Lenovo India is continuing to bet heavily on retail and is in the process of providing a face-lift to its existing retail outlets. The vendor plans to provide uniform look and feel for all Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES) in the country.
"We have almost finished remodeling two of our existing partner stores, and based on the feedback we will be introducing a uniform look and feel for all stores across the country," said Ramprasad L, Vice President, Transactional Sales, Lenovo India.
Lenovo has around 156 LESs across the country and over 350 business partners. "For the B-and C- class cities and for certain pockets in metros, we will have scaled down models. We are ensuring that every one of these stores, irrespective of its size, will look similar across the country," he added.
The vendor is betting heavily on netbooks being sold through retail and is also planning to launch nettops in the country. "We will soon have the Lenovo H200, which will sport an Atom processor, and will be priced aggressively and sold through our retail partners," Ramprasad said.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Information Technology Industry
The IT industry includes such products and services as software, telecommunications, wireless, Internet, hardware, peripherals, and computer and data services. 1• Software and hardware segments of the industry accounted for 12.57% of total GDP in 2001. 2• The commercial software industry of 2003 was a $175 billion economic engine with 2.3 million jobs worldwide. 3• IT is both a distinct industry, and, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a subset of Manufacturing, Transportation, and Business Services. • 92% of all IT workers are in non-information technology companies including companies engaged in health care services, real estate, insurance, and financial services; 80% of them are in small companies outside the IT industry. 4• Over the last 30 years, an investment of $11 trillion has been made in information technology globally. The major achievements have been in productivity, manufacturing efficiencies, and education applications. 5• Seven of the top thirty fastest growing occupations are projected to be IT-related. 6• The computer systems design and related services industry is expected to be one of the top 10 fastest growing industries in the economy, adding more than 600,000 jobs between 2002 and 2012.7• Employment in the telecommunications industry is expected to increase by 7 percent between 2002 and 2012. 81U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Career Guide to Industries 2004-05.2U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, www.bea.gov/bea/dn2/home/gdpbyindy.htm.3“Enabling Tomorrow’s Innovation,” IDC White Paper and Business Software Alliance CEO Opinion Poll, October 2003, p. III. www.globaltechsummit.net/press/IDC-CEOSurvey-2003.pdf.4ITAA Workforce Survey.5“Enabling Tomorrow’s Innovation, ” p. III. 6BLS, Daniel Hecker, “Occupational employment projections to 2012,” Monthly Labor Review, February 2004, p. 100.7BLS, Career Guide to Industries 2004-05.8Ibid.
Information Technology Industry2Updated 3/25/04etaEMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING ADMINISTRATIONUNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR• All seven of the fastest growing IT jobs (Network systems and data communications analyst; Computer software engineer, applications; Computer software engineer, systems software; Database administrator; Computer systems analyst; Network and computer systems administrator; Computer and information systems manager) require at least a bachelor’s degree. 9• Nine percent of CIOs at U.S. companies plan to increase their IT hiring in the fourth quarter of 2003.109BLS, National Projections Data Matrix, www.bls.gov/emp/home.htm.10Robert Half Technology, Press Release, August 2003, www.roberthalftechnology.com/PressRoom?LOBName=RHIC&releaseid=371.
Information Technology Industry2Updated 3/25/04etaEMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING ADMINISTRATIONUNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR• All seven of the fastest growing IT jobs (Network systems and data communications analyst; Computer software engineer, applications; Computer software engineer, systems software; Database administrator; Computer systems analyst; Network and computer systems administrator; Computer and information systems manager) require at least a bachelor’s degree. 9• Nine percent of CIOs at U.S. companies plan to increase their IT hiring in the fourth quarter of 2003.109BLS, National Projections Data Matrix, www.bls.gov/emp/home.htm.10Robert Half Technology, Press Release, August 2003, www.roberthalftechnology.com/PressRoom?LOBName=RHIC&releaseid=371.
IT FACTS NEWS
Computer science course enrollment, test scores, and computer-use figures indicate a disparity between boys and girls in technology. Research indicates that girls are more likely to take lower-end computing classes (e.g., data entry or word processing), less likely to identify computer science as a possible college major, and less likely to use computers on a weekly basis.
AAUW, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children, 1998
Girls display what one researcher calls "computer reticence," in part because culture and stereotypes steer them away from machines.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
More personal computers were purchased for homes with boys than for homes with girls. This results in boys getting more experience with computers and thus being more comfortable with them.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
A 1994 study of high school students found that the lack of knowledge of technological careers, the failure to connect what students were doing in class with future careers, and the lack of a sense of economic realities were particularly discouraging to girls, because they had less information about technology from experiences outside school.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
There is a major difference in attitude between girls who chose to take technology education and those who did not; only a few girls were willing to be "pathbreakers" and challenge stereotypes about nontraditional careers for women. Most girls could not picture themselves in technological jobs and were reluctant to be in classes where they were one of the few girls.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
Girls represent 17 percent of the Computer Science "AP" test takers, and less than 1 in 10 of the higher level Computer Science "AB" test takers.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age , 2000
Women are roughly 20 percent of IT professionals.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age , 2000
Women receive less than 28 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees, down from a high of 37 percent in 1984. Computer science is the only field in which women's participation has actually decreased over time.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, 2000
Women make up just 9 percent of the recipients of engineering-related bachelor's degrees.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, 2000
Occupations which did not exist at the beginning of the 20th Century, computer scientists and analysts, for example, have become increasingly important in the information technology revolution. Yet, women's employment in this important field is actually falling behind, widening the occupational gap between women and men.
U.S. Department of Labor
Future Work Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century, 1999
Nearly 75% of tomorrow's jobs will require use of computers; fewer than 33% of participants in computer courses and related activities are girls.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Dept. of Labor)
Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2000-01 Edition, February 2000
Sixteen percent fewer girls than boys reported ever talking to their parents about science and technology issues.
National Science Foundation.
Women, Minorities, and People with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 1994
Computers and computer games are marketed almost exclusively to boys, and even those games purportedly for both sexes, such as elementary math software, reflect sexist attitudes: only 12 percent of the characters in such games are female, even then they are generally portrayed as either a mother or a princess.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
More personal computers were purchased for homes with boys than for homes with girls. This results in boys getting more experience with computers and thus being more comfortable with them.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
A 1994 study of high school students found that the lack of knowledge of technological careers, the failure to connect what students were doing in class with future careers, and the lack of a sense of economic realities were particularly discouraging to girls, because they had less information about technology from experiences outside school.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
There is a major difference in attitude between girls who chose to take technology education and those who did not; only a few girls were willing to be "pathbreakers" and challenge stereotypes about nontraditional careers for women. Most girls could not picture themselves in technological jobs and were reluctant to be in classes where they were one of the few girls.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
Females score slightly higher in computation, males slightly higher in complex problem solving, and there are no differences in math concepts.
Girls and Math: Enough is Known for Action, by Patricia B. Campbell, Ph.D.
AAUW, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children, 1998
Girls display what one researcher calls "computer reticence," in part because culture and stereotypes steer them away from machines.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
More personal computers were purchased for homes with boys than for homes with girls. This results in boys getting more experience with computers and thus being more comfortable with them.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
A 1994 study of high school students found that the lack of knowledge of technological careers, the failure to connect what students were doing in class with future careers, and the lack of a sense of economic realities were particularly discouraging to girls, because they had less information about technology from experiences outside school.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
There is a major difference in attitude between girls who chose to take technology education and those who did not; only a few girls were willing to be "pathbreakers" and challenge stereotypes about nontraditional careers for women. Most girls could not picture themselves in technological jobs and were reluctant to be in classes where they were one of the few girls.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
Girls represent 17 percent of the Computer Science "AP" test takers, and less than 1 in 10 of the higher level Computer Science "AB" test takers.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age , 2000
Women are roughly 20 percent of IT professionals.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age , 2000
Women receive less than 28 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees, down from a high of 37 percent in 1984. Computer science is the only field in which women's participation has actually decreased over time.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, 2000
Women make up just 9 percent of the recipients of engineering-related bachelor's degrees.
AAUW Educational Foundation
Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, 2000
Occupations which did not exist at the beginning of the 20th Century, computer scientists and analysts, for example, have become increasingly important in the information technology revolution. Yet, women's employment in this important field is actually falling behind, widening the occupational gap between women and men.
U.S. Department of Labor
Future Work Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century, 1999
Nearly 75% of tomorrow's jobs will require use of computers; fewer than 33% of participants in computer courses and related activities are girls.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Dept. of Labor)
Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2000-01 Edition, February 2000
Sixteen percent fewer girls than boys reported ever talking to their parents about science and technology issues.
National Science Foundation.
Women, Minorities, and People with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 1994
Computers and computer games are marketed almost exclusively to boys, and even those games purportedly for both sexes, such as elementary math software, reflect sexist attitudes: only 12 percent of the characters in such games are female, even then they are generally portrayed as either a mother or a princess.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
More personal computers were purchased for homes with boys than for homes with girls. This results in boys getting more experience with computers and thus being more comfortable with them.
R. Hartigan, "Girls Byte Back," Teacher Magazine, April 1999, and N. Bloom, "Why Do Fewer Women Choose Computing Careers?" Boston Software News, March 1999
A 1994 study of high school students found that the lack of knowledge of technological careers, the failure to connect what students were doing in class with future careers, and the lack of a sense of economic realities were particularly discouraging to girls, because they had less information about technology from experiences outside school.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
There is a major difference in attitude between girls who chose to take technology education and those who did not; only a few girls were willing to be "pathbreakers" and challenge stereotypes about nontraditional careers for women. Most girls could not picture themselves in technological jobs and were reluctant to be in classes where they were one of the few girls.
S. Silverman and A. Pritchard, "Building Their Future: Girls and Technology Education in Connecticut," Journal of Technology Education 7 (1996)
Females score slightly higher in computation, males slightly higher in complex problem solving, and there are no differences in math concepts.
Girls and Math: Enough is Known for Action, by Patricia B. Campbell, Ph.D.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The secret pioneers
Some of the boldest early steps into the computer age were taken in Britain. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, did his main work at Cambridge University before joining the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes.
By designing a huge machine now generally regarded as the world's first programmable electronic computer, the then Post Office Research Branch played a crucial but secret role in helping to win the Second World War. The purpose of Colossus was to decipher messages that came in on a German cipher machine, called the Lorenz SZ.
The original Colossus used a vast array of telephone exchange parts together with 1,500 electronic valves and was the size of a small room, weighing around a ton. This 'string and sealing wax affair' could process 5,000 characters a second to run through the many millions of possible settings for the code wheels on the Lorenz system in hours - rather than weeks.
Both machines were designed and constructed by a Post Office Research team headed by Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill and transported to the secret code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, where it was demonstrated on December 8, 1943. We have to fast forward nearly thirty years to 1972 for the arrival of the first desktop all-in-one computer, which are more familar to us today. That honour falls to the HP9830. But unfortunately few people got to hear about it because Hewlett Packard marketed it primarily to scientists and engineers - by nature very quiet people!
Colossus (1941) : inside the machine
During the Second World War the Germans used a Lorenz encoding teleprinter to transmit their high-command radio messages. The teleprinter used something called the 5-bit Baudot code, which enciphered the original text by adding to it successively two characters before transmission. The same two characters were applied to the received text at the other end to reveal the original message.
Gilbert Vernam had developed this scheme in America, using two synchronised tapes to generate the additional random characters. Lorenz replaced the tapes with mechanical gearing - so it wasn't a genuinely random sequence - just extremely complex.
But in August 1941 the Germans made a bad mistake. A tired operator sent almost the same message again, using the same wheel settings. It meant the British were able to calculate the logical structure inside the Lorenz.
Colossus was then built to find the Lorenz wheel settings used for each message, using a large electronic programmable logic calculator, driven by up to 2,500 thermionic valves. The computer was fast, even by today's standards. It could break the combination in about two hours - the same as today's modern Pentium PC.
Without the contribution of the codebreaking activity, in which Colossus played such a major part, the Second World War would have lasted considerably longer.
By the time of the Allied invasion of France in the early summer of 1944, a Colossus Mk II (using nearly twice as many valves to power it) was almost ready.
The head of the Post Office Research Team, Tommy Flowers, had been told that Colossus Mk II had to be ready by June 1944 or it would not be of any use. He was not told the reason for the deadline, but realising that it was significant he ensured that the new version was ready for June 1, five days before D-Day.
It was in the build-up to D-Day and during the European campaign that followed that Colossus proved most valuable, since it was able to track in detail communications between Hitler and his field commanders.
Colossus weighed around 35 tonnes in Mark II form. Its 2,500 valves, consuming 4.5 Kwatts, were spread over two banks of racks 7 feet 6 inches high by 16 feet wide spaced 6 feet apart. Thus the whole machine was around 80 feet long and 40 feet wide.
This huge machine was also one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war yet required dozens of people to build, many of them outside the military establishment in the Post Office.
Tommy Flowers was one of the very few entrusted with the overall plan - and even he didn't know the full details of the German codes.
In order to ensure security, Colossus was broken down into modules - each given to a separate Post Office team at Dollis Hill. The teams were kept apart - each having no idea of the overall shape of the ground breaking machines they were creating.
Another secret wartime computer whose existence was finally revealed many years later was SIGSALY - the secret 'scrambling' system devised to protect the security of high level Allied telephone traffic.
SIGSALY - originally codenamed Project X - was also known as 'Green Hornet'. It was the first unbreakable speech coding system, using digital cryptography techniques, with one time digital keys being supplied by synchronised gramophone discs.
SIGSALY was built in the USA, though using pulse code modulation (PCM) digital encoding techniques invented in 1937 by the English engineer Alec Reeves.
The first priority was to protect the hotline between the Cabinet War Room bunker under Downing Street and the White House in Washington D.C. The 50-ton London terminal was shipped over in 1943 and housed in the basement of the Selfridges annexe in Oxford Street, under tight guard.
By designing a huge machine now generally regarded as the world's first programmable electronic computer, the then Post Office Research Branch played a crucial but secret role in helping to win the Second World War. The purpose of Colossus was to decipher messages that came in on a German cipher machine, called the Lorenz SZ.
The original Colossus used a vast array of telephone exchange parts together with 1,500 electronic valves and was the size of a small room, weighing around a ton. This 'string and sealing wax affair' could process 5,000 characters a second to run through the many millions of possible settings for the code wheels on the Lorenz system in hours - rather than weeks.
Both machines were designed and constructed by a Post Office Research team headed by Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill and transported to the secret code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, where it was demonstrated on December 8, 1943. We have to fast forward nearly thirty years to 1972 for the arrival of the first desktop all-in-one computer, which are more familar to us today. That honour falls to the HP9830. But unfortunately few people got to hear about it because Hewlett Packard marketed it primarily to scientists and engineers - by nature very quiet people!
Colossus (1941) : inside the machine
During the Second World War the Germans used a Lorenz encoding teleprinter to transmit their high-command radio messages. The teleprinter used something called the 5-bit Baudot code, which enciphered the original text by adding to it successively two characters before transmission. The same two characters were applied to the received text at the other end to reveal the original message.
Gilbert Vernam had developed this scheme in America, using two synchronised tapes to generate the additional random characters. Lorenz replaced the tapes with mechanical gearing - so it wasn't a genuinely random sequence - just extremely complex.
But in August 1941 the Germans made a bad mistake. A tired operator sent almost the same message again, using the same wheel settings. It meant the British were able to calculate the logical structure inside the Lorenz.
Colossus was then built to find the Lorenz wheel settings used for each message, using a large electronic programmable logic calculator, driven by up to 2,500 thermionic valves. The computer was fast, even by today's standards. It could break the combination in about two hours - the same as today's modern Pentium PC.
Without the contribution of the codebreaking activity, in which Colossus played such a major part, the Second World War would have lasted considerably longer.
By the time of the Allied invasion of France in the early summer of 1944, a Colossus Mk II (using nearly twice as many valves to power it) was almost ready.
The head of the Post Office Research Team, Tommy Flowers, had been told that Colossus Mk II had to be ready by June 1944 or it would not be of any use. He was not told the reason for the deadline, but realising that it was significant he ensured that the new version was ready for June 1, five days before D-Day.
It was in the build-up to D-Day and during the European campaign that followed that Colossus proved most valuable, since it was able to track in detail communications between Hitler and his field commanders.
Colossus weighed around 35 tonnes in Mark II form. Its 2,500 valves, consuming 4.5 Kwatts, were spread over two banks of racks 7 feet 6 inches high by 16 feet wide spaced 6 feet apart. Thus the whole machine was around 80 feet long and 40 feet wide.
This huge machine was also one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war yet required dozens of people to build, many of them outside the military establishment in the Post Office.
Tommy Flowers was one of the very few entrusted with the overall plan - and even he didn't know the full details of the German codes.
In order to ensure security, Colossus was broken down into modules - each given to a separate Post Office team at Dollis Hill. The teams were kept apart - each having no idea of the overall shape of the ground breaking machines they were creating.
Another secret wartime computer whose existence was finally revealed many years later was SIGSALY - the secret 'scrambling' system devised to protect the security of high level Allied telephone traffic.
SIGSALY - originally codenamed Project X - was also known as 'Green Hornet'. It was the first unbreakable speech coding system, using digital cryptography techniques, with one time digital keys being supplied by synchronised gramophone discs.
SIGSALY was built in the USA, though using pulse code modulation (PCM) digital encoding techniques invented in 1937 by the English engineer Alec Reeves.
The first priority was to protect the hotline between the Cabinet War Room bunker under Downing Street and the White House in Washington D.C. The 50-ton London terminal was shipped over in 1943 and housed in the basement of the Selfridges annexe in Oxford Street, under tight guard.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Top 10 Application Development Stories of 2008
Cloud development platforms, mobile application development and the increasing acceptance of dynamic languages for Web development were among the top 10 stories in the world of software programming. With each passing year, software tools have become more sophisticated. While developers have more languages and tools to choose from than ever before.
1. Cloud development platforms bloom
Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon, Salesforce.com and others have entered into the cloud space in force. What must developers do to program to the cloud?
2. Microsoft gets serious about software modeling
Microsoft releases its "Oslo" modeling strategy, joins the Object Modeling Group and pledges support for UML. Microsoft long held an indifferent if not hostile view of the Unified Modeling Language, but has now done an about face and is supporting modeling big time, and supporting UML in the Visual Studio 2010 toolset.
3. Mobile app development gets huge
Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, name your platform. Mobile app development is where the action is. The next step is making it easier to build apps that run on more than one platform.
4. Dynamic languages take off
Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Python, et al, see mainstream use. Ruby is used in all kinds of social networking and Web 2.0 environments, however, taking shots for not being as scalable as some other languages. Meanwhile, PHP, Python and others see their use on the rise in the enterprise.
5. ECMAScript (JavaScript) 4 is tabled
ECMA was on track to release the next major version of the ECMAScript specification, but several members of the core working group looking at the issue said let's slow down and make things less complicated. ECMAScript is the standards embodiment of JavaScript, which is the lifeblood of browsers. Tabling ECMAScript 4 means companies like Microsoft can have more time to implement new standards into their browsers.
6. Multicore processors put pressure on application developers
With the advent of multicore systems, developers are being forced to write applications that support them. It means developers essentially have to rethink their development strategies and gear up for parallel environments. Companies such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Sun and others are looking at the issue.
7. Microsoft/Adobe rivalry heat up
With new versions of Silverlight and WPF, and Adobe Flash, AIR and "Thermo," Microsoft continues to encroach on Adobe's turf in the rich Internet application (RIA) space with Silverlight 2 and Windows Presentation Foundation. And into the designer/developer workflow arena with Microsoft Expression. However, Adobe continues to innovate, delivering Flash Player 10, a new version of Adobe AIR and its new "Thermo" design tool. Meanwhile, Sun enters the fray with JavaFX.
8. Planting the seeds of 'development as a service'
The Basecamp guys, 37 Signals, do a great job, but there's also Heroku, Bungee Connect and a few others: They've all done special cases of development or team collaboration. If someone were to come in and combine them all, it could be a pretty good (and modern) competitor to Visual Studio and WebSphere. It certainly portends a direction the industry should be taking toward hosted rather than on-premises servers.
9. OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) makes a big splash
Eclipse, NetBeans, the Spring Framework, Apache and others are looking to OSGi as the future of their Java deployment environments. Others see OSGi not only for deployment but for its programming model, which is starting to encroach on Java EE APIs.
10. The Spring Framework wins converts
Spring has become a leading player in enterprise Java because it helps to simplify development as opposed to Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) or Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition).
1. Cloud development platforms bloom
Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon, Salesforce.com and others have entered into the cloud space in force. What must developers do to program to the cloud?
2. Microsoft gets serious about software modeling
Microsoft releases its "Oslo" modeling strategy, joins the Object Modeling Group and pledges support for UML. Microsoft long held an indifferent if not hostile view of the Unified Modeling Language, but has now done an about face and is supporting modeling big time, and supporting UML in the Visual Studio 2010 toolset.
3. Mobile app development gets huge
Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, name your platform. Mobile app development is where the action is. The next step is making it easier to build apps that run on more than one platform.
4. Dynamic languages take off
Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Python, et al, see mainstream use. Ruby is used in all kinds of social networking and Web 2.0 environments, however, taking shots for not being as scalable as some other languages. Meanwhile, PHP, Python and others see their use on the rise in the enterprise.
5. ECMAScript (JavaScript) 4 is tabled
ECMA was on track to release the next major version of the ECMAScript specification, but several members of the core working group looking at the issue said let's slow down and make things less complicated. ECMAScript is the standards embodiment of JavaScript, which is the lifeblood of browsers. Tabling ECMAScript 4 means companies like Microsoft can have more time to implement new standards into their browsers.
6. Multicore processors put pressure on application developers
With the advent of multicore systems, developers are being forced to write applications that support them. It means developers essentially have to rethink their development strategies and gear up for parallel environments. Companies such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Sun and others are looking at the issue.
7. Microsoft/Adobe rivalry heat up
With new versions of Silverlight and WPF, and Adobe Flash, AIR and "Thermo," Microsoft continues to encroach on Adobe's turf in the rich Internet application (RIA) space with Silverlight 2 and Windows Presentation Foundation. And into the designer/developer workflow arena with Microsoft Expression. However, Adobe continues to innovate, delivering Flash Player 10, a new version of Adobe AIR and its new "Thermo" design tool. Meanwhile, Sun enters the fray with JavaFX.
8. Planting the seeds of 'development as a service'
The Basecamp guys, 37 Signals, do a great job, but there's also Heroku, Bungee Connect and a few others: They've all done special cases of development or team collaboration. If someone were to come in and combine them all, it could be a pretty good (and modern) competitor to Visual Studio and WebSphere. It certainly portends a direction the industry should be taking toward hosted rather than on-premises servers.
9. OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) makes a big splash
Eclipse, NetBeans, the Spring Framework, Apache and others are looking to OSGi as the future of their Java deployment environments. Others see OSGi not only for deployment but for its programming model, which is starting to encroach on Java EE APIs.
10. The Spring Framework wins converts
Spring has become a leading player in enterprise Java because it helps to simplify development as opposed to Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) or Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition).
Security
Microsoft is again urging users to apply a patch for a vulnerability in the Windows Server service. The company reported earlier that a new variant of the Conficker worm has surfaced to target the flaw.
Microsoft advised organizations yet again to deploy the patch for a flaw affecting the Windows Server service that was fixed in October.
The latest attacks are coming courtesy of a new variant of the Conficker worm, identified by Microsoft as Win32/Conficker.B. According to the company, the variant is hitting machines that have not applied the fix, while also spreading via network shares by attempting to log in to machines using a list of weak passwords.
The worm exploits a vulnerability caused by the Server service failing to properly handle specifically crafted RPC (remote procedure call) requests. If an exploit is successful, it could allow an attacker to execute code remotely when file sharing is enabled.
The issue was the subject of a rare out-of-band security patch by Microsoft on Oct. 23. As attacks mounted, Microsoft issued a follow-up advisory on its Security Response Center blog a month later.
"We encourage all customers to apply our most recent security updates to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The Windows firewall also provides a defense against attacks in a default setting because as it blocks hackers from reaching the RPC interface.
The flaw affects users of Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008. On Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003, any anonymous user with access to the target network can deliver a specially crafted network packet to exploit the vulnerability. However, on Vista and Server 2008 systems, only an authenticated user with access to the target network can deliver the packet.
"By default, Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 customers will have this update applied automatically through Automatic Updates," the spokesperson said. "We encourage all customers to apply our most recent security updates to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks."
Microsoft advised organizations yet again to deploy the patch for a flaw affecting the Windows Server service that was fixed in October.
The latest attacks are coming courtesy of a new variant of the Conficker worm, identified by Microsoft as Win32/Conficker.B. According to the company, the variant is hitting machines that have not applied the fix, while also spreading via network shares by attempting to log in to machines using a list of weak passwords.
The worm exploits a vulnerability caused by the Server service failing to properly handle specifically crafted RPC (remote procedure call) requests. If an exploit is successful, it could allow an attacker to execute code remotely when file sharing is enabled.
The issue was the subject of a rare out-of-band security patch by Microsoft on Oct. 23. As attacks mounted, Microsoft issued a follow-up advisory on its Security Response Center blog a month later.
"We encourage all customers to apply our most recent security updates to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The Windows firewall also provides a defense against attacks in a default setting because as it blocks hackers from reaching the RPC interface.
The flaw affects users of Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008. On Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003, any anonymous user with access to the target network can deliver a specially crafted network packet to exploit the vulnerability. However, on Vista and Server 2008 systems, only an authenticated user with access to the target network can deliver the packet.
"By default, Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 customers will have this update applied automatically through Automatic Updates," the spokesperson said. "We encourage all customers to apply our most recent security updates to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks."
The Power Of Us
The 35 employees at Meiosys Inc., a software firm in Palo Alto, Calif., didn't know they were joining a gang of telecom-industry marauders. They just wanted to save a few bucks. Last year they began using Skype, a program that lets them make free calls over the Internet, with better sound quality than regular phones, using headsets connected to their PCs. Callers simply click on a name in their Skype contact lists, and if the person is there, they connect and talk just like on a regular phone call. "Better quality at no cost," exults Meiosys Chief Executive Jason Donahue. Poof! Almost 90% of his firm's $2,000 monthly long-distance phone bill has vanished. With 41 million people now using Skype, plus 150,000 more each day, it's no wonder AT&T (T ) and MCI Inc. (MCIP ) are hanging it u.
How can a tiny European upstart like Skype Technologies S.A. do a number on a trillion-dollar industry? By dialing up a vast, hidden resource: its own users. Skype, the newest creation from the same folks whose popular file-sharing software Kazaa freaked out record execs, also lets people share their resources -- legally. When users fire up Skype, they automatically allow their spare computing power and Net connections to be borrowed by the Skype network, which uses that collective resource to route others' calls. The result: a self-sustaining phone system that requires no central capital investment -- just the willingness of its users to share. Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: "It's almost like an organism."
A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."
Collective Clamor
Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS (VIA ) anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.
Although tech companies may be leading the way, their efforts are shaking up other industries, including entertainment, publishing, and advertising. Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds.
Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds -- and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running "prediction markets" that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.
At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters. "It's the democratization of industry," says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. "We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people."
Peer Production
That suggests even more sweeping changes to come. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they're the underpinnings of a new economic order. "These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible," suggests Rheingold, who's also helping lead the Cooperation Project, a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape. "They may make some new economic system possible."
Perhaps they already are. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. "Peer production," as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN ) millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. "The economic role of social behavior is increasing," he says. "Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products."
Indeed, peer production represents a sea change in the economy -- at least when it comes to the information products, services, and content that increasingly drive economic growth. More than two centuries ago, James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services -- along with the Internet's ubiquitous communications that make it easy to pool those capital investments -- are starting to give production power back to the people. Says Benkler: "This departs radically from everything we've seen since the Industrial Revolution."
Sound pretty threatening to anyone invested in the status quo? You bet. Indeed, as the title of Rheingold's book implies, there could be a dark side to this new cooperative force, especially if it results in mob rule. Quite often, the best solution to a problem comes from the sudden flash of insight from a solitary genius such as Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. It would be a tragedy if these folks, sometimes unpopular in their times, got lost in the cooperative crowds. Clearly, peer production has its limits. Almost certainly, it will never build railroads, grow wheat, run nuclear power plants, or write great novels.
Yet this cooperative force may spread beyond such easily shared commodities as information, knowledge, and media. People are starting to use the Net to pool tangible goods as well. In a sense, Skype enables people to share computer hardware. Thanks to the Web's ability to serve as a meeting ground and scheduling coordinator, it's becoming economical to share cars, for example. Services such as Zipcar Inc. and Flexcar let members use the Net to reserve one of a fleet of autos in crowded cities, almost on demand, for an hourly fee.
What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.
What sets these new technologies apart from those of the Internet's first generation is their canny way of turning self-interest into social benefit -- and real economic value. They have what tech-book publisher Tim O'Reilly calls an "architecture of participation," so it's easy for people to do their own thing: create a link on their Web site to another Web site they like; rate a song; or just show off their knowledge with an online product review. Then, those actions can be pooled into something useful to many: the 3 billion song ratings that help people create personalized Net radio stations on Yahoo (YHOO )! Inc. or Amazon's millions of customer-generated product reviews, which help decide hits and duds. Exclaims Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos: "You invite the community in, and you get all this help."
It's surprisingly good help, too. New research indicates that cooperation, often organized from the bottom up, plays a much greater role than we thought in everything from natural phenomena like ant colonies to human institutions such as markets and cities. It's what New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, in his illuminating 2004 book of the same name, calls "the wisdom of crowds." Crowds can go mad, of course, but by and large, it turns out, they're smarter at solving many problems than even the brightest individuals.
The Internet's supreme group-forming capability suggests the rise of an almost spooky group intelligence. Within minutes of Pope John Paul II's death, hundreds of eBay sellers had posted related products for sale. Whether it is responding to world events or new products such as Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) PSP game machine, eBay's hive mind reacts to shifts in demand much faster than traditional companies with layers of management approval. Although eBay recently has seen some mature markets in the U.S. and Germany slow, the group smarts have helped keep growth more than respectable, with gross merchandise sales this year expected to rise 32%, to $45 billion. As eBay CEO Margaret C. Whitman has noted: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."
More companies are starting to understand the logic. If they can get others to help them design and create products, they end up with ready-made customers -- and that means far less risk in the tricky business of creating new goods and markets. So businesses are accessing the cyberswarm to improve everything from research and development to marketing. Says Alpheus Bingham, vice-president for Eli Lilly's e.Lilly research unit: "If I can tap into a million minds simultaneously, I may run into one that's uniquely prepared."
Procter & Gamble's $1.7 billion-a-year R&D operation, for instance, is taking advantage of collective online brain trusts such as Lilly company InnoCentive Inc. in Andover, Mass. It's a network of 80,000 independent, self-selected "solvers" in 173 countries who gang-tackle research problems for the likes of Boeing Co. (BA ), DuPont (DD ), and 30 other large companies. One solver, Drew Buschhorn, is a 21-year-old chemistry grad student at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. He came up with an art-restoration chemical for an unnamed company -- a compound he identified while helping his mother dye cloth when he was a kid. Says InnoCentive CEO Darren J. Carroll: "We're trying for the democratization of science."
And apparently succeeding. More than a third of the two dozen requests P&G has submitted to InnoCentive's network have yielded solutions, for which the company paid upwards of $5,000 apiece. By using InnoCentive and other ways of reaching independent talent, P&G has boosted the number of new products derived from outside to 35%, from 20% three years ago. As a result, sales per R&D person are ahead some 40%.
The online masses aren't just offering up ideas: Sometimes they all but become the entire production staff. In game designer Linden Lab's Second Life, a virtual online world, participants themselves create just about everything, from characters to buildings to games that are played inside the world. The 45-person company, which grossed less than $5 million last year, makes money by charging players for virtual land on which they build their creations. Second Life's 25,000 players collectively spend 6,000 hours a day actively creating things. Even if you assume only 10% of their work is any good, that's still equal to a 100-person team at a traditional game company. "We've built a market-based, far more efficient system for creating digital content," says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.
Likewise, groups online are starting to turn marketing from megaphone to conversation. LEGO Group, for instance, brought adult LEGO train-set enthusiasts to its New York office to check out new designs. "We pooh-poohed them all," says Steve Barile, an Intel Corp. (INTC ) engineer and LEGO fan in Portland, Ore., who attended. As a result, says Jake McKee, LEGO's global community-development manager, "we literally produced what they told us to produce." The new locomotive, the "Santa Fe Super Chief" set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts in 2002, and their word-of-mouse helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing.
Corporate planners are even starting to use the wisdom of online crowds to predict the future, forecasting profits and sales more precisely. Prediction markets let people essentially buy shares in various forecasts, often with real money. Most famously, they've been employed in the University of Iowa's experimental Iowa Electronic Markets to determine, with remarkable accuracy, the most likely winner of the Presidential election. The ease of organizing groups on the Net has caused an explosion in their use, says Emile Servan-Schreiber, CEO of NewsFutures Inc., a consultant that has run 40,000 prediction markets for companies and publications.
Mob Mentality
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HPQ ) services division was having trouble a few years ago with forecasts in the first month of a quarter. So Bernardo A. Huberman, director of HP Labs' Information Dynamics Lab, set up a market with 15 finance people not normally involved in such planning. They bought and sold virtual stock that represented a range of forecasts at, above, and below the official company forecast. Their collective bets yielded a 50% improvement in operating-profit predictability over conventional forecasts by individual managers.
For all the benefits, Net-based cooperation holds plenty of peril for the unwary. Obviously, not all crowds are wise. Even The Wisdom of Crowds author Surowiecki wonders if the Net connects like-minded people so well that it can amplify groupthink. "The more we talk to each other, the dumber we can get," he notes. Groups that discourage independent thought potentially could put a damper on out-of-the-box ideas from brilliant individuals. They can also become herds that buy or dump stocks on momentum alone. For that matter, they can devolve into lynch mobs and terrorist groups.
As companies have learned, the online hordes can quickly turn against them. Last September bike-lock manufacturer Kryptonite tried to downplay a blogger video that showed how to open its bike locks with a BIC pen. But the video instantly spread across the Net, forcing the company to spend more than $10 million on lock replacements.
To contend with this rising people power, corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. They'll be unable to keep secrets for long amid the chorus of online voices, as Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) learned when fan sites spilled the beans on unreleased products. Managers and employees will have to learn how to take orders from customers more than from bosses. "Networks are becoming the locus for innovation," says Stanford University professor Walter W. Powell. "Firms are becoming much more porous and decentralized."
The challenges, though, go to show that we're not talking about merely a new capitalist tool -- at least not one that's dominated by big capitalists. Upstarts, both ad hoc groups and new companies, are seizing the initiative far more than are established businesses. They're transforming industry after industry faster than individual companies can cope with.
Nowhere has that phenomenon happened faster than in software. Collaborative open-source development is rapidly moving beyond basic utility software like Linux to mainstream applications as well. An especially eye-opening example is SugarCRM Inc., which provides an open-source version of customer-relationship management software now dominated by Siebel Systems (SEBL ) and salesforce.com Inc. (CRM ) The 10-person outfit's software, which CEO John Roberts calls "the collective work of bright CRM engineers around the world," has been downloaded more than 235,000 times for free.
The company makes money from services such as technical support and a $40-a-month Web-based service, as well as more fully featured corporate software for which it charges $239 per user per year. Scarcely a year old, SugarCRM won't reveal its finances, but its business model suggests a big change in how the software industry works. "The fact that everyone can participate [in open-source] is creating a new market ecology," says Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource Inc., a startup providing bundles of open-source products. Or, as Roberts adds brightly: "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space."
The same scary prospect lies ahead for other information-based industries, such as entertainment, media, and publishing, that are rapidly going digital. People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs. Overall, 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, from product reviews to eBay ratings, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The most breathtaking example: Wikipedia. Some 5 million people a month visit the free online encyclopedia, whose more than 1.5 million entries in 200 languages by volunteer experts around the globe outnumber Encyclopedia Britannica's 120,000, with surprisingly high quality. "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative," says co-founder Jimmy Wales. Unlike Britannica, Wales is not aiming to generate much, if any, revenue. But "that doesn't mean that we won't destroy their business," he notes. Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas says sheer volume of articles isn't a measure of quality and may be overload for most readers and researchers.
Then again, the cooperative crowds offer a lifeline to beleaguered media such as newspapers. The five-year-old online paper OhmyNews in South Korea has marshaled 36,000 "citizen journalists" to write up to 200 stories a day on everything from political protests to movies. Its popularity with 1 million daily visitors has made it the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, according to a national magazine poll -- topping one of the three television networks. "It's participatory journalism," explains founder Oh Yeon Ho, who says OhmyNews turned a profit last year. The idea is starting to catch fire in the U.S., too, via independent citizen-media efforts such as Backfence Inc. and Bayosphere and budding initiatives by E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP ) and others. The New York Times Co. is also testing the waters: In March, it bought About.com, which has 475 citizen experts on consumer electronics, personal finance, and other topics.
Even industries that traffic in physical goods are being turned upside down by Net-driven sharing. In retail, for instance, "consumers" are becoming active participants in the merchants they buy from, transforming the venerable suggestion box into something more influential. At Amazon.com, thousands of volunteers write buyer's guides and lists of favorite products. Amazon also lets thousands of merchants, from Target Stores (TGT ) to individuals, sell on Amazon pages.
What's more, Amazon is opening up the technology behind product databases, payment services, and more to 65,000 software developers. They're creating new services, such as the ability to compare brick-and-mortar store prices with Amazon's by scanning a bar code into a cell phone. Thanks in part to such moves, the company is solidly profitable on $6.9 billion in sales last year. "We're all building this thing together -- Amazon itself, outside developers, associates, and customers," says Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services evangelist.
That raises a key point: All of us will have to take on more responsibility. And to get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways -- such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. But the rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create.
Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the notion of the tragedy of the commons. He noted that public resources, from pastures and national parks to air and water, inevitably get overused as people act in their own self-interest. It's a different story in the Information Age, contends Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the pioneering PC software VisiCalc and president of consultant Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass.
Instead, he says, there's a cornucopia of the commons. That rich reward may be worth all the disruption we've seen and all the more still to come.
How can a tiny European upstart like Skype Technologies S.A. do a number on a trillion-dollar industry? By dialing up a vast, hidden resource: its own users. Skype, the newest creation from the same folks whose popular file-sharing software Kazaa freaked out record execs, also lets people share their resources -- legally. When users fire up Skype, they automatically allow their spare computing power and Net connections to be borrowed by the Skype network, which uses that collective resource to route others' calls. The result: a self-sustaining phone system that requires no central capital investment -- just the willingness of its users to share. Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: "It's almost like an organism."
A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."
Collective Clamor
Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS (VIA ) anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.
Although tech companies may be leading the way, their efforts are shaking up other industries, including entertainment, publishing, and advertising. Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds.
Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds -- and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running "prediction markets" that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.
At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters. "It's the democratization of industry," says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. "We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people."
Peer Production
That suggests even more sweeping changes to come. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they're the underpinnings of a new economic order. "These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible," suggests Rheingold, who's also helping lead the Cooperation Project, a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape. "They may make some new economic system possible."
Perhaps they already are. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. "Peer production," as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN ) millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. "The economic role of social behavior is increasing," he says. "Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products."
Indeed, peer production represents a sea change in the economy -- at least when it comes to the information products, services, and content that increasingly drive economic growth. More than two centuries ago, James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services -- along with the Internet's ubiquitous communications that make it easy to pool those capital investments -- are starting to give production power back to the people. Says Benkler: "This departs radically from everything we've seen since the Industrial Revolution."
Sound pretty threatening to anyone invested in the status quo? You bet. Indeed, as the title of Rheingold's book implies, there could be a dark side to this new cooperative force, especially if it results in mob rule. Quite often, the best solution to a problem comes from the sudden flash of insight from a solitary genius such as Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. It would be a tragedy if these folks, sometimes unpopular in their times, got lost in the cooperative crowds. Clearly, peer production has its limits. Almost certainly, it will never build railroads, grow wheat, run nuclear power plants, or write great novels.
Yet this cooperative force may spread beyond such easily shared commodities as information, knowledge, and media. People are starting to use the Net to pool tangible goods as well. In a sense, Skype enables people to share computer hardware. Thanks to the Web's ability to serve as a meeting ground and scheduling coordinator, it's becoming economical to share cars, for example. Services such as Zipcar Inc. and Flexcar let members use the Net to reserve one of a fleet of autos in crowded cities, almost on demand, for an hourly fee.
What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.
What sets these new technologies apart from those of the Internet's first generation is their canny way of turning self-interest into social benefit -- and real economic value. They have what tech-book publisher Tim O'Reilly calls an "architecture of participation," so it's easy for people to do their own thing: create a link on their Web site to another Web site they like; rate a song; or just show off their knowledge with an online product review. Then, those actions can be pooled into something useful to many: the 3 billion song ratings that help people create personalized Net radio stations on Yahoo (YHOO )! Inc. or Amazon's millions of customer-generated product reviews, which help decide hits and duds. Exclaims Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos: "You invite the community in, and you get all this help."
It's surprisingly good help, too. New research indicates that cooperation, often organized from the bottom up, plays a much greater role than we thought in everything from natural phenomena like ant colonies to human institutions such as markets and cities. It's what New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, in his illuminating 2004 book of the same name, calls "the wisdom of crowds." Crowds can go mad, of course, but by and large, it turns out, they're smarter at solving many problems than even the brightest individuals.
The Internet's supreme group-forming capability suggests the rise of an almost spooky group intelligence. Within minutes of Pope John Paul II's death, hundreds of eBay sellers had posted related products for sale. Whether it is responding to world events or new products such as Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) PSP game machine, eBay's hive mind reacts to shifts in demand much faster than traditional companies with layers of management approval. Although eBay recently has seen some mature markets in the U.S. and Germany slow, the group smarts have helped keep growth more than respectable, with gross merchandise sales this year expected to rise 32%, to $45 billion. As eBay CEO Margaret C. Whitman has noted: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."
More companies are starting to understand the logic. If they can get others to help them design and create products, they end up with ready-made customers -- and that means far less risk in the tricky business of creating new goods and markets. So businesses are accessing the cyberswarm to improve everything from research and development to marketing. Says Alpheus Bingham, vice-president for Eli Lilly's e.Lilly research unit: "If I can tap into a million minds simultaneously, I may run into one that's uniquely prepared."
Procter & Gamble's $1.7 billion-a-year R&D operation, for instance, is taking advantage of collective online brain trusts such as Lilly company InnoCentive Inc. in Andover, Mass. It's a network of 80,000 independent, self-selected "solvers" in 173 countries who gang-tackle research problems for the likes of Boeing Co. (BA ), DuPont (DD ), and 30 other large companies. One solver, Drew Buschhorn, is a 21-year-old chemistry grad student at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. He came up with an art-restoration chemical for an unnamed company -- a compound he identified while helping his mother dye cloth when he was a kid. Says InnoCentive CEO Darren J. Carroll: "We're trying for the democratization of science."
And apparently succeeding. More than a third of the two dozen requests P&G has submitted to InnoCentive's network have yielded solutions, for which the company paid upwards of $5,000 apiece. By using InnoCentive and other ways of reaching independent talent, P&G has boosted the number of new products derived from outside to 35%, from 20% three years ago. As a result, sales per R&D person are ahead some 40%.
The online masses aren't just offering up ideas: Sometimes they all but become the entire production staff. In game designer Linden Lab's Second Life, a virtual online world, participants themselves create just about everything, from characters to buildings to games that are played inside the world. The 45-person company, which grossed less than $5 million last year, makes money by charging players for virtual land on which they build their creations. Second Life's 25,000 players collectively spend 6,000 hours a day actively creating things. Even if you assume only 10% of their work is any good, that's still equal to a 100-person team at a traditional game company. "We've built a market-based, far more efficient system for creating digital content," says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.
Likewise, groups online are starting to turn marketing from megaphone to conversation. LEGO Group, for instance, brought adult LEGO train-set enthusiasts to its New York office to check out new designs. "We pooh-poohed them all," says Steve Barile, an Intel Corp. (INTC ) engineer and LEGO fan in Portland, Ore., who attended. As a result, says Jake McKee, LEGO's global community-development manager, "we literally produced what they told us to produce." The new locomotive, the "Santa Fe Super Chief" set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts in 2002, and their word-of-mouse helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing.
Corporate planners are even starting to use the wisdom of online crowds to predict the future, forecasting profits and sales more precisely. Prediction markets let people essentially buy shares in various forecasts, often with real money. Most famously, they've been employed in the University of Iowa's experimental Iowa Electronic Markets to determine, with remarkable accuracy, the most likely winner of the Presidential election. The ease of organizing groups on the Net has caused an explosion in their use, says Emile Servan-Schreiber, CEO of NewsFutures Inc., a consultant that has run 40,000 prediction markets for companies and publications.
Mob Mentality
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HPQ ) services division was having trouble a few years ago with forecasts in the first month of a quarter. So Bernardo A. Huberman, director of HP Labs' Information Dynamics Lab, set up a market with 15 finance people not normally involved in such planning. They bought and sold virtual stock that represented a range of forecasts at, above, and below the official company forecast. Their collective bets yielded a 50% improvement in operating-profit predictability over conventional forecasts by individual managers.
For all the benefits, Net-based cooperation holds plenty of peril for the unwary. Obviously, not all crowds are wise. Even The Wisdom of Crowds author Surowiecki wonders if the Net connects like-minded people so well that it can amplify groupthink. "The more we talk to each other, the dumber we can get," he notes. Groups that discourage independent thought potentially could put a damper on out-of-the-box ideas from brilliant individuals. They can also become herds that buy or dump stocks on momentum alone. For that matter, they can devolve into lynch mobs and terrorist groups.
As companies have learned, the online hordes can quickly turn against them. Last September bike-lock manufacturer Kryptonite tried to downplay a blogger video that showed how to open its bike locks with a BIC pen. But the video instantly spread across the Net, forcing the company to spend more than $10 million on lock replacements.
To contend with this rising people power, corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. They'll be unable to keep secrets for long amid the chorus of online voices, as Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) learned when fan sites spilled the beans on unreleased products. Managers and employees will have to learn how to take orders from customers more than from bosses. "Networks are becoming the locus for innovation," says Stanford University professor Walter W. Powell. "Firms are becoming much more porous and decentralized."
The challenges, though, go to show that we're not talking about merely a new capitalist tool -- at least not one that's dominated by big capitalists. Upstarts, both ad hoc groups and new companies, are seizing the initiative far more than are established businesses. They're transforming industry after industry faster than individual companies can cope with.
Nowhere has that phenomenon happened faster than in software. Collaborative open-source development is rapidly moving beyond basic utility software like Linux to mainstream applications as well. An especially eye-opening example is SugarCRM Inc., which provides an open-source version of customer-relationship management software now dominated by Siebel Systems (SEBL ) and salesforce.com Inc. (CRM ) The 10-person outfit's software, which CEO John Roberts calls "the collective work of bright CRM engineers around the world," has been downloaded more than 235,000 times for free.
The company makes money from services such as technical support and a $40-a-month Web-based service, as well as more fully featured corporate software for which it charges $239 per user per year. Scarcely a year old, SugarCRM won't reveal its finances, but its business model suggests a big change in how the software industry works. "The fact that everyone can participate [in open-source] is creating a new market ecology," says Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource Inc., a startup providing bundles of open-source products. Or, as Roberts adds brightly: "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space."
The same scary prospect lies ahead for other information-based industries, such as entertainment, media, and publishing, that are rapidly going digital. People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs. Overall, 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, from product reviews to eBay ratings, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The most breathtaking example: Wikipedia. Some 5 million people a month visit the free online encyclopedia, whose more than 1.5 million entries in 200 languages by volunteer experts around the globe outnumber Encyclopedia Britannica's 120,000, with surprisingly high quality. "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative," says co-founder Jimmy Wales. Unlike Britannica, Wales is not aiming to generate much, if any, revenue. But "that doesn't mean that we won't destroy their business," he notes. Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas says sheer volume of articles isn't a measure of quality and may be overload for most readers and researchers.
Then again, the cooperative crowds offer a lifeline to beleaguered media such as newspapers. The five-year-old online paper OhmyNews in South Korea has marshaled 36,000 "citizen journalists" to write up to 200 stories a day on everything from political protests to movies. Its popularity with 1 million daily visitors has made it the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, according to a national magazine poll -- topping one of the three television networks. "It's participatory journalism," explains founder Oh Yeon Ho, who says OhmyNews turned a profit last year. The idea is starting to catch fire in the U.S., too, via independent citizen-media efforts such as Backfence Inc. and Bayosphere and budding initiatives by E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP ) and others. The New York Times Co. is also testing the waters: In March, it bought About.com, which has 475 citizen experts on consumer electronics, personal finance, and other topics.
Even industries that traffic in physical goods are being turned upside down by Net-driven sharing. In retail, for instance, "consumers" are becoming active participants in the merchants they buy from, transforming the venerable suggestion box into something more influential. At Amazon.com, thousands of volunteers write buyer's guides and lists of favorite products. Amazon also lets thousands of merchants, from Target Stores (TGT ) to individuals, sell on Amazon pages.
What's more, Amazon is opening up the technology behind product databases, payment services, and more to 65,000 software developers. They're creating new services, such as the ability to compare brick-and-mortar store prices with Amazon's by scanning a bar code into a cell phone. Thanks in part to such moves, the company is solidly profitable on $6.9 billion in sales last year. "We're all building this thing together -- Amazon itself, outside developers, associates, and customers," says Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services evangelist.
That raises a key point: All of us will have to take on more responsibility. And to get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways -- such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. But the rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create.
Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the notion of the tragedy of the commons. He noted that public resources, from pastures and national parks to air and water, inevitably get overused as people act in their own self-interest. It's a different story in the Information Age, contends Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the pioneering PC software VisiCalc and president of consultant Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass.
Instead, he says, there's a cornucopia of the commons. That rich reward may be worth all the disruption we've seen and all the more still to come.
Americans Need Not Apply
If we continue to move jobs offshore, the U.S. IT professional could become extinct
It’s 2010. TaTa Consultancy Services has made New York City its de facto worldwide headquarters and opened more than 100 satellite offices around the country. No longer simply a provider of lower-level application development and maintenance work based in Mumbai, India, TaTa now provides high-level consulting and business process improvement, overtaking IBM Global Services as the leading IT services provider in the States -- and the world. The company has hired a recent Nobel Prize winner to head up its burgeoning R&D business, and rumor even has it that a recently out-of-work Sam Palmisano, formerly CEO of IBM, was sniffing around for a position there.
Such a scenario might scare the dickens out of most CIOs (and probably a few CEOs), but it’s perfectly plausible. Offshore companies have made no secret of their wish to compete with the likes of IBM Global Services and EDS. Changing the base of operations to the United States is possible, particularly if the U.S. government does not rein in the L-1 and H-1B visa programs that encourage the hiring of foreign workers here to oversee work done abroad.
"If Indian firms set up shop in the U.S., that’s where the real threat happens," says N. Venkatraman, Boston University School of Management’s IS department chairman. "You no longer have to fly someone over from India. You now have someone who’s worked for the EDSs and Accentures, and now just carries a TaTa business card."
If offshore providers transform themselves into multinational corporations, watch out. They’ll develop talent at all levels of IT operations. "The U.S. IT professional could become extinct if we continue to import foreign labor," says Norman Matloff, computer science professor at the University of California, Davis.
Increased standardization of IT tasks that once required localized, human skills will further the export of the American IT function. And improvements in real-time communication could boost the use of staff around the world as well.
A lack of entry-level IT employment might dissuade U.S. students. It already has. Although America saw a rise of IT college degrees awarded in the late 1990s (from 37,500 in 1998 and 1999 to 52,900 in 2001, according to the Digest of Education Statistics), enrollment has begun to decline again. Fairchild Semiconductor CIO John Watkins understands why. "If it looks like America is just chasing the cheapest source of labor, why would anyone want to go into IT?" he says.
Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, saw the effects last fall. The new IT major at RIT missed its hoped-for enrollment figure by 200 students.
Without new entrants in the domestic labor supply, the United States could lose its competitive edge. In a 2003 report on workforce policies, the National Science Board predicted dire consequences if the United States depends primarily on foreign talent. "If you don’t have a critical mass of people, you won’t get innovation." says Matloff. "Companies that offshore all of their entry-level positions will be shooting themselves in the foot." They’ll be forced to look elsewhere for IT talent, perhaps at higher costs.
Remember the leaked tape that came out of IBM last summer? IBM Global Employee Relations Director Tom Lynch said IBM had to accelerate the shift of white-collar services jobs, including software design, to markets such as India and China because "our competitors are doing it, and we have to do it."
Once one big name in IT does it, nearly every other CIO will too. "It’s the most destructive characteristic of large enterprises, that we’re like herd animals and just do what everyone else is doing," says Intel CIO Doug Busch.
Once the number of jobs available to skilled U.S. IT workers dips below a certain level and the salaries being offered hit rock bottom, "Americans just aren’t going to go into the profession anymore," Matloff says. And that bodes ill for CIOs’ ability to get the job done at their companies and for their own future clout in corporate America. Wholesale offshore outsourcing would also be a disaster for America’s leadership in IT innovation.
Corporate America’s Conundrum
While individual corporations may benefit from their increasingly global staffs, the loss of thousands of IT jobs could hurt America’s ability to remain a leader in technology innovation. For without a critical mass of IT professionals in the United States, true innovation will be next to impossible.
"In 2010, we won’t have gutted the IT industry in the U.S. or any other currently developed economies in favor of moving somewhere else if we behave the way we should as leaders," says Busch. Hopefulness aside, Busch admits it isn’t easy juggling four major constituencies -- his employees, shareholders, customers and the communities Intel operates in. "It feels like swimming upstream," he says.
Busch is currently trying to increase IT’s presence in emerging economies while continuing to invest to a certain extent in his U.S. workers. "We have to compete with highly skilled IT workers in very sophisticated companies with lower cost structures. But simply substituting lower cost resources to reduce spending or deciding to solve a weak IT organization by sending the work someplace else is thoughtless," says Busch. Rather, CIOs must concentrate on improving efficiency, taking the risks necessary to innovate, and investing in tomorrow’s leaders.
"CIOs who focus exclusively on chasing cost savings around the world will have short careers," agrees Sun CIO Howard. "What matters is smart sourcing that looks at the [total cost of ownership] over the long haul and the many other factors like security privacy, [intellectual property] protection, geopolitical risks, and the potential cost of having to bring it all back in."
Investing in R&D will also be important both in the government and private sector. A lot of IT innovation came out of the space program, for example. "We wouldn’t have computers or the Internet had the U.S. government not invested in the research," says Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Homeland defense, security and military technology are all areas where federal funding could spur future innovation.
"But we can’t wait for the government to address these issues," Busch says. CIOs in the private sector can do their part by bringing the R&D spend back in their own companies.
Putting a greater focus on R&D and continuing to recruit the best and the brightest into IT are crucial to maintaining our competitive edge as a nation. But bear in mind, the United States has a built-in advantage when it comes to innovation: As a capitalist democracy, it is relatively free of the excessive government regulations, bureaucracy and corruption that stymie IT innovation in other countries.
"The free flow of information and the freedom to develop products is really the U.S.’s ace in the hole," says Maria Schafer, a program director at Meta Group. "That doesn’t exist in China or in Russia, or even in India. It’s why the U.S. has always been the innovator. There’s a tremendous strength in the way IT is done in the U.S."
IT Staff of the Future
If even 25 percent to 50 percent of offshore work does go overseas by 2010, what will the future hold for IT professionals here?
Diane Morello, a vice president and research director at Gartner, predicts that those who remain in the field will become "IT versatilists, equally at ease with technical and business issues." Travis of AMR Research calls them 50/50 professionals. Fairchild Semiconductor’s Watkins brings up a similar picture: "The IT cohort of the future has to be a good technologist and protector of technology, but also be a savvy businessperson."
Will the IT professional of today want the position of tomorrow? Some will and some won’t. "The content of jobs is changing and will continue to," says David Foote, president of IT management consultancy Foote Partners. "A number of people I know who are really smart stopped working in IT when they realized what it would take to be this hybrid, versatile person. They’ve said, I’m not interested in being a [multitasking] Swiss Army knife. I want to be a big bowie knife."
Consider this hypothetical company in 2010, for example. Paul, the Cobol programming expert who once boasted that he spent all day every day for a year doing Y2K remediation, doesn’t work in the IT department anymore. He’s begun a second career as a carpenter and is actually enjoying spending more time with his family. At his old desk sits Bianca, who has an MBA from Boston University. Just back from a two-year stint at her company’s office in Ho Chi Minh City, Bianca has a meeting to discuss a business case for a joint marketing and IT project in the morning, and will review the post-implementation audit of the recent biometrics installation over lunch. In the afternoon, she has a Six Sigma class so that she can effectively manage the development of a CRM project at the company’s Chinese outsourcer.
Like Bianca, the IT applicants of tomorrow will have to position themselves differently. "I tell my students that the job market is forevermore global, not local," says Venkatraman, who advises his protŽgŽs to consider taking a position in Ireland or India or China if only for the sheer market value of global experience. "You may think there’s a shortage of your skills locally, but companies aren’t going to look at local value alone anymore. You need to compete globally."
Despite downward pressure on U.S. IT salaries (the average compensation for tech workers grew just 1.7 percent from 2001 to 2002, while inflation was 2.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute), experts expect wages to stabilize. But IT workers hoping for the fat paychecks and big bonuses of the past will be sorely disappointed. Normal cost-of-living increases and enough lift to keep up with other corporate positions are more likely, agree Intel CIO Busch and SIM’s Markle.
Future of Jobs
What Jobs Will Go
When it comes to the future of American IT staff, past is prologue. The current trend toward sending some IT work offshore actually began a decade ago, when stateside outsourcing began to gain favor. Companies such as Xerox inked multimillion dollar deals sending their IT work out the door to outsourcers. Some believed that the rise of the EDSs and CSCs would mean the fall of the in-house IT staff. That didn’t happen, but today, with offshore outsourcing, IT workers are not simply shifting employers but in many cases losing their jobs altogether. And at many levels -- lower-end programming, call center tasks, system maintenance and help desk work -- that trend will continue.
When it comes to the future of American IT staff, past is prologue. The current trend toward sending some IT work offshore actually began a decade ago, when stateside outsourcing began to gain favor. Companies such as Xerox inked multimillion dollar deals sending their IT work out the door to outsourcers. Some believed that the rise of the EDSs and CSCs would mean the fall of the in-house IT staff. That didn’t happen, but today, with offshore outsourcing, IT workers are not simply shifting employers but in many cases losing their jobs altogether. And at many levels -- lower-end programming, call center tasks, system maintenance and help desk work -- that trend will continue.
"Commoditized work will go overseas," says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Some more creative work -- like non-commodity one-off and unique projects -- will go overseas. But where interface with the business is important, that work will remain here."
It’s hard to argue for keeping certain IT work stateside. The salary for a programmer with two to three years of experience averages $7,500 in India, according to NeoIT, an offshore consultancy. In Russia, it’s $10,000. In the United States, it’s $65,000. India graduates 75,000 computer scientists each year. The United States, 52,900. China, which currently brings 50,000 new IT workers into the world every year, could eventually provide 200,000 computer science graduates annually, according to Marty McCaffrey, executive director of Software Outsourcing Research.
Bandwidth costs have declined dramatically and should continue to dip, furthering the beneficial cost structure of transoceanic work.
"What will continue to go overseas are the repetitive activities, the things that will ultimately be automated anyway," says Nancy Markle, president of the Society for Information Management (SIM) and former Arthur Andersen CIO. "We have to be able to continue to get the best prices, or else we’ll be growing companies offshore instead of competing with the rest of the world."
What Jobs Will Stay
By 2008, the IT workforce situated in the United States will be 25 percent smaller than it is today, according to Gartner. But the workers who remain will be more important to the business than ever. They’ll be working on architecture, strategy, project management and business processes, predicts Lance Travis, vice president of outsourcing strategics for AMR Research.
"A standardized problem can be solved anywhere," says N. Venkatraman, chairman of Boston University School of Management’s IS department. "But if you need to understand the business and create value, you must be here. It’s very difficult to understand the business context of IT remotely." Supporting a new product launch, for example, requires close observation and fast response --both impossible if the work is done halfway around the globe.
"If it can be codified, it can be done remotely and supported by IT," says Travis. "If it is still tacit and requires a lot of unstructured discussion, then it must be done here."
That need to keep certain activities close to home is one reason why many high-level IT jobs will remain in the United States. Speed and ease of management are two other factors. "Offshore outsourcing ultimately represents a certain loss of control," says Travis. "It is very dependent on the ability to manage relationships, and you always give up some agility." When CIOs outsource development to India, for example, it’s much harder to make changes to projects. "Anything beyond the scope of the project is impossible, unless you want to pour more money into it," says Travis.
Infrastructure, security, communication and project management issues already erode some of the cost advantage of offshoring, says Larry Pickett, CIO of Purdue Pharma. If CIOs try to go further up the value chain -- sending high-level consulting services elsewhere, IT will be even more difficult to manage, he says.
The IT department at Sun Microsystems is a test case for the future. "I have a staff of IT people around the world," CIO H. William Howard says, rattling off cities from Bangalore to Beijing where his IT staff resides. "Any large company is going to position their workers where the talent exists at the best price." Howard employs about 75 percent of the IT staff he used to. By 2010, he expects to outsource 50 percent of noncore activities. He adds, "Does that mean everything will be offshore? No. The things that are core, that are tightly tied to business process and the local business community, won’t."
However, John Watkins, CIO of Fairchild Semiconductor, views IT as an enabler of his business and only offshores on a limited, case-by-case basis. "It’s that intellectual capital we need to protect, especially when you’re as integrated in business processes as IT should be," he says.
Similarly, Cingular CIO Thaddeus Arroyo sends 10 percent of his IT work (mostly maintenance work) offshore. But he retains a U.S. staff to keep "new and more complex development close," from application development related to business process improvement to the integration and customization of off-the-shelf software. Arroyo makes these decisions project-by-project, considering such factors as capability and capacity of his U.S. workforce, the strategic nature of the work, and how closely tied a specific project is to other enterprise applications within the company. And by 2010, he says, CIOs will need to be even more judicious about what they send out the door.
"As we come out of the downturn, there will be even more potential for IT to become the business differentiator," says Arroyo. "Offshore outsourcing simply allows us to remain productive so we can deliver innovation here." In addition, the inevitable rise in labor costs in India, Russia and elsewhere could further reduce the cost advantages of offshoring.
The future of IT--2
While the nation's economy is soaring high on the growth front, the Indian IT industry bows in thanks and is getting all geared up for an even brighter future. The first step towards this has already been taken.
Though Open Source technologies entered the nation to a lukewarm welcome it has been doing really well for the past few years. With over 80 per cent companies moving from Proprietary Technologies to Open Source, the future seems almost predictable. Open Source Technologies provide flexibility, customisation, ease of development and security to the companies. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle Corporation are amongst the few to have taken the lead.
With the growing demand for qualified and trained professionals touching an all time high, it is sad to see how little progress the IT Education sector has been making.
Addressing the talent shortage, equipping students with open source while also developing their soft skills — all seem to be problems the IT education sector has to devise solutions for.
NACE Solutions (P) Ltd, however seem to have found a solution. Having its centres in Chennai and Hyderabad, NACE has recently forayed into Bangalore. They not only offer Proprietary Technologies such as C, C++, JAVA, J2EE, J2ME, .NET and Data Warehousing but also offer Open Source Technologies to their students. They point out that their flagship course, LAMP a combination of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, is the alternative technology in lieu of Microsoft .NET and Sun Java.
NASSCOM has estimated that India's requirement for software professionals will be 2.3 million by 2010. Based on the current supply, they predict that the country will face a shortage of 0.5 million skilled workers.
To cope with this problem, NACE has devised a syllabus that lays more importance on practical training while not forgetting the basic theory.
Although, NIIT and Aptech have carved a niche in the field of IT education, the needs of the industry are changing. NACE, having accepted the change, has grown along with it, says a spokesperson.
Age of Finishing Schools
Initially the need for finishing schools was felt when students who gained technical training from training centres were found to be lacking in soft skills. Also since companies today crave for professionals who have received training according to their unique requirements. Hence the only option the companies were left with was to either train probable employees in their office premises or cut the cost and establish a franchise with ‘Finishing Schools’
According to NACE, to cut down this deployable time companies tie-up with finishing schools. While the Government of Karnataka has opened many finishing schools, from which over 40,000 professionals gain training every year, there are also many private owned finishing schools.
NACE, offers individual training as well as corporate training, hence accomplishing the purpose of a finishing school as well. Of the nine centres planned in Bangalore, the upcoming one in Jayanagar is a finishing school that they plan to start soon.
Also recently, many Online Finishing Schools (OFS) are coming up to empower students with the necessary skills while completing their studies itself. Mindlogicx recently launched one such OFS aiming at increasing the employability quotient of the final year students.
The skill gap is hence being filled and probable employees amongst the general student population are being trained effectively.
Though Open Source technologies entered the nation to a lukewarm welcome it has been doing really well for the past few years. With over 80 per cent companies moving from Proprietary Technologies to Open Source, the future seems almost predictable. Open Source Technologies provide flexibility, customisation, ease of development and security to the companies. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle Corporation are amongst the few to have taken the lead.
With the growing demand for qualified and trained professionals touching an all time high, it is sad to see how little progress the IT Education sector has been making.
Addressing the talent shortage, equipping students with open source while also developing their soft skills — all seem to be problems the IT education sector has to devise solutions for.
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NASSCOM has estimated that India's requirement for software professionals will be 2.3 million by 2010. Based on the current supply, they predict that the country will face a shortage of 0.5 million skilled workers.
To cope with this problem, NACE has devised a syllabus that lays more importance on practical training while not forgetting the basic theory.
Although, NIIT and Aptech have carved a niche in the field of IT education, the needs of the industry are changing. NACE, having accepted the change, has grown along with it, says a spokesperson.
Age of Finishing Schools
Initially the need for finishing schools was felt when students who gained technical training from training centres were found to be lacking in soft skills. Also since companies today crave for professionals who have received training according to their unique requirements. Hence the only option the companies were left with was to either train probable employees in their office premises or cut the cost and establish a franchise with ‘Finishing Schools’
According to NACE, to cut down this deployable time companies tie-up with finishing schools. While the Government of Karnataka has opened many finishing schools, from which over 40,000 professionals gain training every year, there are also many private owned finishing schools.
NACE, offers individual training as well as corporate training, hence accomplishing the purpose of a finishing school as well. Of the nine centres planned in Bangalore, the upcoming one in Jayanagar is a finishing school that they plan to start soon.
Also recently, many Online Finishing Schools (OFS) are coming up to empower students with the necessary skills while completing their studies itself. Mindlogicx recently launched one such OFS aiming at increasing the employability quotient of the final year students.
The skill gap is hence being filled and probable employees amongst the general student population are being trained effectively.
2010: The Future of Jobs and Innovation
Even though some IT jobs will continue to move overseas by 2010, the United States will still have a sizable population of IT professionals doing high-level work on strategy, implementation and design.
By the year 2010, Intel CIO Doug Busch envisions himself managing an IT staff that’s all over the map, literally. Not only will his employees be working in places ranging from Rio Rancho, N.M., to Parsippany, N.J., in the United States, they’ll also reside in Beijing, Leixlip, Haifa, Penang and a host of other locations Busch has never even been to. Each spot will specialize in a particular area of expertise for the company’s IT department -- call centers in Manila, business analysis at company headquarters in Santa Clara, application development in Mumbai. And a full roster of career opportunities -- from entry level to senior leadership -- will exist at each and every location.
"Talent will rise to the top, wherever it is," Busch predicts.
Busch’s scenario may sound a bit like corporate IT’s version of "It’s a Small World." But the CIO of the world’s leading computer chip maker already oversees IT workers in 27 countries around the globe. And most CIOs (to differing degrees) are headed in that direction.
The part of the picture that strays furthest from Disneyland is what this means for American IT staff. Even without offshore outsourcing, U.S. IT staffing levels were never going to return to their prerecession highs. The automation of tasks, increased productivity and a reluctance to return to the unfettered IT budgets of yore pretty much guarantee that the demand for American IT professionals is destined to decline. But, incendiary conjectures to the contrary, the entire population of IT workers in this country will not be replaced by counterparts in emerging economies.
Instead, even as 2010 will see a further movement of some IT activities -- application development, legacy maintenance, call center operations -- overseas (Forrester Research estimates that the cumulative number of IT jobs heading abroad will grow from 27,171 in 2000 to 472,632 in 2015), U.S.-based companies will keep work here that requires close contact with the business: strategy development, business process improvement and the actual application of IT to the business.
The net result: There will still be a future in IT for smart young Americans. But the higher-level IT positions that remain stateside will require new skills. Today’s CIOs would be wise to encourage broader business education in U.S. IT degree programs. And increased government and corporate support of IT R&D will be critical to retaining America’s position as the world’s IT leader.
Perspectives of the IT Organization and the CIO
CIOs and their IT organizations play a central role in the demand for IT consulting. In our discussions with a number of leading CIOs about their impact on the shape of the IT industry, six themes emerged:
1. IT is now an established function in the structure of most organizations. For many years, the IT function was the "new kid on the administrative block." In that tenuous capacity as a newcomer, it was necessary and appropriate to use resources and expertise from outside the company. It was natural for companies to rely on outside sources for guidance on key design and investment decisions and for resource capacity itself. This reliance helped fuel the growth of IT services. Now that a strong IT function is accepted as central to a healthy company as are the HR, Finance or Purchasing functions, the degree of reliance on outside support is both sharpened and diminished.
2. The roles of IT in some companies are being redefined by the nature of what remains to be done after everything else is outsourced. Not everyone is convinced that this IT function design by "default" is a good thing. For example, one CIO sees establishing the "information backbone" of the company as about all that is left after outsourcing maintenance of the data-center, running of the network and programming. This CIO will not outsource ownership of design or maintenance of the so-called information backbone because he believes that the ability to do that is central to the competitiveness of the company.
3. As an established function, IT in the company now has more degrees of freedom to source services for highly specific purposes and value. One CIO describes the IT organization of the future as consisting of the following:
- Business analysis to understand the needs of the businesses
- Technical architecting to oversee and interface between IT and business systems
- Project management to implement change consistent with the practices of the company
- Management of IT processes
For each of these four capabilities, this CIO easily identifies the IT consulting outsiders who currently provide that service to his corporation. And, he states that his strategy aims to steadily bring more capability on the first three into his own organization. He prefers that these capabilities reside in his organization and then, by default, go to the outside if he has no alternative.
4. CIOs have migrated from being mainly IT technical experts to participating in high-level dialogue about the strategic direction of the company. For example, the views of the CIO may be central to design or re-design of the business model or significant in assessing the viability and future value of a major acquisition. One CIO told us, "If you have good people in the IT organization, they are good partners with the businesses." In the past, consultants helped bridge the needs of the businesses and the capabilities of IT. As an established strategy partner with business and corporate executives, the CIO and staff satisfy many of the IT-related strategy needs that IT consultants satisfied in the past.
5. Many CIOs say they will do less outsourcing in the future. This is driven by several factors, including a decrease in the number of new, "gorilla" ERP and CRM initiatives and the increasing need for rapid and flexible modifications to existing systems. What they do outsource will be the "body shop" activity when they need more capacity, but they plan to keep the deeper expertise in their companies.
6. Off-shore suppliers are providing an increasing share of IT services for activities such as coding. These are companies like Infosys, Syntel and WiPro. They market and deliver services on line and are viewed as providing rapid response, high quality, and low-cost service. One CIO told us, "...typically the outsource company will have 60% of their people on a project offshore and the other 40% at our location." These offshore providers were 50% of the cost of the large, U.S. IT consultants.
The Future of IT Consulting
The explosion of "computer-to-computer" communication in the twenty-first century is triggering a growth phase for IT consultants. Harvard Business School professor Richard Nolan and HBS Interactive Senior Vice President Larry Bennigson trace the evolution of IT management consulting.
Johnston: Your research refers to the PC in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's as triggers of explosive growth for the IT consulting industry. Have you identified a third trigger for this decade?
Nolan and Bennigson: The trigger in this decade underlying autonomous computing is "computer-to-computer" communication. By the end of the decade, more than 60 percent of the computer communications will be computer-to-computer. Computer-to-computer vastly speeds up the pace of business. For example, end-to-end supply chains can be automatically adjusted by point-of-sale computers directly communicating with warehouse computers, which in turn directly communicate with manufacturer computers, and, again in the chain, manufacturers' computers directly communicate with their supplier computers. In addition, computer-to-computer communications can track demand and adjust logistic systems to automatically direct product to geographical points of demand.
Q: Can you describe some of the enablers and drivers behind the growth of the IT consulting industry? How has globalization impacted this growth?
A: The enablers and drivers of growth of the IT (see working paper excerpt) consulting industry have been several. First, innovation in frameworks and methodologies along with trained professionals have provided value-added services uniquely available from the consulting firm. For example, the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey innovated unique conceptual frameworks for assisting management in sorting out action plans for their various lines of business.
By the end of the decade, more than 60 percent of the computer communications will be computer-to-computer.
— Nolan and Bennigson
Newness and complexity have been a second driver. Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, has provided expertise in designing and coding complex computer applications. SAP and Seibel have developed unique package software, and have provided specialized consulting services to assist in the implementation of the package software.
A third driver has been the building to critical mass high levels of expertise not economical to maintain in a particular company. For example, computer security consulting requires a high level of expertise, which few firms can economically maintain in-house. By providing these kinds of services to many firms, critical mass can be maintained in the practice group, as well as ensure that the group stays on the leading edge of the subject matter.
Related to this third driver is the focus that a separate consulting firm can maintain in managing a highly talented group of knowledge workers. The management and incentive systems are quite different in a consulting firm than in, say, a product firm. Consequently, a product firm may not be attractive to various knowledge workers who prefer to work in the consulting environment.
A fourth driver is the demand for process and behavior change that IT implementation puts on most organizations. IT was not just a new technology. To capture the value IT represented, organizations had to address change in structure, culture, people, process, and leadership. Many organizations turned to the consulting industry for help in understanding and managing these significant changes.
Finally, the IT consulting industry enjoyed an unprecedented frenzy of convergence of 1) adoption of systems such as ERP and CRM; 2) management improvements such as BPRE; 3) problems to solve such as Y2K; and 4) new territory to pioneer such as e-business.
Q: Who are the current players who have successfully adapted to the changing IT environment? What is the key to their success?
A: In our working paper, we state that more than 50 percent of today's capital budgeting expenditures involve computing in one form or another. As a result of the pervasiveness of IT, literally all consulting firms have had to integrate IT expertise. Indeed, with the hyper growth during the 1990's, consulting is still in restructure mode.
A high degree of industry adaptation in the IT consulting industry will be required in the future.
— Nolan and Bennigson
Within this context, Accenture has continued to broaden their consulting service scope. Accenture has built an impressive education and training facility called St. Charles, outside of Chicago, which focuses on maintaining currency in the skill levels of their professionals, as well as providing a leading tool for equipping their professionals with the new skill required with emerging IT.
Another type of example is the IT product firms that incorporate certification and training for their own consultants, independent consultants, and customer professionals. Microsoft, Sun, and Novell are examples of these kinds of companies.
Q: What are your predictions for the future of IT management consulting?
A: We believe that the recent restructuring in the IT management consulting industry is a point of industry transition. That transition coincides with the emergence of new drivers of IT management consulting growth. While the transition is still being played out, we can see some of these new drivers taking shape.
Until recently, there had been an IBM de facto industry standard for the operating system, and a de facto standard in the use of COBOL for applications development. By the late 1990's, new applications development had become almost exclusively supplanted by package implementation. In addition, networking and the Internet moved the IT infrastructure for the IBM standard to an emerging environment characterized by open standards.
Accordingly, the IT infrastructure became simpler and more complex at the same time through the innovation of layers and API's (Application Programming Interfaces). The implication for IT management consulting is a rather complex demand to provide both strategic perspective along with implementation savvy on managing the considerable risks of not being able to realize the strategic competitive advantages of computing because of failures to effectively manage implementation challenges.
Further, within the context of the management challenges of balancing strategic opportunities with implementation capabilities, there are dampening forces on industry growth. For example, the wave of ERP installations and BPRE projects is now beyond its peak. While outsourcing is still an established practice, companies have gained experience and can now do much more for themselves that they have looked to outsiders to do in the past. Managers know more about IT, more about the business and organizational potential and implications of IT and more about designing their own backbone and architecture.
We think it is important that it is tempting but risky to completely turn over IT initiatives to IT consulting firms.
— Nolan and Bennigson
And, there are forces that will drive new demand. Security is fast becoming a ubiquitous issue. The Internet will experience dramatic growth in Asia and Europe. New applications such as bioinformatics and telematics create new consulting segments. And the adoption of Internet2 will eventually have broad impact.
IT consulting, as much as any product or service, creates its own demand. A high degree of industry adaptation in the IT consulting industry will be required in the future. By introducing innovations and educating the market about the competitive benefits of those innovations, IT consulting invents and "earns" its opportunities for growth. This ability of IT consulting to lead and to adapt is a key to its robust development.
Q: What lessons can operations managers take away from your research?
A: There are a number of lessons we think are important for operations managers:
Many functional and business leaders have become conversant about IT and many IT specialists have become knowledgeable about the strategic and business benefits of IT. Companies that encourage and incorporate this integrated and more sophisticated capability within their organizations will have an edge over those that have to rely on outsiders for the integrated view.
The rate of change in IT capabilities is a companion to the rate of change most companies experience in other technologies, markets, and initiatives of competitors. We have noted that the successful IT consulting firm must be able to anticipate, sense, and nimbly respond to change. This is equally true for operations. Operations managers face the daunting task of implementing new IT capabilities while ensuring they are also prepared for the next version or generation.
The emerging IT environment is at a level of complexity such that efforts to build IT infrastructure and integrated applications require specialized expertise that is often available only in IT consulting firms. Good operations managers will ensure that their organizations have the ability to work effectively with and integrate the value from networks of service providers with a variety of special capabilities.
Finally, we think it is important that it is tempting but risky to completely turn over IT initiatives to IT consulting firms. A significant number of your own IT professionals and users should be included in integrated IT initiatives.Information Technology Faqs
Q1.What is the future of IT industry in India ?
Q2.What are the Educational Courses and List of Institutes?
Q3.What is the Nature of Jobs ?
Q4 What is the remuneration in each field?
Q5.What are the Emerging Technologies ?
Q6.What is the Future Scenario ?
Q2.What are the Educational Courses and List of Institutes?
Q3.What is the Nature of Jobs ?
Q4 What is the remuneration in each field?
Q5.What are the Emerging Technologies ?
Q6.What is the Future Scenario ?
Q1.What is the future of IT industry in India ?
A1.According to leading reports, Indian software industry is set to achieve a turnover of 10 billion dollars by the year 2005. The projected demand for trained I.T. professionals is estimated at over 400,000 per year. There is a clear imbalance between the demand and supply of IT professionals with the result that this sector offers one of the highest remuneration packages. The Internet is a new revolution that is sweeping the world. It promises to change the way we work, live, shop, communicate and entertain ourselves.
Q2.What are the Educational Courses and List of Institutes?
A2. Most engineering colleges offer a B.E. / B.tech in computer engineering. For more information on Computer Engineering, please refer to the section under engineering. Other computer courses offered by universities include: B.Sc. (Computer) also known as B.C.S (Bachelor of Computer Science) M.C.A. (Master of Computer Applications) M.C.M. (Master of Computer Management) D.C.A. (Diploma in Computer Applications) D.C.E. (Diploma in Computer Engineering) D.C.S. (Diploma in Computer Science)
With the info tech boom, hundreds of private computer institutes have opened up across the country. The courses conducted by these institutions range from computer fundamentals to advanced computer languages. However there are no standards of teaching and course content and the quality of students differs considerably from institute to institute. Department of Electronics Accreditation of Computer Courses (DOEACC) Under this scheme there are four level of courses. These are : "O" Level - Foundation Level This would certify the candidate's competence as a programmer assistant or equivalent level. It is visualized as the lowest rung and the course, and should be at least a full-time one-year course. Students from accredited institutes can apply for this examination after completing their 101 Level course if they have 10+2 or I.T.I. certificate equivalent qualification.
Direct applicants need one year relevant experience (which signifies job experience in information Technology (IT) including teaching in a recognised institution) or a pass in the NCVT-DP & CS (Data Preparation and Computer software) Examination, besides 10+2 or equivalent qualification. 'A' level (advanced diploma level) This will give proof of the candidate's skills as a programmer. It should be equivalent to full-time studies of an average student for a year. Those who have done 'O' level and graduation followed by an accredited "A" level course are eligible. In the case of direct applicants, candidates with 'O' level and graduation and with one year relevant experience are eligible. A Government recognized polytechnic engineering diploma + A level course fulfils the eligibility. 'B' level (Graduate level) This will give certification to the candidate for proficiency as a systems analyst or software designer or engineer as the case may be. The course duration at the approved institute should be equivalent to a three year, full-time course. Graduates and government recognised polytechnic diploma holders. 'B' Level candidates who have completed the accredited 'B' Level course are eligible. In case of direct applicants, students with Level 'A' followed by two years) relevant experience and graduates with three years relevant experience are eligible.
Governments recognized PPDCA / PGDCA accords exemption from some courses. 'C' Ievel (master degree level) This will recognize the candidates proficiency as a systems manager. The course duration at the recognized institute should be equivalent to a full-time 18 months course. Candidates with Level 'B' or B.Tech./B.E./M.C.A./M.Sc./Master's degree (in maths/statistics/operations re-search)/M.B.A. (after B.Sc./B.A. with Maths) followed by an accredited 'C' Level course are eligible. In case of direct applicants, candidate with Level 'B'/B.Tech/ B.E' /M.C.A./Master's degree (in Maths/ GATE (computer) Statistics/ Operation Research)/M.B.A. (after B.SC., B.A. with Maths) followed by 18 months relevant experience in each case are eligible. Registration is a prerequisite for taking the examination. At any point of time, a candidate can register only at one level. The registration is valid for five years.
Contact Address- DOEACC Control Centre, c/o Manpower Development Division, Department of Electronics, Electronics Niketan (2nd Floor), 6 Lodhi Road, CGO Complex, New Delhi.
Industry Certified Courses Global infotech majors including Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, IBM etc have come out with their own certification programs which provide an indicator of the proficiency levels of candidates with those certifications and are recognised world wide. The certifications from Microsoft include MCSE - Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer MCP - Microsoft Certified Professionals MCSD - Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer. Microsoft has authorised several computer institutes to provide training for these certifications and the examination is conducted by Microsoft itself. Candidates who are successful in the test are globally recognised as proficient in the corresponding Microsoft technologies. Similar certifications are also offered by other companies.
Q3.What is the Nature of Jobs ?
A3. Introduction With the advent of the PC the information technology industry underwent a quantum change. Suddenly computers were all pervasive and work automation took off in a big way. The software revolution totally changed the way we work. Availability of cheap and easy to use software packages increased productivity levels manifold. Probably no sector is untouched by information technology. Manufacturing, Finance, Banking, Marketing, Entertainment, Education and several other fields are reaping the benefits of I.T. As a result the I.T industry employs not only staff trained in computers but also professionals from all other fields which could also be non-technical in nature. The rapid development of technologies such as networking, multimedia and the Internet have created totally new job categories where none existed a few years ago. This sector is also the one that is witnessing the fastest growth and change rate. New software and techniques come out every month and professionals have to keep pace with the rapid advancements. The hardcore technical jobs in the IT industry can broadly be classified as hardware jobs and software jobs. Non technical jobs include functional expert consultants, web designers, data entry professionals etc. Hardware Jobs Software Jobs Specialised Jobs Internet Related Jobs Multimedia Jobs
Q4 What is the remuneration in each field?
A4. Hardware Jobs Remuneration - Rs. (per annum) VLSI Design Engineers 1,20,000 upwards Production 60,000 – 3,00,000 Maintenance 36,000 – 96,000 Networking 72,000 upwards (entry level) Software Jobs Programmers 84,000 – 3,00,000 (entry level) Project Leaders 2,00,000 – 6,00,000 System Analysts 3,00,000 upwards Senior Managers 4,00,000 upwards Specialised Applications CAD/CAM 72,000 – 2,40,000 ERP 2,40,000 upwards Internet Related Webmasters 1,20,000 upwards (entry level) Web Designers 84,000 upwards (entry level) Web Application Developers 1,20,000 upwards (entry level) Multimedia DTP operators 30,000 upwards (entry level) Computer Animators 60,000 upwards (entry level) CD-ROM developers 96,000 upwards (entry level) Video/Audio Editors 84,000 upwards (entry level)
Q5.What are the Emerging Technologies ?
A5.E-commerce The Internet revolution is sweeping the world and is changing the way companies traditionally dealt with customers. Now customers can compare and shop without moving out of their homes by using the Internet. Electronic commerce relates to all commercial transactions that take place through the Internet. It is estimated that the quantum of e-commerce will jump to 400 billion US dollars by the year 2001. In order to enter this field, in addition to a basic degree in computer science/engineering one must have sound knowledge of software used in the front end such as Java, DHTML, Visual basic etc, the backend which is generally databases such as Oracle and SQL server as well as networking and web server maintenance. In addition an understanding of business transactions is also essential.
Supply Chain Management In any industry there are lot of vendors providing various material inputs used in final production. On the distribution side there are channels comprising of wholesalers, distributors and retailers. Supply chain management software cuts down the time taken for the supplies to arrive from the vendor and reduces the inventory levels thus cutting cost. On the marketing side, it ensures that products reach the end customers in time to fulfill their demand.
Customer Relationship Management Companies offering products and services have to deal with a number of customers. Customer relationship management software provides a record of all previous dealings with customers so that the company personnel can take the right decision while dealing with them.
Q6.What is the Future Scenario ?
A6.According to leading reports, Indian software industry is set to achieve a turnover of 10 billion dollars by the year 2005. The projected demand for trained I.T. professionals is estimated at over 400,000 per year. There is a clear imbalance between the demand and supply of IT professionals with the result that this sector offers one of the highest remuneration packages. With the Internet rapidly changing the way we live, shop, entertain and work there is a tremendous scope for entrepreneurs with radical new in this field.
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