I was recently invited to conduct an interview with a large MNC! On receiving the invite, I told this company's PR team that I no longer represented any IT magazine, nor did I hold any job, and was merely a blogger. So, why was this company interested to speak with me?
Here's the reply I received -- "I know you don't work with any magazine anymore -- don't you know "bloggers' are very popular and fashionable these days?"
God bless those who believe that bloggers are fashionable and popular!
I’ve always maintained that I love writing (or blogging) about things that are close to my heart. Semicon and telecom are prime in that category -- two topics that I am really very fond of.
My blog had started off as a regular affair. There are a whole lot of great bloggers out there, who also write on similar topics. Nor have I ever looked for traffic, etc., as it is my contention that people will only stop by and read your blog post or article IF there’s something of interest to them. So, I'm really my only reader!
It has been an interesting year as far as I'm concerned. First, I gave up a job to turn full time freelancer. Then, my losing spree started! First, I lost my notebook, and later, my blogspot blog (Pradeep Chakraborty's Blog) was found infected with malware, and subsequently removed by Google. I also lost a dear friend! All this while, I've made attempts to stay afloat in the industry! What I found out was: yes, bloggers are somewhat popular, but then, several 'old' problems still remain!
The problems I've faced are: some folks ask me about blog traffic! Well, this isn't a portal! Or, who are you affiliated with? Why should I give you work? Who works with you? Why do you write about semicon? Who will read that stuff? How will you survive in India writing on semiconductors? Why are you trying to develop content around semiconductors? Why can't you blog about easier topics? How much do you expect to get paid for blogging? And so on and so forth!
Any one associated with me is bound to have serious nightmares -- if faced with such questions -- as to why he or she is associated with me in the first place!
Well, I think I've done okay so far. Those who have liked what I write about have indeed given me work for money! Some have invited me to far off places, even overseas. The best part has been the semicon and solar industries -- and the number of people who have got in touch with me over the years for various things!
However, can a blogger survive in India? Or, can someone make a career out of blogging? The answer to both questions -- NO! At least, not yet! However popular or fashionable blogging is today, people don't quite yet realize the value add! Not everyone will get lucky either. Nor will everyone always have compelling content to write!
There are basic questions that need to be answered, such as:
1. Why should anyone choose blogging as a career?
2. How can he or she make money by blogging?
3. What are the services he or she can offer via the blog?
4. What kinds of services are being made available by bloggers?
5. Should bloggers get advertising? What types? To what extent and duration?
6. What should be the advertising charges? Would it be different from print media or the Web portals?
7. How can PR firms work better with bloggers?
8. How can PR firms develop a win-win situation and help bloggers gain financially?
9. How can companies or enterprises work with bloggers?
10. Should bloggers charge a fee for queries received from elsewhere?
11. How good or popular are sponsored posts? Are PR firms doing anything to boost this and help bloggers?
12. There are so many blogs (including mine) on Blogger and WordPress. Is it still a blog or a web site — especially when PR firms look for online coverage?
Despite all of this, I continue to blog and thanks to God, get some work as well! I do believe and see a future for blogging! It is the specialty media we all love to talk about! It will bring in money -- it is just a matter of time.
Why are blogs influential -- as some say? For one, blogs are generally not affiliated to or linked to any large media house, and so, the comments are independent. Two, if you want facts about something, you better head to a relevant blog, rather than read some marketing material. Three, never believe that negative reporting or writing will be a sure shot way to get eyeballs. Just write stuff, as it is!
Do I influence people and companies, and the tech industry? Well, I've really no idea! A lot of people do stop by to read what I write, and I thank them for it. That's all I know!
You still think bloggers and fashionable and popular? Maybe, they are! But, do you care to address their problems?
P.S.: Let me post this on Facebook and LinkedIn, and see what other bloggers have to say as far as their problems are concerned!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Tech industry revival on our doorsteps? Hope it helps the jobs market too!
Well, well, well! The revival in the tech industry seems to be at our doorsteps! So far, there's been quite a lot of positive news coming in from all over!
Mobile phones are seeing some sort of a turnaround. The semiconductor industry is also seeing the first signs of a recovery after what's been a horrible 2009! I hope that the solar photovoltaics industry takes off well in 2010, as this has been a difficult year as well.
However, there's a major event coming up next week on solar in Hyderabad -- the Solarcon India 2009, organized by SEMI India and supported by the ISA. Once the solar National Mission Plan is available on Nov. 14, expect this segment to take off! I do hope it does!
There's another very interesting conference next week -- the SystemVerilog Users Group -- which does promise much. Following that, the ISA has a session at the BangaloreIT.biz event, titled, E3 -- focusing on embedded systems and software in India.
So, the next week promises to be quite a busy one!
Let's hope that the global technology industry continues its recovery. More so, one wishes that all of those jobs lost in the turmoil that 2009 has been, are restored -- if not all, then a majority. That'll be the best gift to welcome the new year!
Mobile phones are seeing some sort of a turnaround. The semiconductor industry is also seeing the first signs of a recovery after what's been a horrible 2009! I hope that the solar photovoltaics industry takes off well in 2010, as this has been a difficult year as well.
However, there's a major event coming up next week on solar in Hyderabad -- the Solarcon India 2009, organized by SEMI India and supported by the ISA. Once the solar National Mission Plan is available on Nov. 14, expect this segment to take off! I do hope it does!
There's another very interesting conference next week -- the SystemVerilog Users Group -- which does promise much. Following that, the ISA has a session at the BangaloreIT.biz event, titled, E3 -- focusing on embedded systems and software in India.
So, the next week promises to be quite a busy one!
Let's hope that the global technology industry continues its recovery. More so, one wishes that all of those jobs lost in the turmoil that 2009 has been, are restored -- if not all, then a majority. That'll be the best gift to welcome the new year!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
ADCOM-2009 conference on green computing
I really didn't know about this conference till I was told by a friend. Well, since we all, including me, deal with and in IT. and green computing is a hot topic, I would surely be interested to take part in this conference in some manner.
To be held at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Bangalore, the ADCOM-2009 will run from Dec. 14-18.
For those who are unaware, the Advanced COMputing and Communications Conference (ADCOM) is a major international conference which is also supported by the IEEE Computer Society and the NASSCOM. A large number of delegates from all over the world take part in this conference every year to share and disseminate their innovative and pioneering views about recent trends and development.
This is the 17th year of ADCOM and is organized annually by the Advanced Computing and Communication Society (ACCS). ACCS is a registered scientific society founded to provide a forum to individuals, institutions and industry to promote advanced Computing and Communication technologies.
Hope I can get a seat at this conference.
To be held at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Bangalore, the ADCOM-2009 will run from Dec. 14-18.
For those who are unaware, the Advanced COMputing and Communications Conference (ADCOM) is a major international conference which is also supported by the IEEE Computer Society and the NASSCOM. A large number of delegates from all over the world take part in this conference every year to share and disseminate their innovative and pioneering views about recent trends and development.
This is the 17th year of ADCOM and is organized annually by the Advanced Computing and Communication Society (ACCS). ACCS is a registered scientific society founded to provide a forum to individuals, institutions and industry to promote advanced Computing and Communication technologies.
Hope I can get a seat at this conference.
Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2010
Here's another release from Gartner.
Must admit, I am not in agreement with these findings! For instance, cloud computing was meant to be hot in 2009, but is again said to be strategic in 2010! In other words, give it another year to succeed!!
Same goes for IT for Green (or Green IT), reshaping the data center, have also been talked about a lot. What's new there? Nor do I think that technologies such as flash memory, virtualization (for availability), social computing (and media), and mobile applications are that earth shattering. Nevertheless, this is just my opinion, and I could well be proved wrong. I am definitely not an analyst, am merely a layman.
Enjoy the article!
ORLANDO, USA: Gartner Inc. analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2010. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 22.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.
“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:
Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers.
Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.
Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions.
Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.
Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical.
Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.
IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.
Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion.
If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.
Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information.
Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.
Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before.
Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements.
A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.
Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking.
At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.
Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server.
This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.
However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible.
The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single “dial” that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed.
Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.
Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding.
It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.
“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
“When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”
Must admit, I am not in agreement with these findings! For instance, cloud computing was meant to be hot in 2009, but is again said to be strategic in 2010! In other words, give it another year to succeed!!
Same goes for IT for Green (or Green IT), reshaping the data center, have also been talked about a lot. What's new there? Nor do I think that technologies such as flash memory, virtualization (for availability), social computing (and media), and mobile applications are that earth shattering. Nevertheless, this is just my opinion, and I could well be proved wrong. I am definitely not an analyst, am merely a layman.
Enjoy the article!
ORLANDO, USA: Gartner Inc. analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2010. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 22.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.
“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:
Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers.
Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.
Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions.
Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.
Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical.
Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.
IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.
Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion.
If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.
Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information.
Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.
Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before.
Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements.
A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.
Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking.
At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.
Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server.
This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.
However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible.
The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single “dial” that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed.
Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.
Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding.
It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.
“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
“When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
IT spending to rebound in 2010 with 3.3pc growth after worst year ever in 2009
This is a Gartner release!
ORLANDO, USA: The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Worldwide enterprise IT spending will struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9 percent. The IT industry will return to growth with 2010 IT spending forecast to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.
Gartner provided the latest outlook for the IT industry during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through October 22. While IT spending will increase next year, Gartner cautioned IT leaders to be overly optimistic.
“While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research. “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.”
The computing hardware market has struggled more than other segments with worldwide hardware spending forecast to total $317 billion in 2009, a 16.5 percent decline. In 2010, spending on hardware spending will be flat.
Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent in 2009 with revenue of nearly $1.9 trillion. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5 percent in 2010. Worldwide software spending is forecast to decline 2.1 percent in 2009, and the segment is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2010.
On a regional basis, emerging regions will resume strong growth. “By 2012, the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT in these economies will directly influence product features, service structures, and the overall IT industry. Silicon Valley will not be in the driver’'s seat anymore,” Sondergaard said.
From a budget perspective, there are three important items that IT leaders must consider in 2010:
A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget — Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scaleable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization. For public companies, they must show how IT improves earnings per share (EPS).
Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware — With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million.
“If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,” Sondergaard said. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”
IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases — 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.
Sondergaard said three additional topics that were important in 2009 will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010. These three topics include:
Business Intelligence — Users will continue to expand their investments in this area with the focus moving from “in here” to “out there”
Virtualization — IT leaders should not just invest in the server and data center environment, but in the entire infrastructure. In 2010, users will create the cornerstone for the cloud infrastructure. They will enable the infrastructure to move from owned to shared.
Social Media — Organizations are starting to scale their efforts in this space. The technologies are improving and organizations realize this is not only about digital natives. It’s about all client segments including the most significant: the population in the next 10 years, the above 60 year old generations.
While those topics are key to IT agendas today, Sondergaard highlighted three themes that will become important going forward. They include:
Context-Aware Computing — This is the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.
Operational Technology (OT) — OT is devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The rapid growth of OT is increasing the need for a unified view of information covering business process and control systems. OT will become a mainstream focus for all organizations.
Pattern-Based Strategy — This is a new model about implementing a framework to proactively seek, model, and adapt to leading indicators, often termed “weak” signals, that form patterns in the marketplace, and to exploit them for competitive advantage.
A Pattern-Based Strategy will allow an organization to not only better understand what’s happening now in terms of demand, but also to detect leading indicators of change, and to indentify and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance.
ORLANDO, USA: The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Worldwide enterprise IT spending will struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9 percent. The IT industry will return to growth with 2010 IT spending forecast to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.
Gartner provided the latest outlook for the IT industry during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through October 22. While IT spending will increase next year, Gartner cautioned IT leaders to be overly optimistic.
“While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research. “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.”
The computing hardware market has struggled more than other segments with worldwide hardware spending forecast to total $317 billion in 2009, a 16.5 percent decline. In 2010, spending on hardware spending will be flat.
Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent in 2009 with revenue of nearly $1.9 trillion. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5 percent in 2010. Worldwide software spending is forecast to decline 2.1 percent in 2009, and the segment is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2010.
On a regional basis, emerging regions will resume strong growth. “By 2012, the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT in these economies will directly influence product features, service structures, and the overall IT industry. Silicon Valley will not be in the driver’'s seat anymore,” Sondergaard said.
From a budget perspective, there are three important items that IT leaders must consider in 2010:
A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget — Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scaleable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization. For public companies, they must show how IT improves earnings per share (EPS).
Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware — With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million.
“If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,” Sondergaard said. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”
IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases — 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.
Sondergaard said three additional topics that were important in 2009 will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010. These three topics include:
Business Intelligence — Users will continue to expand their investments in this area with the focus moving from “in here” to “out there”
Virtualization — IT leaders should not just invest in the server and data center environment, but in the entire infrastructure. In 2010, users will create the cornerstone for the cloud infrastructure. They will enable the infrastructure to move from owned to shared.
Social Media — Organizations are starting to scale their efforts in this space. The technologies are improving and organizations realize this is not only about digital natives. It’s about all client segments including the most significant: the population in the next 10 years, the above 60 year old generations.
While those topics are key to IT agendas today, Sondergaard highlighted three themes that will become important going forward. They include:
Context-Aware Computing — This is the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.
Operational Technology (OT) — OT is devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The rapid growth of OT is increasing the need for a unified view of information covering business process and control systems. OT will become a mainstream focus for all organizations.
Pattern-Based Strategy — This is a new model about implementing a framework to proactively seek, model, and adapt to leading indicators, often termed “weak” signals, that form patterns in the marketplace, and to exploit them for competitive advantage.
A Pattern-Based Strategy will allow an organization to not only better understand what’s happening now in terms of demand, but also to detect leading indicators of change, and to indentify and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
When will the IT industry get over its "2.0" fetish?
The other day, some friends were discussing Web 2.0 and social media with me! Well, it left me with this thought -- what is exactly this 2.0 anyway? A new version? Or, a new generation, perhaps? Or maybe, a better way of doing things?
Wonder when we'd get to hear of things such as virtualization 2.0, storage 2.0, security 2.0, open source 2.0, green IT 2.0, DRM 2.0, and so on and so forth! Oh, by the way, there was an SMS 2.0 doing the rounds in the telecom industry! There's something called community and marketing 2.0 as well!
Well, as though Web 2.0 wasn't enough, we are getting to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0! There we go again!! The moment enterprises start making use of social media platforms -- it is probably up for an 'Enterprise 2.0' title! Or well, those who are in the process of updating or adding new equipment to their network infrastructure can easily go with 'Infrastructure 2.0.'
Never mind! I've not really understood this '2.0' thing anyway, and am truly amazed at the fetish of the technology/IT industry with its fascination for this term!
Great! The word '2.0' really makes for great reading and brilliant copy! However, I am really grateful that there's never been any talk of telecom 2.0 and semiconductors 2.0, at least, not so far!
Ever wondered how GSM would appear, if GSM 900MHz was referred to as GSM 1.0 and GSM 1800MHz as GSM 2.0? Or, for that matter, Intel's brilliant chips as Intel 1.0 or Intel 2.0?
The IT industry has taken pride in coining new buzzwords. Perhaps, it has overdone that a bit! Let's not get carried away by this 2.0 and 3.0 waves. Every new version of any technology or application is next generation anyway.
Instead of selling the version -- in its various avataars such as 2.0, or next-gen -- the IT industry could try selling ONLY the benefits -- of that particular technology -- for the masses at large. Anything 2.0 does have a habit of fast disappearing from sight as well!
A friend once told me jokingly about 'Friend 2.0' -- 'Social media is meant for all of those anti social folks, who don't know what it means to chat and hang out with friends, or don't even bother to either call or email their friends, who, they either haven't met for long, or can't meet anyway, because of the location or other reasons, but are quite happy to stay connected on a social network for ages, without bothering to connect with them realistically!"
Hmmm, perhaps, he's right! I fall in that anti-social category -- who's all enamored with 'everything Web 2.0', so much that even I forget to either call or email friends I haven't met for ages. Maybe, this needs a correction on my part!
Otherwise, I surely belong to the Friend 2.0 category! Do you?
Wonder when we'd get to hear of things such as virtualization 2.0, storage 2.0, security 2.0, open source 2.0, green IT 2.0, DRM 2.0, and so on and so forth! Oh, by the way, there was an SMS 2.0 doing the rounds in the telecom industry! There's something called community and marketing 2.0 as well!
Well, as though Web 2.0 wasn't enough, we are getting to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0! There we go again!! The moment enterprises start making use of social media platforms -- it is probably up for an 'Enterprise 2.0' title! Or well, those who are in the process of updating or adding new equipment to their network infrastructure can easily go with 'Infrastructure 2.0.'
Never mind! I've not really understood this '2.0' thing anyway, and am truly amazed at the fetish of the technology/IT industry with its fascination for this term!
Great! The word '2.0' really makes for great reading and brilliant copy! However, I am really grateful that there's never been any talk of telecom 2.0 and semiconductors 2.0, at least, not so far!
Ever wondered how GSM would appear, if GSM 900MHz was referred to as GSM 1.0 and GSM 1800MHz as GSM 2.0? Or, for that matter, Intel's brilliant chips as Intel 1.0 or Intel 2.0?
The IT industry has taken pride in coining new buzzwords. Perhaps, it has overdone that a bit! Let's not get carried away by this 2.0 and 3.0 waves. Every new version of any technology or application is next generation anyway.
Instead of selling the version -- in its various avataars such as 2.0, or next-gen -- the IT industry could try selling ONLY the benefits -- of that particular technology -- for the masses at large. Anything 2.0 does have a habit of fast disappearing from sight as well!
A friend once told me jokingly about 'Friend 2.0' -- 'Social media is meant for all of those anti social folks, who don't know what it means to chat and hang out with friends, or don't even bother to either call or email their friends, who, they either haven't met for long, or can't meet anyway, because of the location or other reasons, but are quite happy to stay connected on a social network for ages, without bothering to connect with them realistically!"
Hmmm, perhaps, he's right! I fall in that anti-social category -- who's all enamored with 'everything Web 2.0', so much that even I forget to either call or email friends I haven't met for ages. Maybe, this needs a correction on my part!
Otherwise, I surely belong to the Friend 2.0 category! Do you?
Thursday, October 8, 2009
India ranks 44th in Global Index of IT Competitiveness; moves up four places
Findings of a new study undertaken and issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
INDIA: India ranks 44th in the world in the 2008 IT industry competitiveness index, moving 4 notches up from its 2008 ranking of 48 in the index. India has an overall score of 34.1 on the IT competitiveness index*. These are among the findings of a new study undertaken and issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
The study, now in its third year, assesses and compares the information technology (IT) industry environments of 66 economies, to determine the extent to which they enable IT sector competitiveness.
“We are pleased to see that in this year’s index, India has shown strong improvement in its overall IT competitiveness ranking which is a very positive indicator of progress for one of the country’s most dynamic industries.” said Keshav S Dhakad, Chair of the BSA India Committee.
“India has maintained its ability to develop strong talent and maintain a conducive business environment, which is reflective in the six drivers of competitiveness. This year’s ranking is indicative of the progressive initiatives taken by the government & the industry on human capital and support for IT development.”
“Although India continues to perform well in enabling an open, transparent business environment and providing support for IT industry, development of a sound IT infrastructure and enhancing the R&D environment in the country still remain areas, which need strong improvement.
“We are hopeful that with greater government and industry focus in these critical areas, India will not only continue to be an IT power but will become a global leader of IT innovation, products and services. India’s true potential in near future will rest on its ability to indigenously innovate on cutting edge technology, increase domestic investment in R&D activities, promote the value of intellectual property and drive down menace of counterfeiting and piracy”, he added.
“In today’s economic climate, it is critical that governments in the Asia Pacific continue to support the growth of a strong technology sector. The IT sector remains an important engine of economic growth, and economies in the region that are supporting innovation and taking steps to stimulate technology sector output are placing themselves in a strong position to accelerate economic recovery,” said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA Vice President and Regional Director, Asia Pacific.
“However, challenges for Asia Pacific governments remain. Economies like China and India must address issues such as balancing large pools of skilled IT personnel with progress in IT infrastructure. With broadband access becoming a prerequisite for many parts of the IT sector, economies with pervasive broadband penetration have a big competitive advantage over those where the infrastructure is lacking,” he said.
“Additionally, the study shows that economies that have strong legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property (IP) are generally the IT leaders and score higher in the index. In contrast, economies where IP protection has not been well enforced are not traditionally seen as innovators. Some rely instead on their low-cost labour markets to remain competitive but this is hard to sustain over time. By improving on the factors that contribute to IT competitiveness, Asian economies will not only improve their ranking but also generate long term economic growth,” said Hardee.
Category wise, India has shown improvement in its R&D environment, moving from a score of 0.6, last year to 22.0 this year. It has also shown strong performance in the business environment and encouraging improvements in the legal environment. India still continues to have the advantage of human capital. However fluctuating performance in IT infrastructure needs improvement.
In fast growing markets like India, large pools of skilled IT employees remain a significant advantage but uneven progress in other areas, such as IT infrastructure remains a drag on sector competitiveness. As the Internet becomes all pervasive, slow uptake in broadband and PC penetration has had a significant impact on the IT infrastructure in India.
Robust IP protection remains essential to IT sector competitiveness. As innovation gradually becomes more important than low-cost labour to IT firms in India, improvements in IP enforcement and the overall legal environment would make the country more competitive in the IT landscape.
Within Asia Pacific, India ranks amongst the top ten countries, with the top three positions held by Australia, Singapore and Japan. Coordinated efforts among governments, universities and IT firms in the region are needed to improve the quality of technology training. As in India, robust IP protection and broadband penetration are some of the key concerns in the Asia Pacific region.
"While the outlines of good IT policy are the same in good times and bad, the deep global recession has made it all the more urgent to prioritize support for the technology sector," states Manoj Vohra, Director of Research with the Economist Intelligence Unit. "Governments and industry leaders must pay closer attention than ever to ensure they have the right policies in place to maximise the benefits of a globally competitive IT industry."
Six key competitiveness enablers
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, six factors work together to create a sound environment for the IT sector:
* An ample supply of skilled workers,
* An innovation-friendly culture,
* A world-class technology infrastructure,
* A robust legal regime that protects intellectual property,
* A stable, open, and competitive economy, and
* Government leadership that strikes the right balance between promoting technology and allowing market forces to work.
Those economies that perform well in these six “competitiveness enablers” generally are home to high-performance IT industries. The study is intended to provide a roadmap for governments in addressing their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to supporting a strong domestic IT sector.
Other findings from the Economist Intelligence Unit research and BSA recommendations include:
* Broadband networks are a vital factor for IT competitiveness, and the competitiveness gap could widen for economies with slower adoption. Technology firms demand fast, reliable, and secure Internet access, and the importance of broadband will grow as more IT services and applications are delivered over the Internet.
* Investment in skills development remains a long-term imperative. Those economies that deliver a combination of IT, business and language skills training will generate a stronger IT workforce.
* Protectionism and support for ‘“national champions” will hinder recovery efforts — and longer term sector competitiveness. Governments must strike a balance between support that encourages industry growth and investment, and that which introduces unfair market practices and protectionism that can harm competitiveness.
* IP regimes are improving in many emerging markets, but further progress is needed. Intellectual property protection remains critically important to IT competitiveness and is a relatively low-cost way of stimulating long-term economic development.
INDIA: India ranks 44th in the world in the 2008 IT industry competitiveness index, moving 4 notches up from its 2008 ranking of 48 in the index. India has an overall score of 34.1 on the IT competitiveness index*. These are among the findings of a new study undertaken and issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
The study, now in its third year, assesses and compares the information technology (IT) industry environments of 66 economies, to determine the extent to which they enable IT sector competitiveness.
“We are pleased to see that in this year’s index, India has shown strong improvement in its overall IT competitiveness ranking which is a very positive indicator of progress for one of the country’s most dynamic industries.” said Keshav S Dhakad, Chair of the BSA India Committee.
“India has maintained its ability to develop strong talent and maintain a conducive business environment, which is reflective in the six drivers of competitiveness. This year’s ranking is indicative of the progressive initiatives taken by the government & the industry on human capital and support for IT development.”
“Although India continues to perform well in enabling an open, transparent business environment and providing support for IT industry, development of a sound IT infrastructure and enhancing the R&D environment in the country still remain areas, which need strong improvement.
“We are hopeful that with greater government and industry focus in these critical areas, India will not only continue to be an IT power but will become a global leader of IT innovation, products and services. India’s true potential in near future will rest on its ability to indigenously innovate on cutting edge technology, increase domestic investment in R&D activities, promote the value of intellectual property and drive down menace of counterfeiting and piracy”, he added.
“In today’s economic climate, it is critical that governments in the Asia Pacific continue to support the growth of a strong technology sector. The IT sector remains an important engine of economic growth, and economies in the region that are supporting innovation and taking steps to stimulate technology sector output are placing themselves in a strong position to accelerate economic recovery,” said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA Vice President and Regional Director, Asia Pacific.
“However, challenges for Asia Pacific governments remain. Economies like China and India must address issues such as balancing large pools of skilled IT personnel with progress in IT infrastructure. With broadband access becoming a prerequisite for many parts of the IT sector, economies with pervasive broadband penetration have a big competitive advantage over those where the infrastructure is lacking,” he said.
“Additionally, the study shows that economies that have strong legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property (IP) are generally the IT leaders and score higher in the index. In contrast, economies where IP protection has not been well enforced are not traditionally seen as innovators. Some rely instead on their low-cost labour markets to remain competitive but this is hard to sustain over time. By improving on the factors that contribute to IT competitiveness, Asian economies will not only improve their ranking but also generate long term economic growth,” said Hardee.
Category wise, India has shown improvement in its R&D environment, moving from a score of 0.6, last year to 22.0 this year. It has also shown strong performance in the business environment and encouraging improvements in the legal environment. India still continues to have the advantage of human capital. However fluctuating performance in IT infrastructure needs improvement.
In fast growing markets like India, large pools of skilled IT employees remain a significant advantage but uneven progress in other areas, such as IT infrastructure remains a drag on sector competitiveness. As the Internet becomes all pervasive, slow uptake in broadband and PC penetration has had a significant impact on the IT infrastructure in India.
Robust IP protection remains essential to IT sector competitiveness. As innovation gradually becomes more important than low-cost labour to IT firms in India, improvements in IP enforcement and the overall legal environment would make the country more competitive in the IT landscape.
Within Asia Pacific, India ranks amongst the top ten countries, with the top three positions held by Australia, Singapore and Japan. Coordinated efforts among governments, universities and IT firms in the region are needed to improve the quality of technology training. As in India, robust IP protection and broadband penetration are some of the key concerns in the Asia Pacific region.
"While the outlines of good IT policy are the same in good times and bad, the deep global recession has made it all the more urgent to prioritize support for the technology sector," states Manoj Vohra, Director of Research with the Economist Intelligence Unit. "Governments and industry leaders must pay closer attention than ever to ensure they have the right policies in place to maximise the benefits of a globally competitive IT industry."
Six key competitiveness enablers
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, six factors work together to create a sound environment for the IT sector:
* An ample supply of skilled workers,
* An innovation-friendly culture,
* A world-class technology infrastructure,
* A robust legal regime that protects intellectual property,
* A stable, open, and competitive economy, and
* Government leadership that strikes the right balance between promoting technology and allowing market forces to work.
Those economies that perform well in these six “competitiveness enablers” generally are home to high-performance IT industries. The study is intended to provide a roadmap for governments in addressing their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to supporting a strong domestic IT sector.
Other findings from the Economist Intelligence Unit research and BSA recommendations include:
* Broadband networks are a vital factor for IT competitiveness, and the competitiveness gap could widen for economies with slower adoption. Technology firms demand fast, reliable, and secure Internet access, and the importance of broadband will grow as more IT services and applications are delivered over the Internet.
* Investment in skills development remains a long-term imperative. Those economies that deliver a combination of IT, business and language skills training will generate a stronger IT workforce.
* Protectionism and support for ‘“national champions” will hinder recovery efforts — and longer term sector competitiveness. Governments must strike a balance between support that encourages industry growth and investment, and that which introduces unfair market practices and protectionism that can harm competitiveness.
* IP regimes are improving in many emerging markets, but further progress is needed. Intellectual property protection remains critically important to IT competitiveness and is a relatively low-cost way of stimulating long-term economic development.
My blog’s been nominated again — by Computer Weekly, UK!
Wow! It has happened again! What a relief!! I am overwhelmed!!!For those who are unaware, during the middle of August, my original blog — http://pradeepchakraborty.blogspot.com — was suddenly found to be containing malware, and then, without any information, Google removed my blog. That was really devastating!
Not knowing what to do, I quickly rolled out a fresh blog – http://pradeep-chakraborty.blogspot.com — only to find out two days later that it also had malware, and subsequently, Google blocked it too!
Despite mails and requests, nothing happened, and none of the two blogs were returned!
If this alone wasn’t enough, five of my other blogs — on telecom, semiconductors, components, solar and electronics — were marked as spam blogs! All of this, within a space of one week, as though someone, somewhere was out to get me! Rather, remove me from cyberspace, so it seemed!
It was only then, that I moved everything to WordPress — and hence, http://pradeepchakraborty.wordpress.com really came into being. It had been around since 2007, but I only re-activated it when I was literally forced to move my blogspot posts to wordpress.
Not only did I lose traffic, there were lots of emails and messages from folks who were followers of my earlier blog!
Today afternoon, after returning from meetings, I get a mail from Computer Weekly, UK, with this message:
Congratulations, you’ve been nominated for an Award! You are now entered for a Computer Weekly Blog Award, under the category of IT Consultant and Analyst.
I was also pointed to a link: http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/computerweekly/CWAWA/nomin_notification20091006.html
And,
Download your badge here:
http://email.computerweekly.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBz6e0bTQjI0BCI10F7FO0EP
This is just the first stage on your way to winning. The awards will be judged by readers of Computer Weekly and users of ComputerWeekly.com, so start building up support right now – brag about your nomination on your site by downloading a Blog Awards badge onto your homepage.
I tried adding the badge to WordPress, but for some reason it does not appear. So, I’ve added a jpeg image above.
Computerweekly.com also left this message for me: Check out Computer Weekly and ComputerWeekly.com on 27th October to see if you’ve been shortlisted. Voting for shortlisted entries will open on 27th October.
Save the date!
All shortlisted bloggers and tweeters will be invited to our Awards evening on 25th November 2009 at London’s exclusive Shoreditch House. More details to follow in your shortlisted announcement.
Irrespective of my blog getting shortlisted and whether I win this time or not, it is a relief to know that folks still like my blog.
Friends, August 2009 was a testing month with my blogs either getting knocked out or blocked. Three great friends, particularly, Usha Prasad, Sagar Desai and Jo Kuo, along with my family, stood right by me at all times during those testing times!
Scott Weitzman left a lovely message, Poornima Shenoy gave me good advice, Sandesh Advani kept his faith me, as did Intel. Rahuldev Rajguru decided to wait and maintained his faith, as did Meghna Bhutoria, and lately, LK Pathak. The semiconductor and the solar/PV industry stood by me, steadfastly, all this while!
There were good wishes from several others — the list is so long that they can’t be all accommodated here.
My other blog — http://pradeep-chakraborty.blogspot.com — was also eventually returned by Google, without the malware warning, this month.
All I can say is: thanks a lot, my dear friends and dear readers. Whether I get shortlisted or win — these things hardly matter! What matters to me is: I shall always have folks such as you to lean on during tough times. Thanks a lot, everyone.
Finally, thanks a lot for selecting my blog, Computer Weekly.
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