10 Technologies That Changed Business Forever

The applications, devices and services that have changed the way we do business often started as small-scale alternatives to the status quo. Now we can't survive without them.
Remember when you first saw the iPhone? Glimmering like a rare jewel at the Apple store, the debut model was originally dismissed as a bit player in the enterprise, especially compared to the (ahem) BlackBerry. Now, just about every high-ranking corporate official, not to mention pre-teen, has one in his or her pocket. What other technology, gadgets and enterprise services have changed business in such a dramatic way? For most IT leaders, there's a good chance a CRM tool or even a seemingly minor Web technology such as OAuth made more waves over the long term. These innovations caused a sea change of their own. In fact, we're trying to figure out how anyone ran a company without them.

1. The LAMP Stack Here's an innovation you won't hear about in an ad during the Summer Olympics. The LAMP StackLinux, Apache, MySQL, and PHPis a bundle of free open source tools for Web development and deployment. Jordan Hudgens, a software engineer for MCW Services, says LAMP was groundbreaking because of its low deployment costs. That makes sensebefore LAMP, companies would have to hire a disparate group of engineers, many of them using the .NET Framework, and license technology from Oracle and Microsoft. 2. SalesForce.com Salesforce.com had some serious competition when it debuted in 1999namely from existing CRM systems running in on-premises data centers. Times have changed. In Q4 of 2011 alone, the site processed 45 billion customer transactions. There are now 100,000 customers worldwide. What's the secret? One answer is offering a scalable product that provides such a global view into customer data. One recent example: NBC Universal uses the system to manage its custom marketing efforts. 3. Adobe PDF We tend to take ground-breaking tech like Adobe PDF for granted. After all, the portable document formats are amazingly prevalent on the Web, and you can create files easily using tools such as CutePDF. There are now about 150 million PDF docs on the Web today, according to Adobe. They work on just about every computing platform and mobile device, and recent advances in e-signaturesnamely, typing a password to protect documentshave made the standard viable in the banking and finance sectors. 4. Bluetooth The fact that you can connect your smartphone to your car radio is proof enough that Bluetooth has made a big impact across many industries and is still growing. Recent improvements, such as a low-power version that works with heart monitors and better audio quality in Bluetooth 4.0, mean this short-range wireless signal will be around for a while. And there's a new trend: Bluetooth might even move into the financial sector. Intuit, for ex., now makes a credit card reader that connects to your smartphone over Blouetooth. 5. Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is one of the most important enterprise innovations of the past 20 years. Mobile users can now work remotely from anywhere, use Internet telephones, tap into wireless printers and, thanks to the emerging 802.11ac standard, exchange files over a network at Gigabit speeds. John Riordan, CTO of OnSIP says Wi-Fi is largely a success because standards developed quickly, keeping pace with enterprise demands, and how the FCC opened the airwaves so high-speed communication could work. 6. E-Printing You might not know this, but e-printing is finally hitting the mainstream. Corporate workers have known about enterprise-grade e-printing for some time. Now, desktop models such as the HP Officejet 6700 let you print by sending the jobs to an email address. Even Google is involved; users can send print jobs to the Google Cloud Print, where jobs are then transmitted to your printer. The main advantage is flexibility. You can print from home or from a mobile device and expect the copies to be ready and waiting when you get to the office as long as someone remembered to load paper. 7. VPN The virtual private network is now a fixture of every data center, but that was not always the case. In the early days of computing, enterprise workers would tap in using unsecure lines from home. Then the corporate world

started using firewalls to protect against criminal hacking. Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says VPN connections have had a major impact on businesslower travel costs, more freedom to work at home, and even a way to have smaller corporate offices. 8. Multi-Core Processors There was a time when the CPU in a server or desktop computer could only handle one computing chore at a time. Intel introduced multi-core processors to the masses. The impact goes well-beyond being able to run an HD video in the background while you check your e-mail. Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, says multi-core paved the way for legitimate multi-tasking. Important apps such as virus scanners suddenly became more viable, he says, because the processes did not inhibit the CPU. 9. Amazon Web Services It might not seem obvious, but some of the most famous companies today rely on Amazon Web Services, a cloud platform for storage and data processing. For example, without AWS there would be no Dropbox. Analyst Rob Enderle says the major benefit is that even very small companies can sign up for these enterprise services and use high-end management features that allow them to scale as they grow. 10. Google Docs Google is one of the most innovative companies of the last ten years, but one of its crowning achievements for business is not even related to search. Google Docs is now one of the best ways to collaborate, share documents with co-workers and store business information in the cloud. Analyst Rob Enderle says Google Docs helped usher in the age of remote computing, since users could easily post work online and head out for the day. The sea change, it should be pointed out, depended on another major innovationmobile computing.

10 Technologies Shaping the Future of IT

Everyone is a trend watcher. But taking a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases is the only way to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing. Here at InfoWorld, we're every bit as excited about big changes in the direction of enterprise IT, from the consumerization of IT to infrastructure convergence. But what vapor-free technologies have actually emerged to enable these IT strategies to take shape, and more importantly, which will cement these changes in your IT department in the years to come? Among the technologies shipping but not yet widely adopted, we see the following 10 having the greatest impact over the long haul. Get to know them. 10. HTML5 Naysayers point out that we've been putting tags together to form Web pages since the beginning of the World Wide Web. HTML5 has simply added new ones. But while HTML5 looks similar to old-fashioned HTML, the tasks it accomplishes are dramatically different. Local data storage, <canvas>, and <video> make it possible to do much more than pour words and images into a rectangle. Plus, the new HTML5 WebSockets spec defines a new way to conduct full-duplex communication for event-driven Web apps. And with Adobe's decision to end development of mobile Flash, suddenly an entire sector of the Web development industry is going to retool as we move to HTML5 from Flash. And that represents a tectonic shift for Web developers. 9. Client-side hypervisors Desktop virtualization has faltered for two reasons: It requires continuous connection between client and server, and a beefy server to run all those desktop VMs. Client hypervisors solve both problems. Install one on an ordinary machine and leverage the processing power of the client. Laptop users can take a "business VM" with them containing the OS, apps, and personal configuration settings. That VM is secure and separate from whatever else may be running on that machine -- including malware accidentally downloaded -- and you get all the virtualization management advantages, including VM snapshots, portability, and easy recovery. Client hypervisors point to a future where we bring our own computers to work and download or sync our business VMs to start the day. 8. Continuous build tools

The more collaboratively minded developers among us like the way continuous build tools like Jenkins, Hudson, and other "continuous integration" servers help us work together for the betterment of the whole. These tools put all code through a continuous stream of tests, alerting developers about problems with code they checked in some 10 seconds ago, keeping everybody moving toward the same goal. Tools like Hudson or Jenkins aren't new because there have been a number of slick proprietary continuous integration tools for some time, but the emergence of open source solutions encourages the kind of experimentation and innovation that comes when programmers are given the chance to make their tools better. 7. Trust on a chip Assuring security at the highest application level requires verification at every layer, including the physical construction of the computing device. Enter trust on a chip. The TPM (Trusted Platform Module) from the TCG (Trusted Computing Group) was the first popularly adopted hardware chip to assure trusted hardware and boot sequences. Last year, Intel combined the TPM chip and a hardware hypervisor layer to protect boot sequences, memory, and other components. Any software vendor can take advantage of it. Hardware trust solutions aren't perfectly secure, as the Princeton memory freeze and electron microscope attacks showed, but they beat software-only protection solutions. The hardware protection schemes will only get better. Soon enough, every computer device you can use will have a hardware/software protection solution running. 6. JavaScript replacements JavaScript may be the most commonly executed code on the planet, but for all its success, everyone is moving on to the next thing. Some want to build entirely new languages that fix all of the troubles with JavaScript; others just want to translate their code into JavaScript so they can pretend they don't use it. Translated code is all the rage. Google's Web Toolkit cross-compiles Java into JavaScript so the developer types only properly typed Java code. Some translations are cosmetic: Programmers who write in CoffeeScript don't need to worry about much of JavaScripts punctuation because the cross-compiler inserts it before it runs. Other translations, such as Google's Dart, are more ambitious, pointing to a future of ever more options. 5. Distributed storage tiering Vastly faster than disk and many times cheaper than DRAM, NAND flash memory is a hot commodity that will be even hotter when storage management software catches up with its potential in the data center. Its combination of high speed and low cost makes it excellent for server-side cache and a natural choice for tierone SAN storage. With the cost of flash dropping and the capacities of SSDs on the rise, the days of disk drives in servers and SANs appear to be numbered. The best part: Flash storage will enable server-side storage to be managed as an extension of the SAN, storing the most frequently accessed or I/O-intensive data closer to the app. It's like caching, but smarter and more cost-effective. 4. Apache Hadoop Hadoop breaks new ground by enabling businesses to deploy clusters of commodity servers to crunch through many terabytes of unstructured data -- simply to discover interesting patterns to explore, rather than to start with formal business intelligence objectives. Tools like Apache Hive and Apache Pig have made exploiting Hadoop easier for developers, and the evolution of the Hadoop ecosystem points to further ease and deeper insights in the years to come. As Hadoop solutions proliferate, businesses will better be able to predict the behavior of Web customers, optimize workflows, and discover patterns in everything from medical histories to common search terms. The best thing about the new wave of Hadoop analytics is that we're only beginning to discover where it may lead. 3. Advanced synchronization Apple and Microsoft agree on one thing: It's time to say goodbye to single-user environments, where each user device is a separate island from the rest of the user's computing world. Apple paved the way with iOS and iCloud, introducing a cloud-based syncing service across devices. Microsoft's Windows 8 takes the concept further, keeping not just data but application state in sync. This shift will drastically change how people work on computers, giving applications dramatic new utility. Automatic data syncing coupled with context, such as location, available input methods, connectivity, and sensor-driven data, will give rise to truly user-centric computing, profoundly altering how IT approaches applications, security models, and other tech policies and strategies centered on user productivity. 2. Software-defined networks

Data center networks have grown calcified over time. While servers and storage have benefited from software abstractions, networks have remained hardware-bound and static, making them a major roadblock to cloud computing. Enter SDN (software-defined networking), which drapes a software layer over switch and router hardware to serve as both a centrally managed control plane and a platform for innovation. SDN isn't network virtualization, rather it is a way to "program the network" -- that is, it allows cloud providers and ISVs to build new networking capabilities the rest of us can draw on. The leading example of SDN today is OpenFlow, the brainchild of university researchers who wanted to experiment with new network protocols on large production networks. 1. Private cloud orchestration With a private cloud, IT managers can borrow technologies pioneered by public cloud providers and apply them to their own data center. These clouds have many moving parts -- virtualization management, chargeback systems, self-service provisioning -- hence the need for orchestration. Open source project OpenStack has gained considerable momentum offering a core set of cloud orchestration services. Eucalyptus is another alternative, offering essentially a private cloud implementation of Amazon Web Services. It may be easy to be cynical about any technology attached to the term "cloud," but no one questions the benefits of pooling resources for greater economies of scale. Paradigm changes demand new ways of working -- and the emerging collection of cloud orchestration software supplies the means.

IT Offshoring: Romney vs. Obama

Offshore outsourcing, from the manufacturing to call center industries, has become a major issue in the 2012 presidential race.
By Patrick Thibodeau Thu, July 05, 2012 Computerworld Offshore outsourcing, from the manufacturing to call center industries, has become a major issue in the 2012 presidential race. Less clear is what these two candidates would do, if anything, about the offshoring of jobs that are among the most critical to the future of the U.S. economy -- IT positions and other highly-skilled, knowledge-based occupations. IT offshore outsourcing has rarely been raised specifically to date by either President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. But both presidential candidates, through their records and actions, appear to have deep knowledge about offshore outsourcing. Here's how they stand based on their words and actions. What did Mitt Romney know about offshore outsourcing and Boo.com during his tenure at Bain Capital? Before Romney left Bain Capital in 1999, the financial services firm was wired into technology trends, though it didn't always see them correctly. For instance, Bain invested in Boo.com (1998-2000), a U.K-based online fashion store that attracted more than $100 million in venture money. Boo.com perished just six months after launching its Web site, one of the biggest implosions of the dot-com era. Bain got DoubleClick right, investing in the ad serving company in 1997, shortly after its founding. Google paid $3.1 billion in 2007 for DoubleClick. But the election isn't about Bain's venture capital bets. It's about, at least on the margins, whether Romney sees IT offshore outsourcing, or the transfer of high-paying jobs to low-wage countries, as an issue requiring government intervention. The Washington Post recently reported that Bain has invested in companies that moved jobs to distant shores. The Romney campaign is attempting to refute this, in part, by arguing some of this happened after Romney left the firm, but that response misses the point.

While at Bain Capital, Romney had a front row seat to many emerging technology trends, including offshoring. In the early 1990s, Bain invested in Gartner, one of the world's top IT consulting firms, as part of a buyout. A managing director at Bain, Stephen Pagliuca (who later became a co-owner of the Boston Celtics professional basketball team), was on Gartner's board during Romney's tenure at Bain. At that time, Gartner was certainly closely tracking the beginnings of the offshoring outsourcing industry. A Bain connected fund, the Information Partners Capital Fund, lists Romney as a group member according to records filed in Delaware, where the fund was incorporated. What Information Partners was involved in isn't clear, but there are clues. Information Partners turns up in a reference to Cognizant, one of the largest offshore outsourcing companies in the world. Venetia Kontogouris, who was on Cognizant's board during Romney's tenure at Bain, says in her bio that she was "senior vice president, venture development, at Cognizant Corporation, where she represented Cognizant in the Information Partners Capital Fund formed by Dun & Bradstreet and Bain Capital." Kontogouris is a managing partner at Cloud Capital Partners. New Jersey-based Cognizant, which has more than 140,000 employees, is one of largest offshore outsourcing companies in the world. It began as a Dun & Bradstreet in-house development services business in 1994 and was split off two years later. D&B owned 51% of the total outstanding shares of Gartner and as part of its spin-off strategy transferred ownership of Gartner to Cognizant, which soon transferred its ownership to another entity. It was Romney's his job to understand technology trends, including offshore outsourcing and to put Bain on a path to take advantage of them. There's nothing in his record to suggest he did otherwise. What will Romney do about IT offshoring? Romney has not yet raised IT offshoring as a campaign issue. According to Romney's platform documents, he sees trade agreements as a means to job growth since "95% of the world's consumer live beyond our borders." Romney is calling for a tougher U.S. response to China for "misappropriating Western technology," and for what he calls its indigenous innovation policies that are "forcing American companies to share proprietary technology as a condition of their doing business in China." What will Obama do about IT offshoring? President Obama wants to curb offshore outsourcing, but appears to be more focused on manufacturing than IT. Obama says the tax code encourages offshore outsourcing, but many of his tax proposals, such as deductions for moving expenses, concern manufacturing and not knowledge-based work that travels over a network. Democrats in Congress have also pitched laws offering relief from the employer share of Social Security payroll tax on new U.S. employees. Such laws would require that companies certify that a U.S. worker is replacing an employee who had been performing similar duties overseas. The impact of these proposals on IT offshoring, incl.g tax code changes, has received mixed reviews so far. The legislation could encourage some companies to create jobs in the U.S., and thus slow their use of overseas labor. But the formula for using offshore resources is complex and tax benefits are but one consideration. What does Obama know about the offshoring views of his advisors, and when did he know it? Romney's investment record at Bain will get scrutiny. But it's fair to point out that some Obama advisors have advocated or led firms that used offshore outsourcing. For instance, the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is headed by General Electric chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, whose company was one of the first, in 1990s, to establish a development center in India. In 2009, Obama appointed Diana Farrell, a former director of the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Co.'s economics research arm, to the National Economic Council as a deputy economic adviser to the president.

McKinsey has long argued that offshore outsourcing brings benefits to U.S. firms. What would either candidate do on the H-1B visa issue? The H-1B visa is important in offshore outsourcing because the companies need access to temporary work visas to conduct work in the U.S. As may as half to 90% of offshore outsourcing company workers have such visas. Romney's platform is clear: "Raise visa caps for highly skilled workers." Romney sees foreign workers as critical to U.S. innovation, and doesn't draw a distinction between H-1B or permanent residency green cards. Obama has generally avoided talking about the H-1B visa but has voiced support for making it easier for foreign students with advanced degrees to remain in the U.S. with a green card or permanent residency. When Obama took office, the H-1B visa had become a non-issue due to the recession. For the first time since the recession started, the available H-1B visas were exhausted at a relatively rapid pace in 2012, bringing the issue back to the political arena. However, Congress, not the president, controls the visa cap. Former President George W. Bush supported increasing the H-1B cap, but was stymied by Congress. Whoever is elected president in November will face the same obstacle. http://advice.cio.com/salary/16960/it-salaries-10-cities-where-it-professionals-earn-most

IT Salaries: 10 Cities Where IT Professionals Earn the Most

IT staffing firm CyberCoders recently released its ranking of the 10 cities where IT salaries are highest. CIO.com compares this latest salary data with IT salary surveys from other sources.
Posted April 03, 2012 to Salary | Add a comment . IT salary data is a hot commodity these days, and more firms that collect itwhether staffing companies, salary data providers or research firms--seem eager to share it. That's good news for IT professionals trying to benchmark their salaries and negotiate increases. The latest salary data I received comes from CyberCoders, a tech recruiting firm based in Irvine, Calif. CyberCoders recently released a list of the top 10 cities where IT professionals earn the highest salaries. To develop its list, CyberCoders analyzed salaries that companies in various U.S. cities expect to pay for IT positions they need to fill. CyberCoders also examined the salaries that candidates received in job offers. The staffing firm conducted this research for companies across industries, not just tech firms, and it looked at salaries for various IT jobs, such as application developers, systems administrators and network engineers, says Matt Miller, CyberCoders' CTO. The company analyzed a total of 3,000 salaries that companies actually paid in 2011 and 2012 or expected to pay in 2012. They added up all of this salary data for a given city and took an average, says Miller.

CyberCoders' Highest-Paying Cities for IT Jobs

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 City San Jose San Francisco New York Boston Los Angeles Brooklyn Average Salary $119,412 $112,739 $105,192 $99,099 $96,705 $96,696

Washington, D.C. $99,618

8 9 10

Philadelphia Chicago Dallas

$95,929 $94,899 $94,799

SOURCE: CyberCoders Because CyberCoders' averages combine salaries for different IT positions, Miller admits that the results may skew higher or lower depending on the number and types of jobs included in the averages. For example, the prevalence of mobile application developer jobs in a given city may yield higher averages because those jobs are in such great demand and because companies are paying premiums to recruit them. You're probably not going to be able to negotiate a higher salary based on CyberCoders' data because it isn't title- or position-specific, but if you're looking to relocate, you could use it to determine where to go. Earlier this year, IT job search site Dice released its own list of the best metro areas for finding IT jobs, based on the number of jobs available and average tech salaries in each locale.

Dice's Top Metro Areas for Finding IT Jobs

Metro Area Silicon Valley New York Boston Los Angeles Philadelphia Chicago Dallas Average Salary $104,195 $90,042 $88,657 $87,183 $81,041 $83,970 $84,589

Washington, D.C. $94,317

SOURCE: Dice The average salaries Dice tallied are notably lower than those CyberCoders reported. That may be a result of the fact that Dice collected salary data for 2011 only. Dice surveyed 18,325 working technology professionals last fall to obtain its salary data and create its ranking of the top metro areas for IT jobs. http://www.cio.com/article/692280/Forrester_Tech_Changes_to_Expect_in_Next_3_Years? source=ciointcpt_forrester_reg

Forrester: Tech Changes to Expect in Next 3 Years

Business Intelligence tools, mobile apps and cloud application platforms are areas that will evolve and create significantly more business value between today and 2014, according to a new Forrester report on enterprise technology trends.
By Shane O'Neill Fri, October 21, 2011 CIO "The only constant is change," said the great science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. And few industries change as rapidly as the technology space. On the enterprise side, where slimmed-down IT budgets, economic downturns and traditional thinking can stifle change, evolving technologies and the necessary strategies to address those changes still persist at a rapid clip.

In a recent Forrester report entitled "The Top 10 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2012 To 2014", the research firm gauged 208 IT executives with knowledge of their companies' technology strategies to see what areas they expect to change most during the next three years. The survey also asked about the areas in which these IT execs expect to see the most business value in the next three years. Business intelligence (BI), mobile apps and application platforms won out as the top three areas for change and increased business value. Slideshow: 15 Best iPhone Apps for Busy CEOs Other leading areas where change is on the horizon, according to Forrester: data governance, application integration and Infrastructure-as-a-service (i.e. cloud computing). Here are two key observations Forrester culled from its research on upcoming changes in enterprise IT.

Business Intelligence Is the Biggest Changer, but Is IT Taking it Too Lightly?

In a related 2010 Forrester survey, BI was ranked as the third technology that's expected to change the most. This is year BI is number one, with 44 percent of respondents expecting it to change the most and 50 percent expecting it to generate big business value as data mining and reporting tools become more sophisticated and move to a cloud model. BI is on the minds of IT execs and CIOs more and more as advanced metrics and analysis of raw data are used to improve manufacturing workflow, cut costs and discover new sales opportunities. In a tight economy, BI allows CIOs to justify business decisions using hard numbers rather than gut feelings, Forrester says. The top BI vendors continue to be Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft and the various BI companies that they all acquire. Yet there is a contradiction at play in the Forrester survey. Respondents did not indicate plans to change the back-end data warehouse infrastructure that most BI apps depend on. http://www.cio.com/article/692031/Gartner_the_Top_10_Strategic_Technology_Trends_for_2012? page=1&taxonomyId=3178

Gartner: the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2012

The technology that makes up many of the systems in the IT world today is at a critical juncture and in the next five years everything from mobile devices and applications to servers and social networking will impact IT in ways companies need to prepare for now, Gartner Vice President David Cearley says.
By Michael Cooney Tue, October 18, 2011 Network World ORLANDO -- The technology that makes up many of the systems in the IT world today is at a critical juncture and in the next five years everything from mobile devices and applications to servers and social networking will impact IT in ways companies need to prepare for now, Gartner Vice President David Cearley says. GARTNER: 10 key IT trends for 2012 For example, enterprises will need to invest capital to improve network capacity and reliability. They will also need to improve wireless governance to improve wireless manageability and service levels, Cearley told attendees of the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo this week. At the annual presentation of Gartner's popular Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends presentation, Cearley offered the following as examples of the way the tech world is changing: 30 billion pieces of content were added to Facebook this past month. Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015. More than 2 billion videos were watched on YouTube ... yesterday. The average teenager sends 4,762 text messages per month.

32 billion searches were performed last month ... on Twitter. So what issues need to be on IT's radar screen for 2012? Here's a look at the Top 10 Tech Trends and the implications of those issues according to Gartner: 1. Media tablets and beyond: Bring-your-own-technology at work has become the norm, not the exception. With that come security and management challenges that IT needs to address. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50% of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Android and Apple. The net result is that Microsoft's share of the client platform, be it PC, tablet or smartphone, will likely be reduced to 60% and it could fall below 50%, Cearley says. The implication for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support. In the smartphone arena, prices will fall to $75 for entrylevel devices in 2012 with faster two- and four-core processors, and with bigger, brighter, higher-resolution screens, plus 3D, HD video and more sensors such as gyros, compasses and barometers driving greater features into high-end devices. While iOS dominates the tablet market today, Gartner says it expects iOS/Android will dominate the market with 80% of tablets shipped by 2015. 2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces: Here touch, gesture and voice search is going to change the way mobile apps work in the future, Cearley says. By 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. By 2014, at least half of the tools optimized for app store application development in 2010 will have been acquired or will have ceased to exist. "The enterprise data warehousing category ranked 19 out of 25 in terms of expectations for change," writes report author and Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins. "EAs [enterprise architects] should reconsider this in light of the significant technology changes that next-generation BI and big data are driving."

Mobile Apps and Cloud Platforms Merging to Create the App Internet
It should come as no surprise that mobile apps and application platforms were ranked number two and three respectively, with high ranks for expected change and increased value. Thirty-six percent of respondents see mobile apps for smartphones and tablets as a top changer and 32 percent believe mobile apps will deliver the most business value. Clearly, the proliferation of mobile apps will call for IT to support at least the BlackBerry, iOS and Android platforms, as well as increased acceptance of personal and potentially corporate-liable devices that connect to enterprise resources. The good news, writes Hopkins, is that mobile apps are relatively inexpensive, and they're improving as context-aware technologies via sensors, location services, and better security and battery management. The application platforms category, which refer to development of "elastic" applications for cloud services such as IaaS (infrastructure as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service), is seen as a top changer by 34 percent of respondents and 28 percent believe app platforms will deliver business value. Mobile apps and cloud platforms will offer lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and CIOs should plan to capitalize on that over the next few years, writes Forrester's Hopkins, who also recommends that enterprise IT be prepared to manage apps on many devices and develop mobile and desktop apps that use new technologies such as HTML5 and PaaS for platform compatibility. In the coming years, Forrester predicts that mobile apps and cloud services will merge to form what the company calls the "App Internet," where specialized apps will use the storage and processing power of PCs, smartphones and tablets and the scale and flexibility of the cloud to allow applications to communicate with other apps and devices. The App Internet, if it plays out, would mark the end of the website as we know it and the dawn of the mobile app era, states the Forrester report. It's also certain to change how developers and enterprises create apps and manage the devices that run them. "This type of interaction requires a new architecture, and it's not one that most companies currently support," writes Hopkins.

3. Social and contextual user experience: According to Gartner, context-aware computing uses information about an end user's or object's environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. The tipping point here could be technology such as near-field communications getting into more and more devices. Some interesting facts here: By 2015, 40% of the world's smartphone users will opt in to context service providers that track

their activities with Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple continuously tracking daily journeys and digital habits for 10% of the world population by 2015, Cearley says. 4. Application stores and marketplace: The key here is the rise of enterprise application stores that can develop specific apps for users. This will let IT manage and control certain apps. But embracing the idea of user choice might be a difficult concept for enterprise IT to embrace, Cearley says. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value. Where the business value of an app is low and the potential risk, such as the loss of sensitive data, is high, apps might be blocked entirely. 5. The Internet of everything: The idea here is that we are building on pervasive computing where cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition -- everything -- is now part of the environment. Remote sensing of everything from electricity to air conditioning use is now part of the network. In addition, increasingly intelligent devices create issues such as privacy concerns. Eventually IT will need some central unified management of all these devices, Cearley says. 6. Next-generation analytics: Most enterprises have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs where Cearley says they can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. Not only will data center systems be able to do this, but mobile devices will have access to data and enough capability to perform analytics themselves, potentially enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere. Going forward, IT can focus on developing analytics that enable and track collaborative decision making. 7. Big data: Big data has quickly emerged as a significant challenge for IT leaders. The term only became popular in 2009. By February 2011, a Google search on "big data" yielded 2.9 million hits, and vendors now advertise their products as solutions to the big data challenge. The key thing enterprises have to realize is that they just can't store it all. There are new techniques to handle extreme data, such as Apache Hadoop, but companies will have to develop new skills to effectively use these technologies, Cearley says. 8. In-memory computing: We will see huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment devices, equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, flash offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages -- space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where we place information that must survive power-downs and reboots, yet it has much of the speed of memory, far faster than a disk drive. As lower-cost -- and lowerquality -- flash is used in the data center, software that can optimize the use of flash and minimize the endurance cycles becomes critical. Users and IT providers should look at in-memory computing as a long-term technology trend that could have a disruptive impact comparable to that of cloud computing, Cearley says. 9. Extreme low-energy servers: What if you could turn 10 virtual machines in one box into 40 slow physical servers that are tiny and use very low amounts of energy? There is a call for this type of computing to handle big data. For example, thousands of these little processors could work on a Hadoop process, Cearley says. Gartner says that 10%-15% of enterprise workloads are good for this. Moving the application from 10 images to 40 slower, less capable machines will only deliver on that promise if the software will perform the same. Server technologies are going to change to handle big data. 10. Cloud computing: This topic went from No. 1 last year to No. 10 this year, but it's still an important trend. It will become the next-generation battleground for the likes of Google and Amazon. Going forward, enterprise IT will be concerned with developing hybrid private/public cloud apps, improving security and governance, Cearley says.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/offshoring-why-its-an-opportunity-not-a-threat/990? tag=nl.e124

Offshoring: Why its an opportunity, not a threat

By Nick Heath August 1, 2012, 2:45 AM PDT Takeaway: IT industry experts in the UK argue that offshoring shouldnt be viewed simply as a threat to domestic jobs but as an opportunity to join a global workforce. Offshoring should not be viewed as a threat to domestic jobs but as an opportunity for tech workers to adapt to new roles as part of a global workforce, according to IT industry experts. The practice of using overseas labour to fill certain tech roles doesnt necessarily mean a net loss of jobs, a recent debate at the BCS, the UK-based chartered institute for IT, heard. Elizabeth Sparrow, past president of the BCS, said there is a danger that we try to cling onto jobs as they exist today. It has not stopped evolving. We need to be looking at the jobs for tomorrow. The BCS cited research that it said shows new jobs continue to be created onshore as other roles are sent offshore, with one piece of research claiming 750,000 jobs in finance, IT and other areas will be offshored by 2016, while a second predicts a total of 225,000 jobs will be created in cloud computing by 2015. Business intelligence specialist Gary Nuttall said that offshoring software development doesnt have to mean the onshore staff disappear: A number of my experiences have been on follow the sun type projects, where each team involved passes on the project for development. When you turn that around the UK just becomes part of that chain. So we are talking about the threat of outsourcing software development, but it may be that we are part of doing software development for otherscertainly in global organisations Ive seen that. As offshoring is a reality of modern IT, interim CIO Karim Hyatt said that there is a need for western IT staff to become more comfortable working alongside colleagues working offshore. Ive had this experience with a highly trained Swedish group of gaming professionals and they stated that one developer in Sweden is worth three in India. But that wasnt true and they had no basis for stating that. This is the attitude that needs to very quickly change. The way companies view offshoring is also changing, the debate heard, with Nuttall saying that companies have discovered that offshoring doesnt always save money, as while things may seem cheaper at first, the controls also add overheads. Companies could avoid some of these unforseen problems with offshore vendors by adopting an outcomebased approach, said Nuttall. I think in future contracts will go down an outcome based approach where as long as the code is produced to the required spec, does it really matter what qualifications the developer has in the past? I use the Kwik Fit analogy - if I have my exhaust replaced I go to a specialist, they give me a price and a time. I dont analyse the mechanics qualifications or a schedule of what they are doing - all I want them to do is deliver on time and on budget and that they phone me if there is a problem. Part of the reason that the IT industry has to accept that offshoring is here to stay, Hyatt said, is that companies are forced to look overseas to fill certain roles, as the skills are not available in their home nations. IT isnt viewed as cool as it was in the 70s and 80s. In the software product area you sometimes, for example in gaming, need extremely specialist and clever people. Real techies. They are difficult to find. If you go to India you are getting 500,000 IT graduates per year and if you go through the recruitment exercise the people are out there. So if you want a large team of developers you are more likely to be able to do it in India than the UK. Sparrow said that offshoring could be viewed as a natural offshoot from the transnational nature of modern business. For me it is one example of a globalisation movement. There is work that can be done around techniques and standards around offshoring. But there is also how to work in a global setting, when perhaps the majority of your customers are not in the UK.

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http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/project-management/what-uk-consultants-need-to-know-about-ir35/4809? tag=nl.e108

What UK consultants need to know about IR35

By Chip Camden July 26, 2012, 2:22 PM PDT Takeaway: Under UK law IR35, Her Majestys Revenue and Customs may examine the contract between contractor and client to determine if its terms could describe an employment relationship. If youre an independent consultant (or any other type of contractor, for that matter) in the United Kingdom, youll want to know about IR35, a piece of legislation that could cost you a bundle in taxes. Similar to the U.S. rules regarding statutory employment, IR35 is a law that seeks to close tax loopholes related to classifying workers as contractors rather than employees. In the UK, a typical incarnation of this tax dodge would be to have clients pay to a service company, and then the contractor would withdraw funds from the company in the form of dividends, with a small salary. Since dividends arent subject to National Insurance Contributions (NICs), this practice saved contractors a lot of money. Setting up a company and drawing dividends from it is perfectly legal. However, if the relationship between contractor and client is virtually the same as that between employee and employer, its taxation should be no different at least, that was the reasoning behind the introduction of IR35, which took effect in 2000. Under IR35, Her Majestys Revenue and Customs (HMRC) may examine the contractual relationship between contractor and client to determine if its terms could describe an employment relationship instead. If so, HMRC would deem the contractor a disguised employee, and all fees paid to the contractors company would then be taxed as salary. While that may sound fair enough, studies show that contractors whose contracts fail IR35 end up paying approximately 12% more in taxes than permanent employees making the same salary. HMRC use three main tests of employment: control, substitution, and mutuality of obligation. Control, as in the United States, means whether the contractor controls his/her own business. Ideally, clients should request an end result, and leave the how to the consultant. If the client exerts too much control over the process, then it could be deemed an employment relationship. Substitution means that the contractor can use any of his/her own personnel or subcontractors to complete the work on their behalf. If the client specifies that only the individual who signed the contract may perform the work agreed upon, then they are treating the contractor as an employee. Mutuality of Obligation means that the client is obligated to provide a certain amount of work to be performed, and the contractor is likewise obligated to perform it. In the UK, thats more like an employment relationship. Contractors, by contrast, are expected to get individual jobs with no guarantees of future employment. Conversely, a contractor should have the right to refuse a specific job. Other factors also come into consideration, but these are the big three. However, the nuances of each of these factors and their interactions need to be taken into account with regard to almost every business-related activity. For instance, travel should ideally be booked and paid by the consultant, and then charged back to the client. Otherwise, HMRC could raise the issue of control. There are cases where limited control of such activities by the client does not invalidate the control test. Unfortunately, HMRC will not review any contract until after it is signed, which means you either roll your dice and take your chances, or you contract a lawyer who specializes in these rules to vet the contract terms. If youre a foreign contractor in the UK, the question of whether IR35 applies to you probably resolves into the question of where you pay your taxes. For instance, a US contractor would pay tax on UK income to the US Treasury as foreign income. In that case, IR35 does not apply but US rules do. Conversely, if youre a UK contractor working for companies outside the UK, then IR35 may apply to your relationship with those companies. Check with a lawyer to be sure. As we might expect, IR35 has sparked a lot of controversy in the UK. The revenue it has generated has fallen short of the projected 220 million for National Insurance and 80 million for income tax by somewhere around 99%. We might hope that the UK will repeal or simplify this legislation, but from all signs the government only intends to expand its applicability.

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Killing the Entrepreneur in the UK

I had been running my own IT consulting business in the UK for many years leading up to 1993 when I took a contract overseas and never bothered returning to the UK for work. I've seen a flood of contracts and

consultants arrive in Asia since the early 2000's and many of them on short term assignments that decide it's not worth going back to the UK. IR35 has killed much of the spirit that drives or used to drive individuals to take a chance and set up their own business. They take the risks - no work no pay, cover their own medical, insurance, indemnity and pension costs and the benefit was the extra they could earn through the "flexibility" of the tax system. That's gone. The expertise and entrepreneurial spirit has in many cases gone overseas or died as a result and the tax man has nothing to show for it. Have I missed something or is this just another blind accounting decision with no view to the development of business, professional services and well being of the country and it's people?
Length of Contract

Being a contractor in the UK for a couple of years now and from what I understand (not an expert, thats why I hire them) are the following: 1. Length of Contract can be an issue. You need to be careful if a contract is over a year. 2. If you are in a management position. i.e. responsible for permanent personnel; doing reviews, holidays etc.. Im sure that there are other rules, but Im not clear of them, also from what I understand and have read even after a couple of years with IR35 in place everyone is still confused on this, from HR, Lawyers, Accountants and even the HMRC.
There's been some nice fights over this stuff

Substitution was always a good one. Initially this was posited as using kit provided by the "employer", course that was a nonsense as not many serious organisations let you plug personal kit into their network. Another one was most contractors didn't legally have holidays or sick pay, etc, unless they provided it themselves. Seeing as employers and the state have to meet statuary minimums in the UK, they had to mess about again. While I'll be the first to admit pre IR35, a lot of contractors were taking the urine, they went way too far with this and threw the baby out with the bath water. I also find it typical that they went after the little guys.
IR35 not as scary as made out to be

Considering how many contractors there are, the chances of the HMRC targeting you for a breach of the ir35 rules are very slim indeed. But if you can proove that you use all your own equipment, plus a list of other tediously obvious things, it really isn't a problem. The biggest problem is probably having to use your own equipment - so you'll have to bring your own laptop into work every day if a client likes you to be on site. You can't just use one of their PCs.
When government attempts to solve a problem

... they usually end up creating a bigger one -- and as you observed, the little guy is the one who pays for it. Which only makes sense, because they don't have the resources to fight it or buy it. Multiple clients is a key factor in the US and in France, but in my research I didn't find any mention of that with regard to IR35. I'm sure it can't hurt, though. http://www.call-centers-india.com/articles/indian-ites.html http://www.call-centers-india.com/articles/it-ites-labour-laws.html