By: James Velasquez
Country General Manager, IBM Philippines
March 5, 2010

The planet may be getting smarter,but it is also getting more dynamic and harder to predict, particularly the business world. Everything from swings in markets, to increasing global competition to new consumer expectations are changing at a furious pace. How do businesses evolve to adapt and respond dynamically?

We also live in a time when people want to communicate in real-time, anytime, anywhere. Information and expertise abound, but gaining insight from it is harder than ever. Workers want to use new tools and personal technology to accomplish their goals. How do people collaborate to maximize effectiveness?

To keep up, we work harder. But to get ahead, we must set an agenda.

Businesses must embrace change by creating a more agile, collaborative and connected business environment. Setting a collaboration agenda can make a company more profitable and productive, while giving people a better quality of work and life.

A collaboration agenda differentiates your business by redefining the way your people work. It’s about cost effectively building and deepening connections among people, systems, and processes in and beyond the boundaries of an organization.

Collaboration helps the organization by discovering and combining expertise and information in time and in context, and tapping in to world class expertise from anywhere. It can be structured without delays and distractions or high costs. Collaboration can also contribute to better product development by connecting people to drive insight and deepen relationships to collaborate on new products and approaches.

The world is becoming more connected economically, socially and technically. In this process, humans are key to systems becoming instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. People are the ultimate sensors where latency in business processes still exist, and where data is used to make decisions. As a result, we have to also focus on enabling people to work more naturally and efficiently, essentially without obstacles.

Business leaders can solve challenges and address opportunities by better enabling people important to them - inside and outside their organization, around established business processes, and by industry-specific roles and patterns. First, it’s critical to define challenges, issues and risks across the roles and patterns within a particular business area. Then, it can be determined how collaboration can solve those challenges and improve real business results such as increased revenue, decreased cost, reduced risk, and raised customer satisfaction among other benefits..

Begin looking at business areas and strategic priorities that can be best addressed with investments in collaboration. Where can you make the greatest impact if you could unleash the potential of your workforce by freeing people from the hard-wired organizational barriers that slow them down?

An example of a company which have taken on this challenge is Panasonic Corporation, a leader for consumer and industrial electronics who recently started a massive migration to IBM’s LotusLive public cloud services for e-mail, calendaring and contact management, from Microsoft Exchange and other on-premise collaboration technologies, the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment in the history of IBM.

The new services allow Panasonic’s workforce to communicate and collaborate more efficiently with its global network of customers, partners and suppliers through a cloud-based community. More than 100,000 employees in various departments will initially begin the migration, expanding to a total of over 300,000 employees and external partners and suppliers of Panasonic, who will work together across the Web as efficiently as if they were all down the hall. Panasonic turned to the “cloud” not only to optimize its own information technology infrastructure and workloads, but also to improve efficiencies in its business model by better integrating employees with clients and suppliers.

Many other organizations agree that adapting and responding dynamically is the key. According to IBM’s Global CEO Study, 98 percent of CEOs say they will restructure the way their organizations work. The gap between CEOs who expect change and those who have the ability to handle change has widened sharply. And a Harris Interactive Poll shows that two-thirds of people can’t find the help they know is available.

Setting an agenda for collaboration is a systematic approach to realizing measurable business value from improving the way people interact specific to their job roles, functional area and industry. This enables an organization to become expertise-based and collaborate across their entire internal and external population — including employees, partners, suppliers, customers, even investors — in the context of how they work.

Two key characteristics shared by the top quartile of companies most adaptable to change are: being effective at collaborating; and connecting experts, IBM studies show.

In addition, a study by McKinsey & Company in January 2009, according to a report entitled “How Companies are benefitting from Web 2.0 McKinsey Global Results, Sept 2009, showed that those who collaborate and connect experts well reap measurable business benefits — a median reduction in operating costs for core business processes of 15 percent; a 25 percent improvement in customer marketing conversions; 17 percent rise in customer loyalty; and a 20 percent reduction in time-to-market for new products and services.

To set a Collaboration Agenda, businesses should:
—- Establish a clear strategy that makes fluid connections and interactions across customers, partners, employees, etc.
—- Design a roadmap that balances business impact, adoption and investment.
—- Optimize their organization–specific role interaction patterns showing how people really work together.
—- Define tangible metrics to measure return-on-investment.

How Do You Get Started?

Start by asking yourself tough business questions such as:

1. Does your organization change effectively when it needs to?
2. Do you empower people to work wherever and whenever they need to?
3. Can you quickly and easily find the right information and expertise?
4. Are you spending time searching for information and not getting anywhere?
5. Are you making optimal use of people and resources inside and outside the organization?
6. Do your systems take so long to change that they slow business response?
7. Are your major business processes stuck in silos?

Answering these questions honestly may lead to the blueprint for a collaboration agenda — a view of the ultimate organization of the future — yours.

IBM Philippines will be holding their ‘Lotusphere Comes to You’ in Manila on March 16, 2010, Tuesday at the Grand Ballroom of New World Hotel Makati, where these topics and more will be discussed by industry and IBM experts. For more information and to register, visit www.ibm.com/software/ph/lotus/lcty.

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Computerworld Philippines Staff
March 4, 2010

Fueled by the rapid development in telecommunications services in the ASEAN region, tech giant IBM recently opened its doors through its new ASEAN Telecom Center of Excellence (CoE) in order to contribute to the growth of regional telco providers.

Located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the CoE will house software solutions, hardware, services, and business partner applications that operators, suppliers, independent software vendors, and service providers can leverage in order to accelerate solution development and streamline product delivery.

Technical and telecommunications experts with adequate experience in the industry are on standby as well.

“To sustain growth in this competitive industry landscape, service providers must offer customers a more positive and differentiated user experience while reducing complexity and cost,” said Rey Lugtu, country manager for telcom and utilities industry, IBM Philippines. “The CoE offers the ASEAN telco industry an unparalleled level of expertise and support to speed implementation and facilitate effective use of applications and technologies. This is very beneficial to the Philippines, wherein the telecommunications industry remains one of the more exciting and rapidly growing sectors in the country.

In 2009, IDC estimated the telecommunications services market in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand to reach a combined US$35.7 billion, growing at a four to six percent rate over the years.

IBM’s CoE is an answer to the rapidly growing telco market in the region, essentially because 90% of the world’s communications services providers are their clients.

“By supporting ASEAN’s telecommunications service providers in innovation efforts which leapfrog traditional technologies plans to be world-renowned leaders, we have established a unique position in the industry,” added Lugtu. – John Mark V. Tuazon

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
March 3, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - After shrinking its U.S. workforce by as many as 10,000 employees last year, IBM this week may be on its way to cutting another 2,000 workers.

IBM isn’t commenting on its latest round of cuts and information about it comes from the Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701, which gathers its data directly from IBM employees. The Alliance, which has blamed offshoring for many of the layoffs , has been trying to win bargaining rights for employees.

“IBM is clearly offshoring things where they can,” said one IBM employee who received his notice yesterday and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his severance. A 10-year veteran and UNIX administrator, this employee said his customer support team once had 15 U.S.-based workers. That staff was reduced over time to just three workers in the U.S., with other members of the customer support team now in Brazil, Argentina and India.

The employee said he was not given a good reason for his layoff. “Higher ups made a decision that a certain percentage had to be cut - it was not performance-based at all,” he said. Although the employee said he’s uncertain about the job market, “my sense is that it is not horrendous [but] I’ll have to assume that I’ll have to take a cut in pay.”

As of last October, IBM employed 105,000 workers in the U.S., compared to 115,000 in 2008. In 2007, IBM had 121,000 U.S. employees. It employs about 400,000 globally.

IBM doesn’t discuss its jobs actions other than to explain that they are in response to shifting customer needs.

IBM’s workforce is scattered around the country and it continues to hire in U.S. locations. Michigan State University, for instance, has posted a notice about an IBM recruitment fair March 8 for IBM’s Michigan Delivery Center. It says the company has nearly 60 “upcoming openings” for application support specialists. A university official deferred questions to IBM.

IBM jobs are high paying and the company is a major employer in number communities, such as Burlington, Vt.

In a review last year of a bond issue for Burlington, Moody’s Investors Service looked at major employers and hiring trends to assess the economic health of the community. It wrote that IBM was Burlington’s single largest employer, with 5,400 workers at that point, or 5% of the area’s workforce.

“IBM recently announced job reductions, with the Burlington area reportedly experiencing between 300 and 500 IBM related job losses,” Moody’s wrote. “These recent cuts bring the total number of workers that IBM has laid off since 2001 to about 3,000, or 15% of manufacturing employment. Additional workforce reductions at IBM present considerable downside risk”

It was not immediately clear whether the Burlington workforce was affected directly by the latest round of cuts.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
March 2, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - IBM has issued layoff notices to more than 400 workers, according to the Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701 , an employee organization that has been the principal source of layoff information at the company.

The Alliance’s online job cuts board was abuzz today with news from employees, all anonymous, who had received layoff notices.

The Alliance gets some of the paperwork involved in the layoffs and can typically pinpoint the number of job cuts. The layoff count is expected to grow beyond 400, said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of the Alliance.

IBM never comments on its job actions other than to say, as it did today, that it is a result of a remixing of “our skills and structure to meet the changing needs of our clients.”

Conrad blames the cuts on a shift to offshore work. IBM has been reducing its U.S. workforce — according to latest available numbers the company now employs 105,000 U.S. workers, versus 115,000 a year ago. It has been increasing its percentage of overseas employees .

The company employs about 400,000 globally.

Employees may be eventually be eligible for help under the Trade Act of 1974.

In a notice published last month in the Federal Register, the U.S. Department Labor said that IBM global services employees who were laid off in an earlier job action are eligible for assistance under the act.

That help kicks in based on a number of trade-connected issues, including “a shift by the workers’ firm to a foreign country in the production of articles or supply of services like or directly competitive with those produced/supplied by the workers’ firm.”

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , send e-mail to pthibodeau@computerworld.com or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed? .

Read more about careers in Computerworld’s Careers Knowledge Center.

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By Agam Shah
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
February 26, 2010

NEW YORK - IBM researchers have developed a new algorithm that could in minutes analyze terabytes’ worth of raw data to more quickly predict weather and electricity usage, the company said Thursday.

The mathematical algorithm, developed by IBM’s laboratories in Zurich, can sort, correlate and analyze millions of random data sets, a task that could otherwise take days for supercomputers to process, said Costas Bekas, a researcher at IBM.

The algorithm is just under a thousand lines of code and will be instrumental in establishing usage patterns or trends based on data gathered from sources such as sensors or smart meters, he said. The algorithm could be used to analyze a growing mass of data measuring electricity usage trends as well as air or water pollution levels. The algorithm could also break down data from global financial markets and assess individual and collective exposure to risk, Bekas said.

“We are interested in measuring the quality of data,” Bekas said. Efficient analysis of large data sets requires new mathematical techniques that reduce computational complexity, Bekas said.

The algorithm combines models of data calibration and statistical analysis that can assess measurement models and hidden relationships between data sets. IBM has been working on the research for two years, Bekas said.

The algorithm can also reduce the cost burden on companies by analyzing data in a more energy-efficient way, Bekas said. The lab used a Blue Gene/P Solution system at the Forschungszentrum Julich research center in Germany to validate 9TBs of data in less than 20 minutes. Analyzing the same amount of data without the algorithm would have taken a day with the supercomputer operating at peak speeds, which would have added up to higher electricity bills, Bekas said.

According to Top500.org, the Blue Gene/P is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world as of last November, with 294,912 IBM Power processing cores that can provide peak performance of up to 1 petaflop.

The traditional approach to data analysis is to take multiple data sets and look at them individually, said Eleni Pratsini, manager of mathematical and computational sciences at the IBM research labs. However, the algorithm compares data sets against each other, which could help enterprises point toward larger trends in particular areas, such as risk reduction in financial portfolios.

Enterprises will want faster ways of generating business intelligence as masses of data flood servers with the expansion of computing to new devices, he said.

Now that the algorithm has been proven to work scientifically, the research lab is collaborating with IBM’s Global Services unit to use it for specific services, Pratsini said. Ultimately, the algorithm could make its way to IBM applications such as the SPSS statistical analysis software, but the company didn’t provide a specific time frame for that.

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By Stephanie Overby
CIO.com
February 26, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The economic downturn has taken its toll on the IT services industry, and consequently, on the consultancies that swelled to support corporate outsourcing efforts in better days. Over the last two years, everyone–from the IT outsourcing arms of the biggest general business advisories (the KPMGs and Accentures, for instance) to the consulting divisions of IT service providers (the IBMs and HPs) to the leading outsourcing-specific consultancies (the TPIs and Alsbridges)–has been hit with layoffs, consolidation and upheaval.

But what’s been difficult for the consulting industry and the community of IT outsourcing experts it employed may have an upside for IT organizations in need of external expertise. Some of the talent that once logged $300 an hour for the likes of IBM, TPI or EquaTerra have set up shop for themselves, and–minus the overhead of their big bosses–are available at as much as half the cost.

Mark Ruckman is one example. He spent more than 12 years at IBM Global Services in a variety of roles from outsourcing delivery to sales. His tenure at Big Blue was followed by a stint at outsourcing consultancy Alsbridge, where he led clients through RFPs, vendor selection and contract negotiation. Today he provides the same service for his clients as a solo consultant–for about 30 percent less.

After leaving Alsbridge last February, Ruckman says, he had little choice but to go independent. The once-booming business of high-priced outsourcing hand-holding had gone bust.

Michael Engel, who was laid off from Deloitte last spring with a “large contingent” of sourcing consultants, echoes Ruckman: “I suspect in most cases becoming an independent advisor was more of a necessity than a strategy.”

Engel went on to form Sylvan VI consultancy with five fellow Deloitte refugees.

The need for these consultants to strike out on their own is serendipitous for that segment of clientele looking for lower cost, targeted outsourcing advice. “The major consulting firms were laying off or not hiring,” Ruckman says. “But working with my network I discovered companies still required consulting support, but they didn’t have budgets for large consulting teams.”

The Outsourcing Soloist’s Selling Points

Independents and smaller firms are cheaper for a number of reasons. They don’t have as much overhead. They often work virtually, instead of travelling on the client’s dime. And they only have so many hours for which they can charge.

“When someone at a big firm is put on a deal, they are expected to charge 40 to 50 hours per week–every week–for a long period of time. They internally allocate people by the month,” says Adam Strichman, who worked for IBM Global Services and Meta Group before selling his six-person benchmarking firm Nautilus Advisors to Alsbridge and going solo in 2008. “The ‘butts-in-seats’ model is not what I do. My hours are often 20 to 40 percent less than big firms’.”

Combined with his lower rates, Strichman can do a job at up to half the total cost of a larger firm, he says.

Price may be the biggest selling point for the independent outsourcing consultant and boutique advisory firm, but it’s not the only one. While mature outsourcing consultancies and business advisories hew closely to their own established practices, “our size allows us the flexibility to blend our processes with a client’s process,” Ruckman explains.

What’s more, flexibility can sometimes translate into increased speed. “I feel like we are moving at warp speed being able to adjust our business model to the market business requirements,” says Craig Tobin, managing director of Lone Tree, Colo.-based Eventus Sourcing Group, which he formed last February after a corporate sourcing career at GE and taking an exit package from Accenture.

Working with an independent outsourcing advisor or small consultancy also may foster more trust with clients. “What you see is what you get,” says Susan Tan, IT services and sourcing research director for Gartner. She’s alluding to the “bait-and-switch” tactics that big firms sometimes employ, when they” trot out their best consultants during the early days, only to replace them with less experienced staff over time.

Phil Fersht, who recently launched Horses for Sources Research, an independent consulting firm, after leading AMR Research’s outsourcing practice and working briefly for offshore outsourcer Cognizant, concurs: “Clients genuinely get what they pay for–no junior ‘number crunchers’ here.”

Outsourcing’s David v. Goliath

Of course, going with the big guys has its benefits. “From a client perspective, the biggest difference is that most independents don’t have a bench,” explains Ruckman. “If a client wanted to kick off a large project in two weeks, I would have to ask for three or four [weeks] to build a team.”

Thus, the upstarts must partner to scale, and that can only get them so far.

Moreover, they don’t have the name recognition of the big firms. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That philosophy holds true [in sourcing consulting], with a small modification,” says Strichman. “Clients think, ‘If one of the big consultancies screws up, they will be in trouble. But if you screw up, I will be in trouble.”

While independent consultants and small firms get most of their new business from their existing networks, hiring them can require a bigger leap of faith. It’s easier to sell a CEO on an outsourcing plan if it has an Accenture or TPI seal of approval. Even with the 40-plus experienced consultants he works with (as independent contractors, not full-time employees), Tobin of Eventus Sourcing Group says there’s a misperception that he can’t offer customers “board-safe” decisions or that his company doesn’t have the financial resources or company experiences that come with working with billion dollar organizations. In fact, Eventus today serves several Fortune 100 companies including American Express and GE, he says. The deals just start smaller at the beginning.

Another challenge associated with the soloists: While these outsourcing consultants can bring with them double-digit years of experience, they’ have to leave behind many proprietary methodologies, frameworks and other intellectual property they used when they worked for the big firms.

The market’s need for the larger, general IT or pure-play outsourcing consultancy isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. “Solo consultants and the small consultancies they set up certainly have a place in the client portfolio of work. They are clearly most suited to work that requires experts as well as situations when clients need consultants as coaches, rather than as arms and legs,” says Gartner’s Tan. “But large scale applications work is still best done by big firms who have the scale, methodology and sources of cheap labor from offshore delivery centers.”

The Future of Outsourcing Consultants

Going independent isn’t easy for a seasoned outsourcing professional. “Establishing a pipeline and managing the slow periods have been the biggest challenges,” says Ruckman.

Solo outsourcing consultants say the need to fly under the radar for the first year in order to stay out of trouble on the non-compete front further complicates their efforts to build a project pipeline. And even in the leanest early days, newly independent consultants can’t take every job that comes their way if they want to be successful. “We don’t have the scalability, and we have to be selective in the clients and projects we take on as we continue to build the organization,” says Tobin.

Then there are the tax and incorporation headaches.

Despite those challenges, Fersht, for one, is upbeat. “Clients prefer to work with boutiques these days,” he says, noting that he knows of about twenty small consultancies that have sprung up in the last year or so. “They’re more flexible and have higher quality staff,” he notes.

In the end, the increase in independent outsourcing consultants is less a major market shift than a sign of the times. “I’m aware of a handful of sourcing professionals who set up their own shop,” Ruckman says. “As companies look for alternatives to execute deals with limited budgets, this trend could grow. I wonder if the economy will force more companies to look at the ROI of a deal and include consulting cost in the ROI. If the answer is yes, this will be great for independents.”

For his part, Ruckman keeps communication lines open with his contacts at the larger consultancies and could see himself suiting back up for them if his pipeline runs dry or they make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Strichman, who still occasionally hears grumbling from former employers concerned he’s stealing their business, insists there’s plenty of room in the pond for advisors of all sizes.

“We serve a different client and a different space. Somebody with a large outsourcing initiative needs the scale of a large firm. I fill the void for smaller jobs: an addendum here, a renegotiation of a single tower there,” says Strichman, noting that his biggest growth area is insourcing advice these days, a niche unmet by larger firms. “Independence lends itself to smaller jobs, so I don’t swim upstream.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
February 24, 2010

With a promise of better performance, lower total cost of ownership, and optimum features for virtualization, IT solutions vendor IBM today announced the launch of its new IBM Power7 system servers, which builds on the successes of its predecessor.

The release of the new server is timely, according to Simon Piff, director for Enterprise Infrastructure Research of IDC. “Sun is a bit busy with its recent acquisition by Oracle, while HP is focused today on its UCS competition with Cisco,” he explained. “It’s perfect timing for IBM.”

It is perfect timing for CIOs and IT managers as well, Piff added, due to changes brought by the impending economic upturn. Piff, however, stressed that in this crucial transition from a new economic environment to the next, IT departments must change the way they deal with IT financially.

“CFOs want to de-capitalize IT,” Piff explained. “There are a lot more scrutiny and oversight regarding IT projects, with much smaller investments being given to IT, forcing managers to very, very clearly justify the ROI for such implementations.”

CIOs, said Piff, must “think like business people,” while business executives, in turn, need to think about IT more than they think they need to.

Helping CIOs recover the financial loss from the crisis is one of the main drivers for the new IBM server launch, according to Mike Viray, product manager for Power systems, IBM ASEAN.

“CIOs are known to be working harder each day,” Viray noted. “With the Power7 system, we want them to work smarter.”

Viray said the new Power7 system is able to manage millions of transactions in real time, enabling users to put more workload—around 60 to 80 percent utilization—into the machine.

Field use reveals the 32-core version of the Power7 can accommodate 15,600 users on SAP, comparable to a 128-core enterprise-grade system from its competitor. Viray said the new server is also four times energy-efficient and can deliver twice the performance at the same base price.

Viray, meanwhile, dispelled notions that the new server release may overpower their Intel-based offerings, which will see a new upgrade by next week. “We acknowledge that there is no single solution to every IT problem, and clients also know that there are some applications best run under our x86 systems while others believe that it’s better in our Power systems,” he noted.

The Power7 system can run UNIX—and IBM’s own flavor AIX—Linux and IBMI operating systems.

IBM said it will continue to maintain its hold of loyal customers for the Power systems among the retail, banking, manufacturing and public sector industries nationwide.

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IBM and the University of Cebu (UC) will offer students an “Earn as You Learn” (EAYL) undergraduate program in joint efforts to create educational and employment opportunities for young IT professionals among the local Cebu population and its neighboring areas.

As second most significant metropolitan center in the country, Cebu has an important role to nurture experts and specialized IT resources as the Philippines move towards an innovation-led economy,

“Innovation is crucial in the economic advancement of Cebu and our country. Information Technology has been identified as a vital sector that can support innovation and can open up a lot of opportunities for progress. With the EAYL program, we not only support the local government of Cebu’s drive to be the premier IT hub in the Philippines, we also have the opportunity to enhance the employability of the university’s graduates,” said Candice Gotianuy, Chancellor, University of Cebu.

The “Earn as You Learn” program offers placement at IBM, providing undergraduates with valuable and practical experience working in the IT industry as part of their studies. The program, to be incorporated into Bachelor of Science in Information Technology degree, is intended to be completed over four years or eight semesters. It is patterned after the successful collaboration between IBM and the University of Ballarat in Australia.

IBM will recommend select subjects to be included in the course and provide subject matter experts to cover these recommended topics. Both parties are still working on the specifics of the course.

“Global demand for IT is growing and it remains to be a lifeline for economic growth across all industries and in all economies, especially here in the Philippines. It is critical for the private sector and academe to work together to address the issues that collectively impact the IT market. We want to play our part in ensuring a healthy and competent manpower resource pool is available,” said James Velasquez, Country General Manager, IBM Philippines.

University of Cebu is targeting to kick-off the EAYL course by June, in time for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Photo Shows (from left):

Standing - Alejandro Melchor III, Governmental Programs Executive, IBM Philippines; Lula Mohanty, Director for IBM Global Delivery Center Philippines; Atty. Nendell Hanz Abella, Vice Chancellor for Administration, University of Cebu

Seated - Atty. Baldomero Estenzo, Executive Vice Chancellor, University of Cebu; Candice Gotianuy, Chancellor, University of Cebu; James Velasquez, Country General Manager, IBM Philippines and Richard Patterson, General Manager, Globally Integrated Delivery, IBM Corporation.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
February 18, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The White House claim today that the U.S. has created or saved about 2 million jobs as a result of federal stimulus spending is not evident as far as IT is concerned — not yet at least.

President Barack Obama talked about the impact of the stimulus today to mark the one-year anniversary since signing the Recovery Act, which set aside $787 billion in spending and tax cuts.

But despite the stimulus spending so far, employment of high-skilled, high-wage information technology professionals has shown little improvement. In January, IT employment increased by about 13,000 jobs, its best month in more than a year but still modest.

Layoffs have left a lot of ground to cover, and nearly all the major tech companies have cut their workforces. One bellwether company, IBM, is due to release its 2009 annual report this month with updated worldwide employment figures, and it may show a U.S. workforce decline of 115,000 to 105,000 for the year, according to testimony by a company official in November before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.

An IBM spokesman said today that this U.S. workforce figure is accurate through October.

IBM employs about 400,000 globally. In 2007, IBM employed 121,000 in the U.S., but has increased at the same time its hiring in India and other overseas markets.

“You cannot have an economic recovery when good paying information technology jobs are slashed in the US, the workers terminated and the work shifted offshore,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of the Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701, a union that has been trying to organize IBM workers.

“These are the jobs workers trained for when the manufacturing jobs were offshored,” Conrad said. “Now these jobs are going to low cost countries. You also can not have an economic recovery when these workers see their jobs disappear and their wages vanish.”

White House touts IT

Obama said today that “the jobs of the 21st century are in areas like clean energy and technology, advanced manufacturing, new infrastructure.”

“That kind of economy requires us to consume less and produce more; to import less and export more. Instead of sending jobs overseas, we need to send more products overseas that are made by American workers and American business,” Obama said.

The President said the last third of the stimulus will be spent “rebuilding our economy on a new and stronger foundation for growth over the long term.”

He said the Recovery Act is on track to save or create another 1.5 million jobs this year.

The U.S. has lost about 200,000 IT jobs, from its peak of 4 million in November 2008.

Michael Balsam, the chief solutions officer at the Seattle-based Oniva Inc., which tracks government contract spending, said the majority of jobs created so far by the stimulus have been in the public sector, in occupations such as teaching and law enforcement.

But this year, Balsam expects to see more spending shift to the private sector, particularly on the infrastructure and foundational work needed for energy and health IT, and a lot of that will involve technology.

“As energy and health care spending picks up velocity you will see an impact on technology spending,” Balsam said.

One aspect of the market for 2010 that has seen an improving outlook is offshore outsourcing. The Indian IT services firms have been hiring in expectation in demand from overseas clients.

Syntel Inc., a Troy Michigan-based firm that IT and knowledge process outsourcing firm that has most of its workforce overseas, is a company that expects the year to improve. Last week, it reported that its fourth quarter revenue increased to $117.8 million, up 12% from year-ago quarter and 12% sequentially.

“As we look forward into 2010, we are optimistic that demand for offshore services will continue to progress,” Syntel Chairman Bharat Desai said in last week’s announcement. “We anticipate that our clients’ budgets will remain relatively flat in 2010, however we believe that a larger share of their spending will be allocated to offshore partners.”

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

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By Kathleen Lau
ComputerWorld Canada
February 17, 2010

TORONTO - Today business intelligence may only reach 15 to 20 per cent of an organization’s users, but that will explode to 65 per cent in the next five years, said an executive with IBM Canada Ltd.

And as users increasingly get acquainted with these analytic systems, IT pros will have no choice but to deal with the massive flood of queries and data requests that will undoubtedly follow, said Jason Gartner, business analytics development executive with IBM Canada.

“Every bit of information you give them they ask for twice more back,” said Gartner. “You give them a global headcount. The next thing they are going to ask is give me a global headcount by geography. All of a sudden, it’s four times the information.”

Gartner spoke at a ComputerWorld Canada TechInsights event about driving business innovation with smart analytics.

As user requests grow exponentially, the daily challenge for IT pros will be to continue to serve those needs, said Gartner. He describes what he calls a “one-way mirror” which separates business users from IT who toil in the background ensuring the data is clean, rationalized and at the granular level users want it.

Microsoft, HP unveil ‘breakthrough’ stack integration

“(Users) don’t care where the data comes from, they don’t care how you got the data,” said Gartner.

Also speaking at the event was Glen Sheffield, information management technical specialist with IBM Canada, who said the product landscape has become a lot more complex for IT pros in the last 15 years with all the possible options of databases, analytics, network, storage and servers. “The world got more confusing, there were more choices,” said Sheffield. “It’s time to start thinking about how we’re going to start delivering this in a faster manner.”

For this reason, Sheffield said the next trend among vendors, including IBM, is to address the simplicity of deployment with integrated hardware and analytics. IBM announced precisely this with its Smart Analytics last September. And just last January, Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled what they called a “breakthrough” stack integration of both company portfolios.

Gartner said IBM is not attempting to solve all its customer problems with this integrated approach, rather it’s about letting IT pros focus on the business needs and not on “all the little pieces and nuts and bolts.”

IT pros can then customize available packaged analytics applications and add modules as needed, said Gartner.

Conan Lear, business intelligence consultant with Toronto-based T4G Ltd., attended the event wanting to find out more about IBM’s analytics strategy. In an interview with ComputerWorld Canada, Lear said IBM’s Smart Analytics approach is very ambitious. “I think it is great that they are thinking about solutions for every area and I love the idea of being modular,” he said.

However, Lear thinks it’s clear to IT pros that a one-vendor environment is never the entire answer. “I know customers are seeing that,” he said. “Just because I’ve got IBM Cognos doesn’t mean I need DB2.”

As a consultant, Lear must assess how his clients understand business intelligence and what they expect from it. At present, he said he doesn’t think the term is very well understood but that will change. “With the mergers and acquisitions that are going on at the moment, it’s going to become more and more clear to them,” said Lear.

Also in the audience was Alex Raul Pascua, a team lead for the business intelligence team at Scarborough, Ont.-based Toyota Canada Inc. Pascua said the objective at his company is to get to an enterprise-wide approach to data warehousing where eventually users will rely on self-service analytics tools.

IBM’s Smart Analytics approach and recent acquisitions happen to work well for Toyota Canada because it was already using technology from data mining company SSPS Inc. and business intelligence vendor Cognos Inc. when IBM acquired those companies, said Pascua. “Now that IBM bought those two companies, integration would be a lot easier for us,” he said.

Although an IBM shop, Pascua isn’t ruling out other vendors’ analytics tools should he find them better and users express greater comfort with them.

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By Nancy Weil
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
February 15, 2010

BOSTON - SAP’s executive changes reverberated across the IT news sphere and opened the week’s big IT news. Google’s Buzz garnered Tuesday’s big headlines, while Microsoft’s Windows patch woes took over as the week progressed. As we head into the weekend, our sights turn to the Olympic Games in Vancouver, which will be not only a show of athletic prowess but also an IT spectacle.

1. SAP hits reset button with CEO change and More executive changes at SAP: SAP replaced CEO Léo Apotheker with co-CEOs Bill McDermott, who was the head of the field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, who was in charge of product development. A few days later, it announced the resignation of executive board member John Schwarz, who was head of the BusinessObjects division and had been seen by some observers to be a possible future CEO.

2. Google Buzz: A visual tour, Review: The full buzz on Google Buzz, Google Buzz criticized for disclosing Gmail contacts and Google Buzz attracting spammers already: The hype-o-meter got close to tilt as Google announced its Buzz social-networking technology, which earned praise as a good idea, but thumbs down in some quarters for poor implementation, privacy concerns (which the company moved to address), and it also got the attention of spammers.

3. Microsoft stops serving Windows patch blamed for blue screens and Microsoft says malware causing blue screen crashes: After users flooded Microsoft’s support forum seeking help and lodging complaints, the company stopped distributing a Windows XP patch that was causing the dreaded blue screen of death on some computers. At week’s end the company said that it looked like the problem might be caused by malware, although Microsoft continued to investigate.

4. IBM launches eight-core Power7 processor, servers: IBM unveiled its latest Power7 mega multithread processor along with some new servers. They will do battle with systems based on Intel’s latest Itanium chip, which it launched the same day after years of delay.

5. Macworld Expo news: Our friends at Macworld were — as we’d expect — all over the Macworld Expo this week, checking out the news and offering their views.

6. Powerful smartphones bound for Mobile World Congress: And other of our colleagues were headed for Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, where we expect they will file a steady stream of stories next week, especially given that they were already hard at work filing plenty of stories in advance of the big show.

7. Motorola will split up in Q1 2011: Motorola will split into two publicly traded companies early next year, with one entity focused on enterprise communications wares and the other on handsets and home entertainment devices.

8. France considers Internet censorship: French lawmakers are supposed to vote next Tuesday on a new security bill that would filter Internet traffic with the aim of catching child pornographers. Critics of the measure say it will not work but will lead to undue censorship.

9. 5 reasons Silicon Valley might stumble coming out of recession: Unemployment, worldwide competition and slower investment than in the past could hamper Silicon Valley’s road out of the recession, according to a new report.

10. Vancouver 2010: An exclusive tour of the technology operations center, Avaya hopes for gold in running the Olympic network and Six high-tech ways to enjoy the 2010 Olympics: The 2010 Olympic Winter Games opened at week’s end in Vancouver, with the sports-loving geeks among us impressed by both the athleticism on display and the technology.

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By Joab Jackson
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
February 08, 2010

NEW YORK - Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips.

With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said Yu–Ming Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work.

If commercialized, such graphene processors could be the basis of superior signal processing componentry, improving the fidelity of audio and video recording, radar processing and medical imaging.

IBM conducted the work on behalf of the U.S. Defense Department’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), under a program to develop high-performance RF (radio frequency) transistors. A write-up of the results has been published in the Feb. 5 issue of Science.

Graphene, a single-atom-thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, can transport electrons more quickly than other semiconductors, a quality called electron mobility. “That makes graphene a promising material for high-speed or high-frequency electronic components,” Lin said.

This prototype processor was created on a 2-inch wafer, though in principle it could be done on even larger wafers, which should bring the production costs down, Lin said. Graphene is produced by heating a silicon carbide wafer, allowing the silicon to evaporate.

Until now, the downside of graphene has been that it is very sensitive to the environment. During the fabrication process, an oxide layer is deposited over the graphene to form the gate insulator. Typically, this deposition degrades the graphene’s electron mobility, due to defects in the oxide that scatter electrons in the graphene. The IBM researchers minimized the damage by separating the graphene from the oxide with a very thin polymer layer.

This new approach has been instrumental in allowing the researchers to almost quadruple the frequency of graphene chips. Last year, research teams from IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology both demonstrated graphene processors capable of frequencies around 26GHz. By comparison, silicon-based transistors of the same gate length (240 nanometers) have only been able to scale up to a clock rate of 40Ghz or so.

It also sets the stage for commercial production. The research shows that “high-quality graphene can be produced on a wafer scale, and graphene transistors can be fabricated with those processes used in the semiconductor industries,” Lin said.

Lin cautioned against thinking of graphene as a substitute for the silicon-based microprocessors used in today’s computers, at least at anytime in the near future. One major roadblock is that graphene does not work easily with discrete electronic signals, he explained. Because graphene is a zero bandgap semiconductor, meaning there is no energy difference between its conductive and nonconductive states, transistors made of the semiconductor cannot be turned on and off. In contrast, silicon has a bandgap of one electron volt, making it good for processing discrete digital signals, Lin said.

Instead, graphene is better suited for making analog transistors, such as signal processors and amplifiers. Today, such circuitry is largely made from GaAs (gallium arsenide), though GaAs offers nowhere near the same electron mobility, Lin said.

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
February 5, 2010

IBM reported that fuel giant Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corporation (PSPC) is now experiencing greater operational efficiency resulting from the two strategic agreements with them pegged at US$9 million.

In May 2009, PSPC signed the contract with IBM, building on an earlier agreement in 2008. As part of the deal, IBM provided SAP consultancy services to PSPC’s Global Systems Applications and Products (GSAP) in Data Processing for its Downstream One project implementation in the country.

With its global pool of SAP consultants, IBM said it enabled PSPC to successfully integrate its local Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with the Shell global system for its so-called “downstream” business in the Philippines.

IBM claimed to have helped PSPC consolidate the smaller legacy applications into Shell’s global system. This resulted for PSPC to achieve its Downstream One program objectives of simplifying and standardizing systems and processes in its operations.

During the project’s implementation, PSPC and IBM teams worked together delivering what Big Blue describes as “the best GSAP Go-Live” ever.

James Velasquez, country general manager of IBM Philippines, noted that key to the project’s success was IBM’s ability to provide a simplified business procedure for Shell’s business partners in the Philippines, which resulted in the issuance of accurate and timely invoices. By automating the said procedure, the time taken previously to issue invoices manually was significantly reduced. As a result, PSPC’s sales managers were able to channel their energy and focus on developing greater customer relationship.

“The GSAP system helped Shell’s commercial team build better relationships with business partners. The system issued precise invoices while minimizing time spent on clerical work. It has freed up more time for account managers to effectively engage with customers,” said Ramon del Rosario, manager of Downstream One Philippines for PSPC.

Velasquez said IBM is elated to be part of PSPC’s successful GSAP experience. “We were able to bring to the fore IBM’s deep industry insight and global experience in SAP implementations through our partnership with Pilipinas Shell,” he said. – Tom S. Noda

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Computerworld Philippines Staff
February 4, 2010

Local food manufacturer Del Monte Philippines is outsourcing part of its IT department to technology services giant IBM, in its bid to increase its revenues as part of a five-year plan.

The move to IT outsourcing, which includes outsourcing its entire IT infrastructure and the management of an outsourced SAP infrastructure, will help the company reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) by funneling funds to its operating expenditures (OPEX), freeing up some finances for other more relevant investments.

The two contracts amounting to as much as US$3.1 million covering a five-year term were signed in 2009.

Under the service level agreement, IBM will manage the company’s data center, servers/storage, network, DMS, helpdesk, and IT asset & vendor management facilities. Additionally, Big Blue will manage an outsourced IP infrastructure—composed of servers, storage, a data center facility and a disaster recovery site—for Del Monte’s migration to SAP ECC 6.0.

Cesar Canlas, CIO, Del Monte, said outsourcing to IBM has helped the company improve its day-to-day operations, while boosting employee productivity and helping the business grow.

“Our clients recognize that in today’s business environment, technology is the differentiator which can provide a valuable competitive edge,” said James Velasquez, Country General Manager, IBM Philippines. “IBM has the global IT expertise and know-how to help ensure that Del Monte reaches its five-year revenue objectives.”

Del Monte is a local competitor in the food manufacturing market, which produces pineapple juice and juice drinks, canned pineapples and tropical mixed fruits, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, and tomato ketchup, among others. – John Mark V. Tuazon

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
February 2, 2010

IBM claims to have strengthened anew its global delivery capabilities with its recent opening of a new global delivery center for application services (AS) in Cebu City.

The new Cebu hub will provide IT services to clients to support their growth in the local and global markets.

IBM is expanding its application services operations in the Philippines, offering key competencies such as Java and Web technologies, Lotus Notes, Testing and Software Maintenance. The new facility serves as IBM’s second global delivery site for AS in the country, and is located at the TGU Tower in Asiatown IT Park, Lahug Cebu City.

“As an integral part of IBM’s strategic network of delivery centers, the team in the Philippines provides a full range of end-to-end consulting, systems integration, and application development and maintenance solutions to many valued customers around the world,” said Lula Mohanty, director for Philippines Global Delivery, IBM Global Business Services. “IBM’s global delivery brings together deep industry, technical and analytics expertise for development of advanced business solutions and asset assembly to achieve the highest delivery excellence.”

James Velasquez, country general manager of IBM Philippines, said the southern region plays a very important role in IBM’s strategy for geographical expansion in the Philippines, and Cebu is at the center of this.

“Global integration is about tapping into the best skills and capabilities from across the globe and delivering them where needed. Cebu was chosen as a choice location because it offers a conducive infrastructure and a wealth of talent,” Velasquez said.

IBM has been operating in Cebu for over 30 years and is committed to investing and growing its presence in the city.

“We are excited about extending our partnership to a wide range of clients in the southern region - both from the public and the private sector. We are confident of bringing the best of IBM - local as well as global expertise - to clients here and neighboring areas, to help the local organizations achieve their business goals,” he said. “We are also looking forward to enhance our long-term relationships with government and educational institutions as well as expanding our business partner eco-system in this region.”

The first Global Delivery Center for AS in the Philippines was launched in 2003 located at Eastwood City, in Quezon City. Since 2000, IBM has established the following global delivery centers in the Philippines: IBM Solutions Delivery, IBM Daksh and IBM Business Services to deliver Customer Relationship Management, HR, Finance and Administration, Supply Chain, IT and Business Consulting Services to over 2,000 clients within the country and around the world.  – Tom S. Noda

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Response Network IBM has committed PHP 40,000,000 (USD$860,000) worth of technology, services and expertise as part of its contribution to the Philippines’ disaster rehabilitation and preparedness efforts. IBM is strengthening its partnership and collaboration with the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) towards the effective implementation of its Emergency Response Network (ERN) — Sahana Go Kit. Sahana is an integrated set of free and open source web-based applications that provide solutions to large-scale humanitarian problems in the aftermath of a disaster — from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

The coverage of the assistance may include the provision of IBM servers and storage, project management services, a review of NDCC’s IT network infrastructure, provision of software developers to customize Sahana, ERN related services and volunteers from IBM On Demand Community and the IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC).

Photo shows IBMers doing volunteer work — packing “care” goods for typoon-affected employees and community.

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
January 30, 2010

IBM claims ownership to the “largest enterprise cloud computing deployment in history” with Panasonic Corporation’s adoption of its suite of LotusLive collaboration technologies.

Big Blue told Computerworld Philippines, that more than 100,000 employees in various departments will initially begin the migration, expanding to a total of over 300,000 employees and external partners and suppliers of Panasonic who will work together across the Web as efficiently as if they were all down the hall.

Panasonic reported its adoption of IBM’s LotusLive.com services will be for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management. The company will also implement LotusLive Connections for business social networking between employees, partners and suppliers to find and share the right insight when needed.

And as part of the investment in open IBM technology, Panasonic will migrate employees from Microsoft Exchange or other collaboration software to LotusLive for email, calendaring and contact management.

According to Mitsuhiro Aoyama, vice president of Panasonic’s Corporate Information Systems Company, they selected IBM for its global email and collaboration platform to help them transform their workforce into a globally connected and integrated team. Due to the open architecture of LotusLive, Panasonic can build on its existing and future investments in their IT infrastructure, without increasing the resources of their IT departments.

“Panasonic would only make this strategic move with the assurance that their daily business workflow will be safeguarded from costly interruptions and intrusions as millions of existing LotusLive users know,” said Sean Poulley, vice president, IBM Cloud Collaboration.

“When responsible businesses such as Panasonic move to the cloud, they want innovative technologies without compromising security, reliability or privacy,” Poulley added.

Now on its first year, IBM LotusLive has attracted 18 million users worldwide for business services such as social networking, email and Web meetings for as little as $3 per month. Because of this, IBM said it will extend LotusLive further with the availability and free trial of social networking services LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Spanish.

Citing various market estimates, IBM said the cloud computing market is expected to grow 28% annually, from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012.  – Tom S. Noda

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
January 28, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison expressed high hopes for his company’s now-completed acquisition of Sun Microsystems Wednesday but denied media reports that Oracle planned massive layoffs of Sun employees.

Expressing ambitions to be like IBM was in the 1960s, Ellison stressed that Oracle could offer customers a full line of integrated software and hardware technologies. He addressed attendees at a session detailing Sun-Oracle post-merger plans, held at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif.

[ Oracle continues to hail Java but is not interested in offering the proposed Sun Cloud service. | Relive the rise and fall of Sun Microsystems in InfoWorld's slideshow. ]

“It took a while, but Oracle and Sun are now one company,” Ellison said of the $7.4 billion merger, which closed on Tuesday. “We’re very excited. Sun has a wonderful heritage of engineering and innovation.”

“Our vision for the year 2010 is the same as IBM’s vision for the year 1960, which is go ahead and deliver a comprehensive suite of technologies,” said Ellison. IBM was successful with that strategy and became “the most important company in the history of the Earth,” he said.

“I believe that by having all the pieces, we can deliver better working systems,” Ellison said.

But he denied media reports that said Oracle would lay off half of Sun’s organization.

“I think the people who [reported] that should be ashamed of themselves,” said Ellison.

“The truth is, we’re actually hiring 2,000 people over the next few months to beef up the Sun businesses, and that’s about twice as many people as we’ll be laying off,” he said. Prior to the completion of the merger, however, Sun was already in lay-off mode. Most recently, the company in October revealed intentions to cut 3,000 jobs.

The Sun business will begin contributing to Oracle profits in February, said Ellison. Last year, Ellison had said Sun was losing $100 million per month while waiting for the merger to close. The deal had been held up by European Union objections, which have been resolved.

Oracle, Ellison said, plans to sell to and service the top 4,000 Sun customers directly.  Customers, however, still can buy Oracle software to run on non-Sun hardware, he noted.

“If you want to run our database on HP, we’ll sell you that,” said Ellison.

Ellison also stressed Oracle’s commitment to the Solaris Unix OS acquired with Sun and also to Linux.

“I love Linux. We’re a big supporter of Linux. Solaris is an older and more capable OS,” said Ellison.

Additionally, he stressed MySQL, the open source database that Sun owned, fits in with the company’s strategy of offering different databases for different uses.

This story, “Oracle’s Ellison excited about Sun technologies,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on Oracle at InfoWorld.com.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
January 26, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, posted the image of a tombstone on his blog last week, an R.I.P., for Sun Microsystems Co. Before long. more than 800 employees, outside developers and others had posted comments.

The responses, under the headline, “So long, old friend…,” were similarly eulogizing, many offering up a simple “thank you” mixed with some sadness, a few memories and sprinkles of hope for the post-merger.

On the same day Gosling posted his tombstone, CEO Jonathan Schwartz sent around an internal memo expressing his pride at having worked at Sun and urging employees “to emotionally resign from Sun,” and prepare to take “the first step in a new adventure.”

What wasn’t said in Schwartz’s note — and isn’t clear at this point — is how many at Sun will continue with the merged companies.

Schwartz and some of Sun’s other top executives will leave with large severances; in Schwartz’s case, that would be more than $12 million in severance, according to Sun’s recent proxy statement . The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Schwartz will soon resign .

With European regulatory approvals for the deal all but final, Oracle and Sun plan to hold Webcast briefings on Wednesday to outline the direction of the combined companies and their many products.

Sun has about 29,000 employees and the combined headcount of the two firms will be about 115,000. Analysts, however, expect cutbacks to take place once the merger begins in earnest.

Oracle and Sun announced their plans to merge in April but the uncertainty about Sun’s future goes back a little further, to March, when news surfaced that Sun was in acquisition talks with IBM.

Oracle wanted the merger completed sometime in last fall, but European regulators’ delay in approving the merger has dragged it out. That, in turn, may have hurt Sun’s share of the server market. Its worldwide server systems revenue totalled $778 million for the third quarter of last year, a 35% decline from the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC’s latest report on worldwide systems factory revenue. All vendors saw revenues fall in the recession, but Sun’s decline was the steepest.

Even so, Jean Bozman, an IDC analyst, points out that Sun remains the fourth largest server vendor in the world, after IBM, which had 30% of the world’s market share with $3.3 billion in revenue in the last quarter; Hewlett-Packard, with a 31% share and $3.2 billion in revenue; Dell , with 13.5% and $1.4 billion; and Sun, with a 9.5% market share.

Sun’s “installed base is so large there is continuing demand to replace what people have,” said Bozman.

For the first time since the merger acquisition talks began, the big new thing for Sun and Oracle will be the gradual removal of the uncertainty about the future — starting with Wednesday’s briefing.

The tech industry has, of course, seen many companies with great legacies evaporate. In this case, some of what was Sun may survive, thanks to decisions to open source much of what it owns, according to one person who posted on Gosling’s blog. Henry Story, a Web architect at Sun, wrote: Sun Microsystems was indeed one of the greatest companies ever.

“Jonathan [Schwartz]will be remembered for open sourcing the whole software/hardware stack, so that at least none of the engineers who worked at the company will have wasted their time,” Story wrote. “In other companies, such a takeover could all so easily [have] sent their work to the dustbin of copyrighted material. Imagine a great musician — a Mozart perhaps — working for some owner who then one day turned around and just burnt all his work. This is not what happened. And yet, all too often, this is indeed what does happen in the software industry.”

For his part, Gosling appears ready to move on with Oracle. He followed his tombstone post with one of fish tank that shows the Java mascot with a snorkel. Sun plus Oracle = Snorcle?

“Enough of being maudlin, it’s time to look forward to being a unified company,” wrote Gosling.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , send e-mail to pthibodeau@computerworld.com or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed

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IBM Philippines has been awarded as one of the top business taxpayers of Quezon City. Country General Manager James Velasquez (2nd from left) along with Chief Financial Officer Rommell Silva and Government Programs Executive Alejandro Melchor (4th and 5th from left) received the award from Quezon City Mayor Feliciano Belmonte Jr., Vice Mayor Herbert Bautista and City Treasurer Dr. Victor Endriga on the occassion of the City’s 70th founding anniversary. This is the 8th consecutive year that IBM has been recognized by the local government as one of its top taxpayers. IBM Philippines has four sites in Quezon City for its key business units including Sales and Distribution, Global Business Services, BPO and BTO operations, and the recently opened IBM Innovation Center in UP Ayala Technohub.

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By Denise Dubie
Network World (US)
December 23, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Enterprise IT management technologies underwent an image makeover in 2009. No longer just the mandatory tools discussed by engineers troubleshooting problems, IT management capabilities such as automation and service delivery became central to discussions around adopting virtualization, cloud computing and other emerging technologies that high-tech executives want.

The usual suspects — CA, BMC, HP and IBM — responded frequently to growing demand with technology updates, partnerships and purchases, but 2009 also saw some unexpected vendors move further into the management game. With acquisitions, alliances and product advancements, Cisco, EMC, Microsoft and VMware also incorporated management capabilities into larger strategic announcements, realizing there is money to be made in providing intelligent controls for advanced environments.

“The emergence of converged infrastructure solutions such as Cisco [Unified Computing System] and HP converged infrastructure are driving a significant range of systems management functionality closer to the hardware,” says Mary Johnston Turner, research director for system management software at IDC.

Here Network World takes a look back at 10 significant moments (presented in no particular order) in the IT management market during 2009 that prove vendors across the board are prepping 2010’s next big thing in management.

Infrastructure vendors make management moves
Much of the significant management news made in 2009 didn’t involve familiar names such as BMC and CA.

Companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, EMC and VMware started gaining more attention for how their partnerships and product launches related to data center and policy-based management, typically only on the agenda for the market-leading ‘Big Four’ management vendors. That trend, according to industry watchers, could be the most notable news in the IT management market for 2009.

“All the infrastructure players are doing more in the management game, especially in the virtualization world, because for now, customers are turning to their infrastructure provider for their initial take on management capabilities. And management technology is a way to reduce total cost of ownership and obviously an opportunity for a new revenue stream,” says Cameron Haight, research vice president covering IT operations management for Gartner. “The traditional management players are trying to figure out their relationship with those infrastructure vendors that are clearly augmenting their portfolios with management technology. This continuing progression from the infrastructure providers will be interesting to watch as former partners become competitors and management software makers look for ways to differentiate themselves from the pack.”

Microsoft acquires Opalis
Microsoft in 2009 acquired the technology many industry watchers expect to be most in demand in 2010. Opalis offered customers IT process automation software, which all of the leading management software makers either developed or acquired. For instance, HP acquired Opsware, while BMC bought RealOps and BladeLogic. And CA and IBM organically developed automation technology.

“IT process automation became the mantra for all major IT operations management vendors,” says David Williams, research vice president at Gartner.

The Opalis buy gives Microsoft the technology management vendors need to manage virtual systems as well as applications and services delivery via cloud computing.

“IT process automation is a real needed technology and it becomes more important when you talk about virtual systems because virtualization requires rapid responses, it requires things be done at automation speed, not human speed,” says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates. “Microsoft was one of the vendors in the dark on automation so this acquisition gives the vendor a chance to extend automation to Azure and other cloud environments, because cloud computing requires a level of workflow and orchestration that Microsoft could not have done well in the short-term on its own.”

BMC acquires Tideway
Industry watchers say BMC didn’t make industry-changing acquisitions in 2009, but the company did strengthen its product portfolio with the purchase of Tideway Systems. Tideway’s Foundation product helps customers build a map of application components and the underlying infrastructure supporting the applications. This technology coupled with BMC’s Atrium configuration management database (CMDB) could help the management software maker extend its business service management (BSM) efforts.

“Worth mentioning are that two vendors that have tried to stay ‘independent’ have now been snapped up as well: Tideway — application dependency mapping — into BMC, and Opalis into Microsoft,” says Evelyn Hubbert, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “BMC did have some functionality but this acquisition improves their capability across their solution platform.”

Cisco launches Unified Computing System
Cisco’s UCS not only had Cisco presenting an architecture alternative for enterprise IT executives, it also marked a recognition from the vendor that management technology is critical to larger infrastructure strategies. UCS involves Cisco-developed blade servers that would become part of an advanced architecture that incorporates network, computer, virtualization and management resources into a single system. And BM became for the UCS release the management resource provider chosen by Cisco. The partnership fueled other rumors that Cisco may make even bolder moves into the management market.

“Until recently Cisco never really appreciated that IT management is a set of complex, collaborative, interdependent processes which require more sophistication than their device monitoring and configuration tools. This is where BMC comes in — they’ve been working on management issues forever,” said Jasmine Noel, principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates, at the time. “I’m thinking there will be no hardware-only computing vendors by the end of this recession. The perceived customer value for hardware-only is too low. For customers with large data centers and server farms, the perceived value is having agile, policy-based computing and capacity management. Cisco, using next-generation Intel chips, could by itself deliver the first two parts, but not the management system.”

CA acquires NetQoS
CA continued expanding its broad IT management software suite when for $200 million it acquired network performance management vendor NetQoS. The deal gave CA application flow capabilities that its Wily Technology acquisition didn’t cover. The application performance management products from Wily coupled with NetQoS helped CA complete its application management portfolio.

“The acquisition is good because NetQoS has a focus on application delivery, so when combined with Wily, it offers a good one-two punch. Customers can visualize the links and relationships between the delivery technologies and the business applications and services with Wily, and understand the real-time application and service activity across those links and relationships with NetQoS traffic flows,” Noel said.

The deal also marked a larger trend among management vendors in 2009, according to Gartner’s Williams.

“Application performance management became the hot product in the availability and performance space — this was attacked from all sides: traditional end-to-end J2EE type performance (CA Wily, Compuware, IBM Tivoli, HP, Dynatrace), network NetFlow (CA NetQoS, Opnet and Network Instruments) and end-user response time and behavior analysis (Knoa, Compuware/Gomez and Aternity),” Williams says.

IBM unveils Tivoli Live Monitoring Services
IT management software delivery models experienced some transformation in 2009, with several vendors offering their typically licensed software as services. IBM, for instance, packaged sophisticated technology such as Tivoli monitoring as easily digestible services paid via subscriptions. Tivoli Live Monitoring Services provides technology hosted in IBM’s cloud computing environment, which enables IBM to provide customers with monitoring capabilities without large upfront investment or ongoing maintenance.

“Tivoli Live gives customers the ability to have hybrid service delivery models with one integrated console,” says Al Zollar, general manager at IBM Tivoli. “On-premise or off-premise, the person working in the operations center is looking at the same dashboard. We wanted to be able to deliver the same service management software through flexible service delivery models and enable customers to adopt hybrid scenarios.”

Industry watchers note that the leading management software makers developed software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, in part in response to customer demand but also to better compete with newcomers such as Service-now.com.

“The big news among IT management vendors was that they all announced SaaS offerings in some of their solutions,” Forrester’s Hubbert says. “This reflects the buying behavior we have seen with many of our customers where they want predictability in what they are spending on IT management solutions.”

EMC buys Configuresoft
With a handful of management vendors already under its belt, EMC upped its management software game even more with the acquisition of Configuresoft.

The company expanded on its OEM partnership with Configuresoft and acquired the software maker outright, which helped EMC broaden its management capabilities across the “entire IT information infrastructure,” EMC executives said at the time. Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) technology was already sold as EMC Server Configuration Manager, and Configuresoft’s Configuration Intelligent Analytics (CIA) is sold as EMC Configuration Analytics Manager. EMC says the purchase will help customers automate management across virtualized environments. EMC also was able to unveil its Ionix brand, which incorporated the Configuresoft and other technology buys (Smarts, nLayers, Voyence and Infra).

“EMC buying Configuresoft basically enabled EMC to transform a relatively chaotic product line into a streamlined and strategic Ionix, which is a product set that definitely signals to BMC, CA, HP and IBM that EMC is serious about management,” EMA’s Mann says.

Compuware acquires Gomez
Another acquisition in the management market proved vendors recognize that customers want to deal with fewer vendors when trying to get control of their environments. As for application performance management, Compuware coupled with Gomez could help IT managers get a complete picture of internal and external environments.

“The internal monitors such as what Compuware offers don’t do a good job of providing insight into the end-user experience and the external monitors can’t see performance inside. The coupling provides a complementary viewpoint, a more complete end-to-end application performance management product,” says Jim Frey, research director at EMA.

Compuware acquired Gomez to combine Compuware’s application performance management technology with Gomez’s Web site monitoring and Web application performance management. The combination, according to industry watchers, could help Compuware win more customers and provide customers with more options in application performance management.

“In the short term, integrating information from Gomez into an APM solution becomes a strong argument in favor of Compuware’s new strategy, and providing an integration between web monitoring services and Compuware’s passive monitoring and APM is a plus for Gomez customers,” Garbani wrote in a Forrester Research blog post. “Longer term, the combination of the two could lead to an SaaS end-to-end application performance management solution, something that should have a strong market appeal.”

Cisco-EMC-VMware data center venture
Cisco’s second significant management move involved a three-way partnership with EMC and its subsidiary VMware. The trio came together to launch its Virtual Computing Environment coalition and Acadia, which would offer training and education on how to use products developed by the coalition.

According to a report in Network World, “The products being developed by the [Virtual Computing Environment] coalition are called Vblock Infrastructure Packages. They are pre-integrated, tested and validated packages combining virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management products from the three vendors.”

EMC’s contribution to the joint data center venture was notably unified management software. As part of the news blast, EMC also introduced Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager software, which the company says is “designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles.” EMC says the product will manage Vblock Infrastructure Packages that are, according to press statements from the coalition members, “validated platforms of engineered, integrated IT infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, that deliver a breakthrough total cost of ownership and pervasive virtualization at a scale to meet today’s most demanding use cases.”

VMware’s vSphere, SpringSource news
First VMware announced vSphere, which represented an overhaul of its virtualization platform designed to aggregate virtual resources in a data into one centrally managed computing poll.

“VMware partnered very strongly with cloud provider Savvis to deliver vSphere in the cloud and it clicked that they needed to also be able to manage cloud environments. Soon after announcements from management vendors BMC and CA emerged around managing cloud,” EMA’s Mann says. “VMware also launched a raft of its own management products, which also put the niche vendors on notice that VMware is really getting to the core of systems management now.”

Then VMware announced its plans to acquire SpringSource. The management technology gain might not have been top of mind to industry watchers, but considering SpringSource had acquired open source network management software maker Hyperic, it started to become clearer that VMware realized it needed management to better compete.

At the time, VMware said in a Network World report that the SpringSource acquisition would lead to new products to build, run and manage applications both internally and on external cloud platforms. SpringSource picked up Hyperic to be able to offer customers a Java application life-cycle solution that would start with developing Java applications and run through the management of applications on production systems.

“VMware and SpringSource set the groundwork for more application and workload-aware resource provisioning and automation,” IDC’s Turner says. “VMware emerged as a management software vendor this year, supported by a number of vCenter announcements.”

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
December 17, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The three leaders of the relational database market are responding to the sudden mania for the data processing technology Hadoop in three very different ways.

While startups and established data warehousing vendors such as Sybase Inc. and Teradata Inc. are embracing Hadoop and its Google -developed progenitor, MapReduce , Microsoft Corp. is resisting it.

“We’d never bring Hadoop code into one of our products,” said Microsoft technical fellow and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David J. DeWitt.

DeWitt’s lack of interest is not surprising. DeWitt is an academic expert in parallel SQL databases, having co-invented three of them. He co-authored a paper this spring that argued that SQL databases still beat MapReduce at most tasks. He hasn’t changed his mind.

“Every database vendor wants to claim that they’re doing Hadoop because it’s the popular thing,” he said. “There’s too much FUD. SQL databases still work pretty well.”

DeWitt leads a database research lab at Madison that is helping Microsoft with R&D for its upcoming Parallel Data Warehousing version of SQL Server 2008 R2 , formerly known as Project Madison.

As such, he said that the new edition of SQL Server will add some analytic functions that roughly mimic some of the features of MapReduce/Hadoop.

The additions are the result of incorporating technology from DATAllegro Inc., which Microsoft acquired , not Hadoop, DeWitt said.

He said does acknowledge, however, that MapReduce/Hadoop is better at keeping long-running queries from crashing than SQL.

Because of that, Microsoft may eventually try to incorporate those capabilities into future data warehousing-oriented versions of SQL Server, he said.

That would likely be a Microsoft-led effort, rather than a licensing of Hadoop’s open-source code, which is managed by the Apache Software Foundation.

IBM is the leading corporate supporter of Apache. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also “very bullish on Hadoop,” said Anant Jhingran, CTO of IBM’s information management division in the software group.

“I’m not saying that mind-melding Hadoop with a database is the answer for everything,” Jhingran said. “But in the end, I think every enterprise will want Hadoop. I’m just not sure in what form.”

Questions remain about whether enterprises want Hadoop integrated into their SQL databases, as a separate data warehousing appliance, or as a Web-only service where Hadoop is hidden underneath, as with IBM’s experimental M2 service.

To determine this, IBM is running pilots with a dozen enterprise customers, as well as doing R&D work in the lab, Jhingran said. He declined to comment on the likelihood of Hadoop functionality making it into the next version of DB2 or Informix.

One thing is for certain, says Jhingran: Hadoop is best used to solve emerging problems such as Web analytics, fraud, and analysis of unstructured and semi-structured data, rather than the problems that relational databases have already proven to excel with.

“For those vendors who simply want to use Hadoop to build a database replacement, I think they will fall flat on their faces,” he said. SQL technology “supports a $300 billion ecosystem. It’s extremely robust. I’m not that young [at 46], but I’ll be retired before SQL is retired.”

Oracle Database stands to lose the most if MapReduce/Hadoop takes off, critics say.

That’s not just because of Oracle ’s longtime lead in the relational database market, but also because of its database’s poor reputation for scale-out — a MapReduce/Hadoop strength.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. But in October, it published a blog which argued, in the words of independent analyst Curt Monash, that “actually, we’ve been doing MapReduce all along.”

A senior product manager at Oracle, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, said parallel processing of large data sets been possible with Oracle Database using features first introduced with Oracle 9i back in 2001. He describes in detail how to implement it in a blog post.

“MapReduce in the end is a programming construct … SQL will allow for massive parallel processing as well. It is all a matter of looking beyond hype and finding a solution you are comfortable with,” Dijcks wrote.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
December 15, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - IBM has been disparaging products made by a smaller rival in order to protect its lucrative mainframe business, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday.

The suit was filed by Neon Enterprise Software and concerns a software tool called zPrime that the company released in July. Neon says zPrime can reduce operating costs for mainframe users by allowing them to shift more of their computing jobs onto IBM’s zAAP and zIIP specialty mainframe processors.

Customers don’t pay software licensing fees to use those specialty processors, or SPs, instead of IBM’s standard central processors, which has caused IBM to lash out at Neon in order to protect its mainframe business, according to the lawsuit (PDF).

IBM told its mainframe customers in a letter that “the use of zPrime will cause Neon’s customers to become obligated — contrary to IBM’s original promises to customers that purchased SPs — to pay software license fees for workloads shifted to SPs,” Neon said in its lawsuit. That claim is false, Neon said.

It also accused IBM of selling additional SPs to customers only if they agree not to use Neon’s product, and of characterizing zPrime as an unlawful “circumvention” technology. The lawsuit seeks damages and a permanent injunction to prevent IBM from repeating those claims.

IBM is not taking the suit lying down. In a brief statement via e-mail, it said Neon’s claims “have no merit, and its product offers no innovation.”

“Neon’s software deliberately subverts the way IBM mainframe computers process data,” IBM said. “This is akin to a homeowner tampering with his electrical meter to save money. IBM has invested billions of dollars in the mainframe this decade, and we will vigorously protect our investment.”

IBM is also dealing with an antitrust inquiry into its mainframe business by the U.S. Department of Justice, following a complaint filed in September by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

The trade group said IBM has been refusing to issue licenses for its mainframe OS to competitors, something it had been required to do by the DOJ after actions taken against the company in the 1970s. The DOJ ended a longstanding antitrust consent decree with IBM in 2001.

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
December 1, 2009

Arming them with the English language and some basic computer skills, blind people are seen to establish careers in call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.

“A call center career is a potential for blind graduate students,” said Randy Weisser, executive director of Resources for the Blind, Inc. (RBI), a non-government organization. “Having the opportunity to train and access technology allows blind students to explore new avenues for personal development and greater employment opportunities.”

Speaking during the recent graduation ceremony of “Computer Eyes” program, a week-long computer camp for blind students conducted by RBI and IBM Philippines, Weisser said empowering visually challenged persons with language and computer skills will change their traditional career of “massage therapist.”

Weisser reported massage therapist is the “No. 1 profession” of blind people in the Philippines and also claimed that 70% of visually impaired individuals in the US remain to be unemployed to date. “This Computer Eyes program will change that.  There are opportunities for them to do jobs in call centers and data transcription centers if only they have PC skills and English skills.”

The recent Computer Eyes event served as the 8th national computer camp for blind students who came from various schools across the Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao islands in the Philippines.

A total of 20 visually impaired students from high school and college levels gathered for a week-long basic training in computer literacy, particularly on computer applications, such as: keyboard skills, word processing, web page creation, social internet networks (Facebook and Friendster), and the use of adaptive software that enable individuals to use computers regardless of blindness or visual impairment. 

This year’s Computer Eyes camp was held inside Big Blue’s main headquarters at IBM Plaza in Eastwood City Cyberpark in Libis, Quezon City. There, the students learned computer skills by using Jaws, an open-source software program that works with speech synthesizers.

Weisser said Computer Eyes training will bridge the gap between the sighted and blind, and claimed that those who went under the program learned to be independent and are now practicing what they have learned.

Since Computer Eyes’ introduction in 2001, more than 170 visually impaired students from all over the country were trained under the program. Weisser said RBI and IBM are planning to do summer evaluations next year for a possible computer camp during the summer vacations of students.

Andrea Escalona, IBM Philippines’ country manager for marketing, communications and corporate citizenship and corporate affairs, said big blue’s support to Computer Eyes only shows that IBM has been living up to its company values of “dedication to every client’s success, innovation that matters” and also “trust and responsibility.”

Escalona said IBM has a long history of commitment to “diversity” and has consistently taken the lead on diversity policies long before it was required by law. “The company is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer,” she said.

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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 Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
November 19, 2009

BOSTON - IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is now available on Keepods — thin USB devices made by the Italian company NSEC.

Big Blue’s Symphony suite is based on OpenOffice.org and includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation creation. The new Keepod version, available through the Keepod store, employs VMware’s ThinApp virtualization software, which wraps applications into an executable file that is isolated from a computer’s operating system, mitigating compatibility and security concerns.

Keepods are roughly the size of a credit card and hold up to 16GB of data. Prices start at €19.90 (US$29.78) for a 2GB “Base” version. A 2GB Secure edition, which includes 256-bit AES hardware encryption, is priced at €69.

Although a USB deployment option could make Symphony attractive to more users, Microsoft retains an iron grip on the office productivity market. Eighty percent of respondents polled for a Forrester Research report earlier this year said their companies were using some form of Office, and 78.4 percent had no plans to deploy any alternatives.

IBM does not formally track Symphony installs but estimates about 10 million people are using the software, said product manager Jeanette Barlow.

Many companies are still in the tire-kicking stage, running pilot programs or deploying the software on a departmental level, she said.

The Keepod announcement comes in response to “a huge push from enterprise customers for supporting mobile workers,” she said.

IBM expects interest in Symphony to jump significantly next year, when a new version based on the OpenOffice 3 codebase is released, according to Barlow.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
November 17, 2009

CLARK, PAMPANGA – A homegrown medium-scale livestock producer emerged as the winner of IBM’s Business Reality Challenge, granting $30,000 worth of software, hardware, and consulting services to the SMB with the most pressing IT challenges.

Red Dragon Farm (RDF), a commercial livestock producer aiming to be the lead poultry and swine operator in the Central Luzon region, has been chosen as the recipient of the IBM grant to aid in its business expansion.

RDF currently has 12 poultry grower farms sprawled across Central Luzon, a 2,000-sow level swine farm, its own feed mill to supply the needs of its poultry and swine farms, and Fresh Options, a meat shop with over 58 stores located all over Luzon.

RDF, IBM executives said, was chosen out of almost a hundred SMBs who participated in the challenge due to its unique IT challenges. “We have been in the business for 20 years, but we have been stuck with manual systems that ended up fragmenting our processes,” explained Dr. Robert Lo, founder, president and general manager, RDF.

Lo described their current system as “very disparate,” with the absence of networking and automation capabilities that could enable them to deliver information faster. “There are a lot of bottlenecks, especially with the processing of documents. All documents need to be signed by supervisors, so imagine if one supervisor goes on leave, the whole process is affected,” Lo lamented.

The IBM grant will be RDF’s first enterprise-level IT implementation to date. “With their growth, the IT side wasn’t emphasized,” stressed Pia Azarcon, country manager for ibm.com/midmarket, IBM Philippines. “Imagine if they had IT capabilities from the beginning, and imagine what they can do if they have all these products in front of them.”

Lo said he hopes the IBM grant will address their rabid challenges, especially in the area of business intelligence, which he personally finds “interesting.” “We have established locations for our retail shops without good marketing studies using only a trial and error system,” he said. “With a good business intelligence unit in place, we will be able to forecast good locations, popular products and deal with volatile prices in the market.”

The final integrated system is yet to be finalized, Azarcon and Lo said, but Lo said he sees an integrated solution that will combine the financial, administrative, people and overall operations arms of his company, This, he predicts, would achieve 15% to 20% costs savings in overall business operations of RDF.

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By Stephen Lawson
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
November 17, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - A Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has regained the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, overtaking the installation that was ranked at the top in June, while China entered the Top 10 with a hybrid Intel-AMD system.

The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops per second from its 224,162 cores, while the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico slowed slightly to 1.042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned. A petaflop is one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The list of the Top 500 supercomputers, set to be released on Monday during the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, is compiled twice a year and is now in its 34th installment. The total capacity of the systems on the new list is 27.6 petaflops, up from 22.6 petaflops on the previous list in June.

Roadrunner debuted in June 2008 as the first computer to surpass 1 petaflop per second on the Linpack benchmark test used to rank systems in the Top 500. It held the top spot in June 2009 with 1.105 petaflops, but lost its place after being repartitioned. Jaguar, which was in second place in June with 1.059 petaflops, was upgraded with new processors and surged ahead to take the lead. It is based on the Cray XT5 Linux supercomputer platform, which uses Advanced Micro Devices Opteron (AMD) processors. Its total peak capability is 2.3 petaflops per second.

The No. 3 system is Kraken, at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, which performs at 832 teraflops per second. This Cray XT5 supercomputer was ranked No. 6 in June, when it was rated at just 463 teraflops per second.

China’s fastest supercomputer ever, the Tianhe-1 in the city of Tianjin, achieved 563 teraflops per second for the No. 5 ranking. It uses Intel Xeon processors with Advanced Micro Devices GPUs (graphics processing units) as accelerators. Each node of the 71,680-core system has two Xeons attached to two AMD GPUs, according to the compilers of the Top 500 list. Tianhe-1 was built by the National University of Defense Technology for the National SuperComputer Center and is intended to provide high-performance computing services in northeastern China. Applications will include petroleum exploration and aircraft design.

The only other Top 10 system outside the U.S. was Jugene, built by IBM at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, which was ranked No. 4. U.S. computers dominated the Top 500 overall, making up 277 of the systems, with Europe accounting for 153 and Asia for 50. Just to make it onto the new Top 500 list, a computer needed to achieve at least 20 teraflops per second, up from 17.1 teraflops per second earlier this year.

Intel processors power 402 of the systems on the list, or 80.4 percent, up slightly from 399 in June. The IBM Power architecture is the second most commonly used, with 52 systems, down from 55. AMD’s Opteron family appears in 42 of the systems.

Most of the Top 500 supercomputers — 426 systems — now use quad-core processors. Only 59 use dual-core chips, and just four systems are based on single-core architectures. There were six systems on the latest list using IBM’s nine-core Cell Broadband Engine processor, also used in the PlayStation 3. Gigabit Ethernet is the internal interconnect technology in 259 installations, compared with 181 using InfiniBand.

Hewlett-Packard led in the number of systems on the list, with 210 supercomputers or 42 percent, compared with 185 for IBM. However, the IBM systems accounted for the most computing power, with 34.8 percent of total performance, down from 39.8 percent. HP held 22.8 percent.

The Top 500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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By Anuradha Shukla
MIS Asia
October 30, 2009

SINGAPORE - Insurance carriers in the Asia Pacific are known for their reluctance to spend on IT but the latest report from IDC Financial Insights indicates a change in scenario. The increasingly challenging marketplace is encouraging insurers to forego the tendency to look inwards rather than outsource.

IDC Financial Insights is a research and advisory firm in the Asia Pacific. It is dedicated to help clients select or short-list vendors, assess their IT master plans, and devise business and operational best practices.

The firm says insurers in this region are becoming more aware of the benefits of outsourcing technology. They now realise the importance of outsourcing for competing in today’s challenging marketplace.

Change driven by economic slowdown

The ongoing global economic crisis has given these insurers a major push towards IT outsourcing. These insurance vendors have realised how tough it is to survive in a changing business environment and understand the need to create a more dynamic business framework through the assistance of technology.

These findings are revealed in IDC Financial Insights’ study “Insurance Vendors: Spotlighting the Major Players in Asia/Pacific.” This document assesses the leading insurance technology vendors in this region.

This report focuses on three enterprise-wide technology firms: CSC, IBM and SAP, and six insurance technology firms: 3i Infotech, Cognizant, EAB Systems, eBao Technologies, Mastek and Perot Systems.

The study includes their strategic objectives; approach to product development, deployment and support; value proposition and competitive differentiation; market footprint and client profile; and, overview of major products. In addition, it provides IDC Financial Insights’ assessment of the strengths and limitations of these vendors.

According to Li-May Chew, CFA, senior research manager for IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific, each company has a unique value proposition, and compete through their different products, services and solutions.

While CSC is known for their large installed base with commendable end-to-end reach, IBM is appreciated for its high commitment level to the industry and vast ISV ecosystem of business partners.

“Among the InsTech organisations, 3i Infotech has a laudable front-end solution that addresses the full spectrum of insurance functions, and eBaoTech is viewed as being an aggressive company that has excelled at building brand awareness,” added Chew.

Recommendations

The research and advisory firm suggests that insurers exploring IT outsourcing should be sure of their needs. This will help them find a solution that correlates with their requirements. Insurers should ask the vendor if they can customise the products according to their company and weigh the pros and cons of deploying multiple or one-system solutions. Insurers should also ask for reference clients.

Technology vendors looking to tap this emerging market should identify niche or underserved segments. It is helpful to know the current state of the insurance industry and its shifting client demographics. Vendors can be more successful in this market if the provide assistance to insurers in building agility and efficiencies. They should also be ready to help them manage their ecosystem of relationships. IDC Financial Insights suggest that they can achieve this by leveraging information with greater granularity and insight. All these efforts will ultimately result in smarter, more profitable business decisions.

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IBM and Angeles University Foundation (AUF) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the development of a services science university curriculum that will support the nation’s specialized human resource needed in the services industry.

Under the Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) Collaboration Program, IBM is helping AUF to develop high end research, case studies and curriculum for incorporation or supplementation of the university’s degree offerings.

“The SSME Program is both timely and relevant given the explosive growth in the Philippine service sector, and the status of the country as a global outsourcing powerhouse. We fully subscribe to the vision of SSME’s proponents and, as the leading higher education institution in the region, we are well equipped to support this initiative,” according to Atty. Joseph Emmanuel L. Angeles, President of Angeles University Foundation.

AUF is one of a handful of autonomous universities in the Philippines located in Angeles, Pampanga. The university recently garnered the triple crown of IQUAME certification, PAASCU accreditation, and ISO certification. It is also one of only nine Centers of Excellence in Information Technology Education in the country and will soon be offering the groundbreaking Doctor of Information Technology program on November 7, 2009.

SSME is an academic discipline designed to develop the skills required in an increasingly services-based global economy and brings together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in services-led organizations.

The agreement was signed by AUF president Atty. Joseph Emmanuel Angeles and IBM Philippines country general manager James Velasquez and was witnessed by Mr. Raul Rodriguez representing the Commission on Information Communications and Technology (CICT).

Following an earlier MoU between IBM, Commission on Information Communications and Technology (CICT) and Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), a Steering Committee was established by the three parties (IBM, CICT, and BPAP) to oversee the effective implementation and development of SSME program in the country. AUF automatically becomes a member of the committee.

The Angeles University Foundation is also part of IBM’s Academic Initiative network - incorporating Websphere and Rational courses into the school’s curriculum.

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