Pulse
Fortune Magazine, 4/29/04: Top Five Search Terms @ Fortune Magazine’s Website:
1. Outsourcing
2. Wal-Mart
3. Ethics
4. Market Opportunities
5. Starbucks
IT Utility
Garter, 4/23/04: Gartner Introduces the Infrastructure Utility Maturity Model
We identify five stages of maturity for the concept of IT as a utility. Our model can help providers and their clients benefit from low-cost services that are flexible, consolidated, virtualized and available on demand.
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IT Services
Forrestor, 4/27/04: Services Market Sizing Update: 2003-2008
The market for IT services and IT outsourcing has begun picking up, but not as quickly as Forrester originally anticipated. Forrester now expects the IT services and outsourcing market to grow at a compounded annual rate of 6%, rising from $184 billion in 2003 to $241 billion in 2008. IT consulting weathers the downturn of the past three years to grow 5% through 2008. Applications management leads the outsourcing growth, while mainframe revenues begin to decline after 2006. Some of the changes in our outlook come from refinements in Forrester’s methodology for forecasting the IT services market. However, more significant are market shifts like decreased interest in outsourcing packaged apps like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and slower outsourcing adoption among small and midsize firms.
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IT Management
Microsoft Watch, 4/29/04: Microsoft Brass Tout Redmond's Management Strategy
Microsoft is focused on making customers' growing network of distributed systems easier to manage, CEO Steve Ballmer assured the company's customers and partners in one of Microsoft's periodic "Executive E-mail" blasts, released on Wednesday.
Ballmer's missive highlighted Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), its autonomic computing plan.
[more]
Offshoring
The New York Times, 4/28/04: Send Jobs to India? Some Find It's Not Always Best
By EDUARDO PORTER
Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised.
"For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far," said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. The "depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough" among Indian programmers, the executive said.
If it sounds like "Made in the U.S.A." jingoism, consider this: The entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is Indian. He was born and raised near Bombay and received his master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in that city, now known as Mumbai. Mr. Kurande is not alone in his views on "outsourcing" technology work to India. As more companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India's ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies — ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India — are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.
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Security
eWeek, 4/28/04: Microsoft Confirms Bug in SSL Patch
By Larry Seltzer
Microsoft Corp. has confirmed in a knowledge base article that its patch for a critical bug can cause some Windows 2000 systems to lock up and fail at boot time.
The patch is for a particularly critical vulnerability of which experts have begun to see exploits in the last few days.
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Gartner, 4/26/04: Spam Hits the Big Time
Spam has become a high-priority item on the agendas of chief information security officers and even CIOs. Consider Gartner’s latest advice about spam filtering and the products that can be used to implement it in the enterprise.
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Computerworld, 4/28/04: Microsoft hole spawns false alarm, real attacks
The backdoor.mipsiv code can open ports on compromised systems
News Story by Paul Roberts
Antivirus company Symantec Corp. backtracked today after claiming that it captured an example of a new Internet worm that takes advantage of a recently disclosed hole in Windows machines running Secure Sockets Layer.
The company yesterday trapped an example of the malicious code called backdoor.mipsiv and warned customers that it was either a new worm or a small automated program called a "bot" that exploits a new Windows Private Communications Transport Protocol (PCT) vulnerability, part of the Windows implementation of SSL. However, Symantec today said further analysis of the code showed that it was neither a worm nor a bot and that it didn't use the PCT vulnerability.
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Optimism
The Wall Street Journal, 4/29/04: Tech Jobs Start to Come Back In U.S. After Three-Year Slump
By SCOTT THURM
After a deep three-year slump that erased more than one million jobs, U.S. technology companies have begun hiring again, marking a so far modest but solid trend that could well brighten the country's economic outlook.
The gains to date are tiny -- fewer than 20,000 jobs since late last year -- and concentrated among smaller companies. Tech-job seekers still must fight strong headwinds, from continuing layoffs to outsourcing of jobs abroad. Executives remain cautious after the long downturn, and job gains could quickly evaporate if sales slip. Yet even the small increases herald a significant shift.
Most tech firms are enjoying solid revenue and profit growth, and beginning to hire, or at least to think about hiring. First-quarter operating profits at 46 large tech companies tracked by Merrill Lynch rose 61% from the same period last year. Revenue at those firms rose 15.5%.
The result: After eliminating more than 538,000 jobs in the course of three years, makers of computer hardware and components added 2,000 jobs between December and March, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Computer-system-design companies added 14,400 since last July. And Internet publishers, who eliminated more than two out of five jobs in the infant industry after the dot-com bust, have added 2,700 jobs since last May, a 9% increase.
Although the gains are small so far, economists are impressed by the way that each tech sector seems to be rebounding at the same time.
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Otherwise
Fortune, 5/3/04: While You Were Out: Fragments of My Brain
By Stanley Bing
Sometimes computers get all catawampus just because their brains can't handle the load. I know how they feel.
By Stanley Bing
Gabriel came to see me. He's one of the minor but essential archangels around here, working on the help desk to fix our computers if they fritz out or go squelchy, as they all do now and then, because, you know, they're only human.
Mine was running slow—taking a long time to boot up, enjoying whole minutes of cogitation when asked to do anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Just, you know, acting weird. It's an old computer, but not that old. Kind of like me.
"What's with it?" I asked Gabriel, who was honking around in its registry.
"I dunno," he said, which might be the motto of the help-desk employee. Nobody really knows why computers, like people, have operating difficulties at times. Suddenly things won't run, or crash, or just go hinky, for no reason other than that their silicon brains get scrambled and suddenly can't handle the load. I know how they feel, if indeed they do, which has never been disproved.
"Maybe he just needs to be defragmented," said Gabe. "Sometimes the hard drive gets too full of stuff, and big files are stored all over the place, and it takes the processor time to find all the little pieces that are stashed everywhere. When you defrag, you put the pieces of the files together and the machine runs faster."
I knew that already. But it had been a while since I performed that service for my hardworking friend.
"It's like your brain," Gabe said. "When you get stressed out, you forget stuff and can't find the right word, and it takes you a little too long to respond to people because your brain is looking through all that material to find the right thing to say."
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