies that are into e-business can take advantage of DataOne’s WebTalk service which enables a website to become “the entry point for all business communications.”

In using WebTalk, Rocke says there is no need to have a phone number or download applications, only easy-to-use buttons. Its other features are: No complex IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System), no per minute charges, no expensive toll-free numbers, and no complex integration with existing systems.

“WebTalk empowers your website by turning it into an active site. Voice communication and interaction can take place via a customer’s click in your website,” Rocke says. “Your website won’t be static anymore if you use WebTalk.”

Rocke shares DataOne will soon be targeting around 50,000 companies, or “all” companies in the Philippines with the dot.ph domain for its WebTalk service.

E-BIZ FOR SMES
Yet for Ripple, it has a flagship product called Barter Retail Solution – an end-to-end solution for mid-tier supermarkets, departments store, hyper-marts, depots and other retail establishments.

Some of the well-known clients of Ripple at present include Ever, Super 8, and Gaisano Mall of Davao.

Victor Javier, president and CEO of Ripple, says “Barter solution is ‘online’ since it connects multiple establishments (branches and warehouses) together, allowing retail businesses to capture real time performance of every location.”

Javier says the e-business solution captures the processes from purchasing of goods to point of sale (front end and back-end operation). It also handles customer relationship management and promotion management, covering the entire retail operation.

“Barter provides retail owners real time information of their sales performance and efficiently tracks their inventories to the item level, thus, maximizing revenue and profitability, as well as minimizing loss,” he says.

Among its list of mid-tier clients, some of Ripple’s clients already have existing systems while others are starting from scratch. “We are able to help both types of clients by implementing best practices or transform their existing process to become more optimized and efficient.”

Focusing on retail technology, Ripple is pushing itself to become more than just another enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions firm.

“There are many IT companies offering different solutions. As a retail solutions company, we extensively invest in research and development of different technologies that can be applied in a retail environment,” Javier notes. “While most local IT companies focus on reselling foreign packages or being a box pusher, Ripple continues to innovate and develop Barter solution which I believe is fit for the Filipino sharp trader.”

A member of the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA), Javier comments that “e-commerce is slow in taking off in the Philippines.”

Javier says the traditional way of buying things, like going to supermarkets and malls is still the norm of today’s consumers. It is the reason on why Ripple is focused on becoming the IT arm of retail firms, mostly small-and medium-size enterprises (SME).

“Although e-commerce experienced a major hype in the past, not many people are making their purchases online,” Javier notes. – With notes from Juan Carlos Perez (IDGNS)

SIDEBAR:

Tips to Stretch the E-Commerce Budget

In order to stretch their resources and meet management’s expectations, e-commerce units can take various steps, including reducing the money they spend on developing in-house applications, says Gartner, Inc..

In particular, IT departments shouldn’t invest on creating their own applications for basic e-commerce functions, since those can be implemented at a lower cost through commercial “off the shelf” software.

Specifically in the case of rich Internet applications (RIAs), the custom development work should be limited to those applications that will generate high sales conversion rates.

“You waste money if you have developers supporting commodity capabilities,” says Gene Alvarez, Gartner’s vice president of e-commerce and CRM research. A company’s e-commerce developers should be focused on building the types of made-to-measure applications that will give the company an edge over its competition.

In addition, IT departments must make sure that their e-commerce groups are maximizing the use of technology tools and products the company already owns.

At the negotiation table, IT departments should be merciless when dealing with their e-commerce software vendors and aim to lower their 2009 license fees between 20% to 50%.

Finally, IT managers need to take stock of their e-commerce staff to see if there are employees elsewhere doing the same tasks, such as separate marketing people for online and offline operations, in which case the work can be consolidated and personnel reduced, according to Gartner. –Juan Carlos Perez, IDGNS

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
December 2, 2009

BOSTON - Gartner announced Monday that it is buying AMR Research for US$64 million, in the latest acquisition by the giant IT research firm. The deal is expected to be completed this month.

AMR is known for its emphasis on supply chain management. It has roughly 40 analysts and 45 sales representatives, and is on track to gross $40 million this year, according to Gartner.

Publicly traded Gartner dwarfs AMR in size, reporting $1.28 billion in revenue in 2008. Part of Gartner’s growth came through acquisitions, such as its 2004 purchase of META Group for $162 million.

Even though AMR is being swallowed into a much larger organization, its customers will see no disruptions as a result of the acquisition, AMR Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson said in a blog post Monday.

“Your research, client services, and sales contacts will remain the same. All are being retained by Gartner,” he wrote. No changes will be made to AMR’s research agenda or current schedule of events, he added.

There are many positive aspects to the acquisition for AMR, including the chance to address a larger audience and provide clients with truly global support, as AMR has operations in just the U.S. and UK, compared to Gartner’s worldwide reach, he said.

AMR will also be able to expand the number of verticals it covers, Richardson said.

Analysts from smaller firms offered mixed perspectives on the news Monday.

“This transaction essentially makes one big guy bigger, and removes a second from the marketplace, so it certainly changes the analyst landscape in general,” said Stephen O’Grady, co-founder of Redmonk. “That said, we’re pretty highly differentiated from both, in that our research focus, our audience and to a certain extent, our customer base, is distinct from either Gartner or AMR’s. As a result, I don’t imagine we’ll shift strategies.”

Major analyst firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester tend to speak to CIOs and other top IT executives, O’Grady said. “Our view is that [technology] adoption is increasingly driven bottom-up rather than top-down. … As a result, we’re most concerned with developers, which means that we tend to be more ahead of the curve than the big guys.”

The deal foretells a wave of change in the IT analyst market, according to Jason Busch of Spend Matters, which provides information and services to buyers and vendors of supply chain and procurement software.

“Consolidation will create fewer voices from existing and even new players that continue to adhere to legacy business models. This will in turn open up the industry to new approaches,” he wrote in a blog post. “The market for non-customized paid technology content will continue to decline unless the research is highly focused around a specific vertical or category.”

“With the rise of blogs and expert, in-depth downloadable content, I believe that in-depth analysis that’s paid for by those looking for leads will continue to gain favor relative to per-report or research subscription research models,” he added.

It’s also likely that more individual analysts will become brand names, versus firms, he said.

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By Channelworld staff
Channelworld India
December 2, 2009

BANGALORE - Worldwide server shipments for the third quarter of 2009 dropped 17.1 percent over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period declined 15.5 percent according to Gartner. Worldwide server revenues totaled $10.7 billion for the quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached 1.2 million units.

“It is important to put the yearly declines into perspective,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Looking at the third quarter results from the sequential perspective, they showed an increase of 13.8 percent in shipments and 10.2 percent in revenues when compared to the second quarter of this year. That suggests that the market as a whole is showing signs of stabilization as we move toward the end of 2009,” he said

IBM held the revenue lead in the worldwide server market for the quarter. IBM’s overall revenue share lead over second-place HP was 1.5 percent for the quarter. Four of the top 5 vendors posted double-digit declines in revenue year over year. However, all of the top tier vendors experienced sequential revenue growth, except for Sun Microsystems.

In server shipments, Hewlett-Packard retained its worldwide server shipment lead, as its market share reached 32.1 percent in the third quarter of 2009. Dell maintained the No. 2 ranking as its share totaled 22.8 percent. HP’s shipment performance was driven primarily by its ProLiant brands.

The overall Indian server market, however, totaled at around $118Mn during this quarter registering a year-on-year decline of 28.3 percent. This market decline could be partly contributed to the sluggish economic situation coupled with seasonality observed around this quarter. Gartner expects that the OND quarter should be much better primarily fuelled by a lot of pent up demand coupled with year end buying. Overall, Hewlett Packard emerged as the market leader followed by IBM and Sun Microsystems. HP and IBM were the worst affected vendors due to the limited market server demand during this quarter in India.

x86 servers accounted for around 59 percent of the market revenue leading to a revenue increase of 4.4 percent, as compared to last quarter. This further suggests that India CIO’s have started selective purchase of servers, which can be considered as early signal of economic recovery. India companies have undertaken a lot server refresh and consolidation projects. Virtualization has been a key driver for such deployments in large as well as mid-market territory. On the other side, non x86 segment of the server witnessed a sequential decline of 35.9 percent this quarter. Some of the large projects seem to be deferred for the next quarter, stated Gartner.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 1, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - IBM retained its narrow lead over Hewlett-Packard in the worldwide server market as sales began to stabilize during the third quarter, Gartner said Monday.

IBM took 31.7 percent of server revenue in the three months to Oct. 31, up a fraction from last year, while HP’s share stayed more or less flat at 30.2 percent, Gartner said. They were followed at a distance by Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu.

Server revenue overall dropped 15.5 percent from the third quarter last year, to $10.7 billion. But it was up by 10.2 percent compared to the second quarter this year, Gartner said.

“It is important to put the yearly declines into perspective,” Gartner Research Vice President Jeffrey Hewitt said in a statement. The server market is “showing signs of stabilization as we move toward the end of 2009.”

All the top vendors bar one saw their server revenue improve from the second quarter. The exception was Sun Microsystems, whose business has been hit by uncertainty surrounding its acquisition by Oracle.

Sun’s server revenue was down 32.3 percent from the third quarter last year, much more than its main rivals, according to Gartner. It remained the top seller of Unix systems by volume, but its lead was pared down from a year earlier as shipments declined by almost half.

In terms of dollars spent, HP overtook Sun to become the second-largest Unix vendor behind IBM. HP grew its share of Unix systems revenue from 28 percent to 29.3 percent, while Sun’s declined from 29.2 percent to 24.2 percent, Gartner said. IBM’s share increased from 36.4 percent to 40.9 percent.

The Unix server market overall was worth $2.6 billion, a drop of 21.2 percent from the third quarter last year.

Industry-standard servers fared a little better. Sales of x86-based systems declined by 11.4 percent from last year, to $6.3 billion. HP retained its dominant lead, followed by Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and NEC

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By Channelworld staff
Channelworld India

BANGALORE (10/27/2009) - While retaining secondary support for documents, 80 per cent of enterprise collaboration platforms will primarily be based on browser-based Web 2.0 techniques by 2013, according to Gartner. As wiki-like collaboration techniques mature and gain more acceptance, Web 2.0 approaches will become increasingly influential, the report said.

Gartner expects that managing users’ transition from a file-orientation to Web 2.0 approach will be a major challenge for organisations. “There are fundamental differences between working styles that are file-oriented and document-based and those that are Web 2.0 and browser-based,” said Jeff Mann, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Understanding and accommodating these differences will be important factors in determining the success of collaboration platform introductions,” he said.

Typically users fall into two camps: those who prefer to collaborate around files and documents, and those who prefer to interact with content and other people directly on Web sites. The differences between these two working styles goes much deeper than mere user preference or alternative ways of getting things done as the mind-set of working with files affects how people work, attitudes toward security and the impact of governance.

“Users who have spent years primarily working with PC-based office automation suites such as Microsoft Office, tend to favour the file orientation and can find it unnerving to work in a Web 2.0 environment where people can be editing the same page at the same time,” said Mann. “Similarly, users accustomed to free-flowing wikis and blogs can stumble over the process and the more-structured requirements when using document repositories. It is this mismatch between expectations and working styles that lies at the heart of many projects facing issues with user adoption,” he added.

While document-oriented platforms are well established, familiar and more productive for some tasks, the trend is clearly toward more Web 2.0-type tools. However, Mr Mann maintained that Web 2.0 will not take over completely because there are situations where working with documents is more appropriate than the wiki style. Tasks that require sequential approval workflows or where the final product will be a file are often easier to get done in a document repository with check-in/out facilities than in a free-form wiki.

Furthermore, some collaboration products show a hybrid of Web 2.0 and file orientation, while several browser-based office automation products allow working with files. For example, Google Apps, Adobe buzzword and Zoho are firmly in the Web 2.0 camp, but also work with files, either by downloading versions to work with offline or by organizing content online using file-like user interface metaphors. “Evolving technologies and increasing familiarity with Web 2.0 techniques will eventually reduce or even eliminate the distinctions between file-oriented and online environments,” said Mann. “However, while functionality will reduce the gap in user mentality, it will prove persistent and remain a challenge to collaboration managers introducing new technologies to their users.”

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By Ellen Messmer
Network World (US)
October 22, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - At the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo this week, thousands of IT managers packed into sessions on the topic of virtualization of enterprise computers, along with the prospect of adopting public cloud-based services or building private ones. Some say the revolution is underway, and security managers are caught in the middle, losing their earlier controls.

Gartner analysts, including David Cearley and Gene Phifer, trotted out user case studies involving FedEx, Presidio Health, Johnson Diversey and others extolling the public or private cloud, while in a separate session Michael Lock, head of enterprise sales at Google, found himself looking like a budding rock star in front of an huge audience of high-tech execs eager to hear about Google Apps. With new ways of conducting enterprise computing and application development shaking up established IT practices, the darker mood about it all was mainly heard from Gartner’s security analysts, recognizing the revolution underway is ripping away the security controls of today.

“Our nightmare scenario is here now,” said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. Botnet-driven cybercrime is clearly accelerating as online predators involved in “cybercrime as a service” plunder corporate and consumer data for financial gain. In addition, corporate employees are now using handheld smartphones the company didn’t even issue and spending substantial time on networks not owned by the enterprise.

Now comes cloud computing as service offerings and “obviously attacks will come after this,” Pescatore said. In many instances, the fact is the “IT organization is being driven to have less control over software and hardware.”

The implication of this, Pescatore said, is they can sit and dream of something pleasant, like the return of the mainframe, or they will have to make a shift to using or developing “security as a service” to adapt to new threat scenarios in both public cloud computing and virtualization of their IT infrastructure.

With the cloud taking shape nebulously as many types of public, private and hybrid services, an important technology to turn to will likely be encryption services. “In the next few years, you’ll see encryption services out there,” Pescatore said.

Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald also minced no words in describing the implications for security in the virtualization and cloud-computing revolution.

“We’re at a critical point,” MacDonald said. Adoption of consumer technologies and the transformation of the technical infrastructure in the enterprise means that there’s “frustration of the business units with us,” MacDonald said.

With virtualization, the key concept of “locking down a physical device” is disappearing in favor of virtual machine-oriented security, such as virtual security appliances as software instead of physical appliances, he said. In addition, the enabling of quick deployment of virtualized applications and databases to facilitate business partnerships will need to be done, though “security becomes very difficult in this environment.”

Cloud computing and virtualization “break one of the foundational principles of security architecture: Us and them,” MacDonald said.

Known technologies such as signature-based antivirus are now insufficient, increasingly useless and he added, way overpriced. Antivirus must be buttressed with whitelisting to control application use, and the newer software-based virtual appliances for security have to be examined for use in a virtual-machine environment.

About the physical security appliances out on the market today, MacDonald said “these boxes are expensive,” and he disparaged Cisco, Juniper and TippingPoint as “not having much going on now because they like to sell boxes.”

When it comes to cloud computing services, the security professional is being pressured to “get out of the way” and figure out something that’s “secure enough,” said MacDonald, though the impulse will be to say no to the cloud.

Though the public cloud “makes sense for less-sensitive data,” there are limits, such as “PCI stuff, no way,” MacDonald said, referring to the data falling under the Payment Card Industry security requirements.

But there are going to be “trade-offs” as new cloud service offerings, and the stance the security professional should take is to clearly explain the risks to the business owners of the data and make sure they accept it, not push it back onto the security and IT department.

“They get all the accolades and you take all the risk, who wants that job?” he pointed out.

Speaking on a panel at the Gartner conference, a number of CIOs acknowledged their prime concerns are about security in cloud computing.

June Hartley, CIO at the National Business Center of the U.S. Department of the Interior, said security requirements known as FISMA that the U.S. government uses for security compliance will likely be changed to meet the new world of private and public cloud computing.

Casey Coleman, CIO at the General Services Administration and co-chair of what’s known as the Federal Cloud Council, agreed, but both indicated there was no apparent barrier to that.

Sometimes there are some unexpected risks.

Sal Allavarpu, senior director, product marketing at Citrix Systems, a player in the virtualization market which has created virtual appliance versions of its Access Gateway, Branch Repeater and NetScaler security, network and application control appliances, says there are new security issues that arise in virtualization and cloud computing.

For one thing, it’s not advised to run applications with different levels of trust controls on virtual machines located on the same physical server, he says. “It’s best to keep them separate, virtual machines with the same trust controls on the same physical server,” he said, noting auditors prefer this.

Without sharing detail, he said he knows of a recent occurrence in a cloud-computing arrangement where law enforcement going after someone seized the data for the entire physical server even though the suspect had data on just one virtual machine on that server. This caused a lot of consternation among other companies whose data happened to be on that same physical server in separate virtual machines. He noted that virtualization and cloud computing is new to law enforcement in some instances and this kind of issue is still being hammered out.

Mark Hurd, chairman and CEO at HP, who gave the keynote at Gartner yesterday, evoked a knowing chuckle from the audience when he said he has visited with many CEOs and frankly, they didn’t like the term “cloud” because they would prefer to think they’re operating in “clear skies.”

But without tipping his hand, he hinted that HP could be active in this arena itself with cloud-oriented services over time, probably the more private cloud varieties.

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By Matt Hamblen
Computerworld (US)
October 7, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - While the Google-backed Android mobile operating system currently runs on less than 2% of all smartphones, Gartner Inc. predicts it will surge to 14% of the global smartphone market in 2012 — ahead of the iPhone , as well as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones.

In that year, Gartner forecasts Android will actually rank second globally, behind the Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia devices that are highly popular in Europe and many countries outside the U.S. Symbian now runs on about half of all smartphones, but will fall to 39% in 2012, Gartner says.

The Gartner forecast gives Android such an enormous surge in popularity because of a variety of factors, but chiefly because of Google Inc.’s backing of Android and the range of cloud computing functions and related applications that Google will make available in coming years, Dulaney said in an exclusive interview with Computerworld .

While the first Android product release, the T-Mobile G1, only won a lukewarm response, Android 1.5 (code-named Cupcake) is well thought-out, Dulaney said. Other expected improvements in Android for its application store and development environment will be “backed by the power of Google’s search engine,” he said. “Google’s other up-and-coming consumer and enterprise products should make[Android] a dominant platform.”

And because Android and Google operate in an “integrative and open environment, [they] could easily top … the singular Apple,” he said.

Android will also run on phones from several manufacturers, helping its growth, especially when compared to the iPhone, Dulaney said. In 2010, as many as 40 models of Android devices will ship, and the next OS update, code-named Donut, will ship in the second quarter, Dulaney predicted.

As an early example of how Android should be successful, Dulaney pointed to Motorola’s Cliq, with its Motoblur interface that he said “handles communications very effectively.”

To explain, Dulaney said that smartphone interfaces seem to have headed off in two divergent ways, with iPhone’s heavy focus on applications compared to Windows Mobile’s and Symbian’s focus on smartphone tasks and communications. But Android, he said, “has blended a focus on applications and tasks pretty well.”

Android’s interface allows a user to perform frequently needed tasks without going back to the top of the logic tree to switch between tasks, he said. Makers of Android “have done a good job of knowing how you work on a phone,” he said.

Dulaney will share his smartphone forecast and views on mobile OS battles during his popular annual presentation at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo, which runs Oct. 18-22 in Orlando.

The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.

Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.

Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.

Various Linux devices will sell 28 million units, at 5.4% market share, in sixth place. Palm Inc.’s webOS will sell on 11 million units in 2012, about 2.1% of the market, in seventh place, Gartner says.

Android will have moved up the most from 2009 to 2012, from sixth place to second. BlackBerry will have moved down the most, from second to fifth, while iPhone will remain in third position and Windows Mobile will remain in fourth position, Gartner says.

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By Channelworld staff
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BANGALORE (09/25/2009) - Datacenter and IT managers are not paying attention to the process of measuring and monitoring energy use in datacenters, according to a poll conducted by Gartner. Gartner said that unless users create dashboards, they will not be able to reduce energy costs and meet compliance requirements.

The Gartner webinar conducted among 130 attendees from the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) management found that although green IT issues remain at the top of the agenda, respondents consider vendor and green procurement a low priority activity. Although 68 percent of respondents thought datacenter energy management is an important green IT issue for the next 18 months, only 7 percent consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create energy efficient solutions as their top priority.

“This finding affirmed in client conversations reveals that, although the green IT and datacenter energy issue has been on the agenda, many managers feel that they have to deal with other concerns,” said Rakesh Kumar, VP- Research, Gartner. “Even if more energy efficient servers or management tools were available, datacenter and IT managers are interested in internal projects,” he added.

Gartner said energy management can be effective through monitoring, modelling and measuring techniques. However, when asked which energy management metrics they will use in the next 18 months, 48 percent of respondents have not even considered the issue of metrics.

“These metrics form the bedrock for internal cost and efficiency programmes and will become important for external use. Organisations that want to publicise their carbon usage through green accounting principles will need to have their energy use monitored,” added Kumar.

In order to include metrics, measurement and modelling in a datacenter’s green IT strategy, Gartner recommends that datacenter and IT managers implement recommendations such as raising the temperature of the server inlet point, using the SPECpower benchmark and developing the dashboard of datacenter energy efficient metrics.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
September 25, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Data center managers should turn server temperatures up to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and adopt more aggressive policies for IT energy measurement, Gartner says in a new report.

After conducting a Web-based survey of 130 infrastructure and operations managers, Gartner concluded that measurement and monitoring of data center energy use will remain immature through 2011. Only 7% of respondents said their top priorities include procurement of green products and pushing vendors to create more energy efficient technology. In general, data center managers are not paying enough attention to measuring, monitoring and modeling of energy use.

“Although the green IT and data center energy issue has been on the agenda for some time now, many managers feel that they have to deal with more immediate concerns before focusing attention on their suppliers’ products,” Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, said in a news release. “In other words, even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, data center and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalization and virtualization.”

About 63% of survey respondents expect to face data center capacity constraints in the next 18 months, and 15% said they are already using all available capacity and will have to build new data centers or refurbish existing ones within the next year. In a troubling sign, 48% of respondents have not yet considered metrics for energy management.

Gartner issued four recommendations for improving energy management:

• Raise the temperature at the server inlet point up to 71 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius), but use sensors to monitor potential hotspots.

• Develop a dashboard of data center energy-efficient metrics that provides appropriate data to different levels of IT and financial management.

• Use the SPECpower benchmark to evaluate the relative energy efficiency of servers.

• Improve the use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization before building out or buying new/additional data center floor space.

In addition to Gartner’s report, a recent survey by CDW illustrates trends related to data center efficiency. CDW surveyed 752 IT pros in U.S. organizations for its 2009 Energy Efficient IT Report, finding that 59% are training employees to shut down equipment when they leave the office, and 46% have implemented or are implementing server virtualization.

The recession has helped convince IT organizations of the financial value of power-saving measures, with greater numbers implementing storage virtualization, and managing cable placement to keep under-floor cooling chambers open and thus reduce demand on cooling systems. CDW found that 43% of IT shops have implemented remote monitoring and management of their data centers, up from 29% the year before.

Data center managers are finding it easier to identify energy efficient equipment because of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Energy Star program for servers. But data centers are still missing many opportunities to save money on energy costs.

“Energy reduction efforts are yielding significant results … Still, most are spending millions more on energy than necessary,” CDW writes. “If the average organization surveyed were to take full advantage of energy-savings measures, IT professionals estimate they could save $1.5M annually.”

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By Computerworld Hong Kong staff
Computerworld Hong Kong
September 9, 2009

HONG KONG - Software budgets are expected to grow faster than overall IT budgets in 2010, said Gartner Tuesday.

According to results of a Gartner survey, organizations in Asia Pacific plan to increase their software budgets by 4.4 percent on average in 2010, while overall IT budgets were expected to decline by 3.1 percent on average. More organizations in Asia Pacific (38 percent) expect to increase their software budgets in 2010 than their overall IT budget (31 percent), the research house said.

The average expected increase in software budget of 4.4 percent is higher than all other regions surveyed including Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), North America and Latin America, Gartner noted.

Gartner said it surveyed 323 IT managers in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Australia, as part of a worldwide survey of 982 respondents, to help business and IT managers compare their enterprise IT spending with peer organisations. Respondents were asked whether they expected their 2010 IT budget to be below, the same or exceed their IT budget for 2009.

SaaS uptake in Hong Kong
Plans to use SaaS in the future are the highest in Hong Kong, followed by India and China — a good mix of both mature and developed countries, said Gartner. However, SaaS spending continues to be fragmented within Asia Pacific, with variation by country, vertical and software segments, the analyst firm added.

India: 42 percent of businesses to up budget
India-based respondents are consistently the most optimistic, with the highest number of respondents intending to increase their IT budget in 2010 (42 percent), followed by China (32 percent), said Gartner. On the other hand, Malaysia-based respondents remain pessimistic, with the largest number of respondents intending to decrease their spending (52 percent), followed by Singapore (48 percent of respondents), Gartner added.

“For most organizations, the budgeting process happens once a year, but adjusting the IT budget is a continuous exercise that is driven by economic conditions and changes in the business,” said Gartner research director Yanna Dharmasthira. “In the midst of economic volatility, hardware budget allocation remains the top priority in most countries, but software budgets are a real bright spot and continue to demonstrate a positive outlook, although more cautious when compared with last year’s survey.”

Software is expected to represent the second-largest portion of the IT budget in most countries, with the exception of India (where software and hardware spend are roughly equal) and Australia (where spending is notably higher on IT staff), said Gartner, adding that India is the most aggressive with the highest software budget allocation (26.9 percent), followed by Singapore (25.8 percent), Malaysia (24.1 percent) and China (23.1 percent).

When looking at horizontal enterprise applications, the software segment with the highest percentage of respondents indicating an increase in spending is CRM, followed by respondents in office applications, collaboration, and ERP software respectively, Gartner noted.

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By Matt Hamblen
Computerworld (US)
July 23, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Most companies are not adequately managing mobile users or wireless services, resulting in overspending, research firm Gartner Inc. said today.

The analyst firm said about 80% of large companies are expected to overspend on wireless services costs by an average of 15% through 2014.

Gartner analyst Phil Redman urged large companies to examine how wireless is used by different work groups to make sure that their needs are matched with the correct services from carriers.

Contracts signed with carriers need to be examined to be sure that pooling of minutes, flat-rate plans and other offers are used properly, Redman said. In general, Gartner recommends companies move to “corporate liability plans” to lower costs, instead of relying on individual liability plans where a worker pays the bill, arranges service and is reimbursed by the company. Corporate liability plans, where a company pays the bills upfront, allow for corporate discounting, Redman said.

Redman also said companies need to remind workers who travel abroad about high fees for roaming calls in other countries. Carriers can work with companies to offer recommendations on roaming, but Gartner recommends that companies prohibit all ad hoc use of international wireless data and rely on smartphones that offer e-mail. Gartner said a small proportion of international travelers can eat up a large portion of travel costs due to high roaming fees.

Gartner also recommends that companies consider using the consulting services of a telecom expense management company to lower expenses. Finally, companies can integrate workers’ cell phones into their corporate telecom system, which gives the workers access to unified communications functions and can reduce the need to rely on a desktop phone.

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By Carol Ko
MIS Asia
July 9, 2009

SINGAPORE - Worldwide information technology (IT) spending is on pace to total US$3.2 trillion in 2009, a six percent decline from 2008 spending of US$3.4 trillion, according to US-based research firm Gartner.

Continued weak IT spending because of the economic situation, combined with the effect of exchange rate movements has resulted in Gartner lowering its 2009 forecast from its first quarter 2009 projection. In March this year, Gartner had forecast 2009 IT spending to decline 3.8%.

“While the global economic downturn shows signs of easing, this year, IT budgets are still being cut and consumers will need a lot more persuading before they can feel confident enough to loosen their purse strings,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president and head of global forecasting at Gartner.

“The forecast decline in spending growth for the hardware and software segments in 2009 has almost stabilised, and only minor downward revisions have been made to these forecasts this quarter,” Gordon said.

“However, the full impact of the global recession on the IT services and telecommunications sectors is still emerging, and forecast growth in these areas has been further reduced significantly. Moreover, the rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies in recent months will have a material downward impact on 2009 IT spending growth, which by convention we report based on US dollars,” he said.

Four major IT segments

All four major segments of IT–hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications–will experience declining revenue, something that did not happen in the 2001 downturn. The computing hardware segment will experience the steepest decline in 2009, with spending projected to decline 16.3%. The software segment will show the slightest decrease in 2009, with spending forecast to drop 1.6%.

In Asia Pacific, total IT spending is expected to reach US$489 billion, a decline of 5.2% over 2008. Software is the only segment forecast to have positive growth in Asia Pacific in 2009.

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By Denise Dubie
Network World (US)

FRAMINGHAM - Gartner Tuesday released updated worldwide IT spending numbers that show the ongoing economic recession and declining revenues across all major segments of IT drove forecasts down 6% in 2009 to a total of $3.2 trillion.

Gartner adjusted its previous 2009 spending forecast downward this week to a decline of 6%, rather than the 3.8% the research firm estimated in March. The research firm attributes the adjustment to continued weak IT spending and declining revenue across all four major IT segments: hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications.

“While the global economic downturn shows signs of easing, this year IT budgets are still being cut and consumers will need a lot more persuading before they can feel confident enough to loosen their purse strings,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president and head of global forecasting at Gartner, in a statement.

Spending in the hardware segment is down 16.3% since 2008, while investment in software declined 1.6% in the same period, according to Gartner. IT services spend decreased by 5.6% this year and the telecom segment experienced 4.6% negative growth. Gartner expects worldwide IT spending to grow by 2.3% in 2010, average 1.9% annual growth from 2008 through 2013.

Specifically, Gartner forecasts 2010 spending on hardware to remain flat while software will see a 3.2% increase over investment in 2009. IT services will also experience slight growth in 2010 with Gartner projecting 3% growth over this year. And telecommunications will see about 2.3% spending growth next year, the firm predicts.

“The forecast decline in spending growth for the hardware and software segments in 2009 has almost stabilized,” Gordon added. “However, the full impact of the global recession on the IT services and telecommunications sector is still emerging and forecast growth in these areas had been further reduced significantly.”

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
June 4, 2009

IT research and advisory firm Gartner predicted that the number of mobile payment users will reach more than 190 million in 2012, representing more than 3% of total mobile users worldwide attaining the “mainstream” level.

Mobile payment refers to the paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and NFC. It includes transactions that use banking instruments such as cash, bank accounts or debit and credit cards, as well as noncarrier stored value accounts, such as travel cards, gift cards or Paypal.

However, mobile payment does not include transactions that use mobile operators’ billing systems, such as purchase of mobile content or telebanking by mobile to the service center via an interactive voice response (IVR) system.

According to Gartner, the mobile payment industry will continue to experience steady growth and is expected to increase 70% in 2009 or a total of total 73.4 million users. The figure is up 70.4% from 2008 when there were only 43.1 million users.

Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner, said the forecast is based on the momentum in the mobile payment market gathered last year. Examples are the number of high-profile launches of mobile money transfer services in multiple markets, participation of major global institutions in near-field communication (NFC) payment trials, as well as new payment solutions entering the market.

Yet despite the positive projections, Shen noted security concerns, an inadequate “ecosystem” and undefined areas in banking regulations remain as challenges for mobile payment.

“Mobile payment has very different user cases and impact on developing markets to that of developed markets,” Shen said. “In developing markets, together with mobile banking, it allows people to use financial services in a more-efficient way — and sometimes the only way — at more-affordable costs, and can greatly improve standards of living. In developed markets, mobile is more of an extension of the existing payment infrastructure that allows people to deal with their financial needs on the go and in a timely fashion.”

The disparity, she explained, leads to the presence of different products in different markets. For instance, many services in the US rely on a full browser and credit card, but this won’t work in developing markets, as many people don’t even have a bank account or bank card.

However, Shen said USSD banking would not be acceptable in the US as mobile operators have never made use of this for customer services and users may find it very awkward to work with.

And in terms of both number of users and transaction volumes, Gartner expects Asia-Pacific and Japan to maintain a larger share of the market through 2012. While mobile payment penetration in Western Europe is expected to rise from 0.9% in 2009 to 2.5% in 2012, and from 1.7% to 3% in North America; penetration in Asia-Pacific and Japan will rise from 2% in 2009 to 3.8% in 2012. Mobile payment penetration in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America is also expected to exceed 3% by 2012.

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