U.S. high school students polled the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers say the current trend in outsourcing American high-tech jobs makes them wary of taking a computer-related career path.
According to an article in WashTech News, students entering college worry that studying IT or other computer science-related courses might be a waste of their time -- if they lose their jobs to outsourcing in the future.
For instance, Rogan Kriedt, 17, a student at Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz, Calif., said: "I like Math a lot but after I saw the rapid pace of American IT jobs outsourced, I decided to not choose Computer Science or IT. I am choosing Economics. Outsourcing worries me and I feel powerless to do anything about it. "
Another student Ciara Proctor, 16, of Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago, told the WashTech News: "The thought of pursuing this career for years only to be left jobless is a terrifying one, especially with the rising cost of college. I decided that I was not willing to gamble my future wondering if I would get a job in a market that is outsourcing these positions at a staggering rate."
Others feel the high-tech market changes enough that they do not need to worry about finding and keeping jobs in IT.
"I have been interested in choosing IT as a career since my freshmen year. The reason why I am hardly worried about the outsourcing of IT jobs is because it is a constantly growing and changing market. I have heard that as many as 8 of the top 10 growth jobs by 2010 are technology related," said Klaudia Leja, 17 of Northside College Prep in Chicago.
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Management consulting firm Janco Associates estimates that the flurry of news around Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America -- and separately HP with its layoffs planned around the EDS integration -- could cause the loss of some 13,000 IT-related jobs.
According to Janco's estimates, "There were over 230 IT professionals who made over $250,000 per year. Many of those jobs will just go away. Add to that the 180 plus IT professionals at Merrill Lynch making over $250,00 per year and there will be a glut of to IT professionals that will be on the street by the end of the year."
Janco 2008 research shows that outsourcing causes quite a stir at companies. According to the firm, more than 71% of employees get laid off, about 8% quit within 90 days of the outsourcing and just about 20% continue on in their position at least 90 days after the outsourcing began.
Network downtime causes many IT executives to wake in a cold sweat, and while technologies advance, the nightmare continues to become reality in many companies.
Survey results released by Avocent at VMworld 2008 this week revealed that network downtime continues to create problems for a majority of some 300 executives and IT managers polled. For instance, 86% of companies stated that any unplanned downtime causes a business issue and an average of 12% reported losing employee productivity due to those unplanned events. More worrisome, another 35% stated they had lost mission-critical data due to unplanned downtime.
As for the frequency of downtime, 43% of companies said that they experience, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events per month. Of those, 17% experienced two to four hours of collective unplanned downtime per month, mostly attributed to hardware or power failures.
"Business continuity, in the form of network uptime, i s a constant challenge for those polled," an Avocent press release reads. "There are potentially significant costs tied to downtime including disgruntled or lost customers, reduced worker productivity and reduced revenues tied to network failure."
The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) Boston Monday hosted an event at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge featuring several start-ups designing technologies and tools to take on everything from charitable giving management (Givvy) to digitizing paper trails (Pixily).
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IT pay research shows pay for several certified and noncertified skills is on the decline.
Foote Partners, a research firm focusing on pay and compensation for hundreds of certified and noncertified IT skills, this week reported that while pay for SAP skills saw increases of 25% to 30% over the past 12 months, other certified skills pay declined during the same time. Foote Partners quarterly tracks some 331 IT skills and pay premiums earned by 22,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.
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LinuxWorld last week proved to be more than a gathering of supporters and a celebration of advances the open source operating system has made. The conference also set the stage for a contest that would unseat Tux the Linux penguin as the most-loved open source mascot.
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Today marks the 9th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day!
The annual day of recognition reminds computer end users everywhere that their systems administrator makes it possible for them to work, play and connect with others online. System Admin Day, the last Friday in July, began in 2000 when Systems Administrator Ted Kekatos, an IT manager for a small start-up, decided it was time he and his colleagues received a bit of recognition for keeping systems running and workers productive.
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IT professionals not only keep networks and systems humming along smoothly, but they are also expected to couple high-tech know-how with business acumen. But that's the norm in today's economy where IT budgets continue to be squeezed for every drop.
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A recent survey commissioned by management and security software vendor CA shows that just 8% of Americans feel very confident in the ability of U.S. retailers, government agencies and banks to protect their information.
The number seems incredibly small and points to a trend that would indicate that more and more consumers worry about transacting business online. Yet at the same time it also seems more and more transactions are being conducted online. The CA 2008 Security and Privacy Survey, conducted on behalf of CA by The Strategic counsel, involved a total of 400 telephone surveys performed among a random sample of the U.S. general population aged 18 to 65.
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Certain IT jobs are weathering the economic downturn better than others, according to research released this week by online career site Jobfox.
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As the needs and demands of the IT organization changes, industry analysts argue that perhaps the organization should change.
One instance in which this may be true is when planning, implementing and maintaining a configuration management database, or CMDB. Because CMDBs encompass configuration and relationship data from multiple components of IT and application infrastructure, they can quickly become unwieldy and fail to perform as intended.
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Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive, discovered a fundamental flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol that would allow an attacker to massively disrupt the Internet. His finding prompted some 16 vendors to deliver patches that could protect ISPs and enterprise companies from falling prey to would-be attackers. Kaminsky joined me on a podcast interview to shed more light on his findings and what enterprise network managers need to do now.
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VMware this week ousted co-founder and CEO Diane Greene and replaced her with Paul Maritz, who has served as president of parent company EMC's Cloud Division. Maritz is also a former Microsoft executive who managed marketing and development for products such as Windows 95 and Windows NT.
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Microsoft's release of Hyper-V today marks the beginning of a race between Microsoft and market leading hypervisor vendor VMware to build out advanced management capabilities that will ultimately win over customers.
Hypervisor technology could become free from most vendors, industry watchers say, which will drive vendors to make revenue on other capabilities, such as management. Aside from the revenue-generating potential management technology offers the vendors, it will be imperative that enterprise companies deploying virtualization across production environments construct and execute an effective management strategy.
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One topic that keeps coming up at Gartner's Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit in Orlando when analysts are discussing the challenges companies will face when implementing virtualization on a large scale is the skill set required to design, manage and optimize virtual server and other technologies across large distributed environments.
David Coyle, research vice president at Gartner, mentioned obsolete skills among a handful of issues IT operations managers will face when rolling out the technology more broadly and across various IT disciplines, such as servers, storage and desktops.
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If IT infrastructure and operations management specialists could hand out report cards to BMC, CA, HP and IBM, the comment they might include would be: "Shows slight improvement."
An impromptu poll of more than 355 attendees (exact number of responses were difficult to calculate on-the-fly) at the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit in Orlando Monday showed that 50% of attendees in the keynote session would give the market-leading big four management vendors a grade of C. Some 17% gave the big four a D grade, 4% determined they deserved an F and 15% offered the "incomplete" option. One percent said the market leaders deserved an A and 14% gave them a B.
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HP Software Universe wraps up today and the vendor succeeded in hosting thousands of customers in Las Vegas, while HP made significant news around its broad software portfolio. HP executive management admitted to customers it has shortcomings in its support organization and announced a technology development partnership with hypervisor market leader VMware that promises to give the management vendor an edge over competitors.
As I sit at McCarran International Airport tapping the free Wi-Fi (better connection than in my room at the Venetian) and fill the hour and a half delay (naturally) on my American flight, I wonder what I will be hearing from HP in the coming months, prior to next year's installment of Software Universe.
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HP's news today that it would expand its partnership with VMware to include deeper technology integrations and future product development could send the competition scrambling to acquire virtual systems management capabilities.
"This deal is hot and it's the first of its kind that involves a major management vendor doing R&D and development work with VMware," says Evelyn Hubbert, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. "They need to deliver a product road map to prove there is substance behind this partnership."
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Reporting from HP's Technology Forum and Software Universe is presenting some challenges for this somewhat trade show savvy reporter. Covering show news in near-real time this week reminded me why despite the location, work travel is trying at the very least. I do hold out hope that the vendor hosting the show will think of the press, naive as it may seem, but once again I have come face-to-face with the reality of my station in the high-tech realm. While I remain committed and some may say oddly happy to cover HP news, this year I do have a few requests for the mega-vendor.
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Virtualization doesn't come in one flavor and the ability to manage multi-flavored virtual environments isn't quite there yet -- resulting in goo.
Management vendors and network players such as Cisco are looking to optimize the environments in which servers, network and storage resources pools are being shared. Check out the latest on this here.
Reports from two U.S. Congressman this week claiming that hacks into U.S. government computer systems in 2006 originated in China echoed a keynote address at Source Boston 2008 given by Richard Clarke, a computer security expert who has served in advisory roles for the Federal Trade Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Treasury Department and the Department of Defense.
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HP next week will host two conferences aimed at giving the mega-vendor's customers a look at new hardware, software and services. Each show features several tracks and sessions -- and keynote addresses by HP brass as well as a few unexpected guests.
For HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008 at Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay, HP expects some 7,000 attendees. The vendor will bring out CEO Mark Hurd, CIO Randy Mott and Ann Livermore, executive vice president, to deliver addresses to HP's servers, storage and services customers.
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Typically when someone celebrates a birthday or anniversay they receive gifts, but this week SolarWinds marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of its community portal Thwack by giving the gift of free software. (Check out our slideshow of 20 free software favorites.)
"We were one of the first community sites for IT network professionals," said SolarWinds Head Geek Josh Stephens in a press release.
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A majority of IT executives are not confident that they are fully compliant with software license agreements, according to a recent survey conducted by King Research.
The research firm, per the request of systems management vendor Kace, polled 350 IT executives about the current state of software license compliance in IT. Nearly 70% of respondents reported they are not confident that they are fully in compliance with software license agreements, 67% don't believe their company has taken appropriate steps to achieve compliance and 60% said they believed they had unlicensed software deployed.
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CA this week unveiled three products and updated five others -- all of which are designed to help enterprise IT managers better manage and secure their environments. (See a slideshow of CA's new and updated products here.)
The technology development and product streamlining the software maker has been doing over the past few years is impressing industry watchers who say CA no longer needs to worry about past impressions of its business.
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I've always believed I was destined to write about management software, based mostly on the fact that the management software market is dominated by four vendors and four is my favorite number. Think what you will.
But lately challengers to BMC, CA, HP and IBM have been threatening to change the perfect number four into six, seven or more. Vendors such as EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and even Cisco say they will shake up the market so much that the big four will find themselves at the bottom of the list. And smaller management software makers continue to make noise about how company size doesn't matter all that much if the software doesn't work.
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A few words in particular strike a chord with IT managers and this week a couple of vendors worked together to hit every one. Not only are the vendors offering a free utility (check out my slideshow of 20 free software favorites), but the no-cost tool addresses security (always top of mind) on virtual servers -- a topic that is hitting home with more and more companies every day.
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Survey results released Tuesday by end-user experience monitoring vendor Aternity reveal that a majority of 70 senior IT and line-of-business professionals polled want to get a more "proactive handle" on IT problems before end users experience productivity or performance degradations.
More than 35% ranked this goal as their number one priority for 2008, and more than 70% of survey respondents said that anywhere between 10% and 75% of all IT problems in their organizations are revealed by end-user complaints and not IT. Most IT managers would consider that the worst way to learn of performance problems, but the survey results show the problem persists.
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This week after spending most of my time eating, sleeping and breathing Big Blue news, I was able to head to the movies to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
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Management software market watchers are trained to look at three other companies when one of the Big Four makes a move. One could say that habit comes from years of experience or industry savvy, but honestly not noticing the chain reaction any move among these constant competitors kicks off would be more of a challenge.
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