The fourth quarter is looking more and more interesting. Did you hear the news earlier this week that for the first time in months, more companies are saying they're planning on hiring than have said they're planning on letting people go? This definitely looks good. And, Yes! IT is hiring. Best cities for employment? According to Forbes.com, the top 10 cities, in order, are:
Madison, WI
Washington, DC
Boston, MA
Richmond, VA
Milwaukee, WI
Pittsburgh, PA
Baltimore, MD
Seattle, WA
Houston, TX
Dallas, TX
Told you it was interesting! So are the top ten IT skills according to Gartner. Read the article below.
Keep in touch – and keep current!
Here's the schedule or you can view the complete schedule on our Website:
CSTA Web sessions:
December 9, 10
January 20, 21
March 3, 4
UITJ (Understanding IT Jobs) Web sessions:
December 10
March 4
TR Web sessions:
November 17
February 10
The Cloud
December 8
Keep in touch - I love hearing from you - and keep up with technology!
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The Cloud - Keeping Up
Inevitably when reading current articles in the IT press, several – if not most – of them talk about the cloud. "The Cloud" is indeed THE hot technology right now. It's still in its infancy, but growing in leaps and bounds. According to Gartner, Cloud computing was #3 on 2009's list of hot technologies, but it's #1 in 2010.
Movement to the cloud grew faster than expected in 2009. Enterprises jumped on private clouds. Cloud computing is just too cost effective and efficient to ignore, and private clouds seemed to be the answer. The big players (read IBM EMC, etc.) moved into the private cloud market – but the success of Amazon with public cloud offerings pushed everyone. Microsoft announced Azure (their public cloud environment), IBM released Cloudburst, a private cloud appliance, and is beta testing SDS (Software Delivery Services) for public clouds. vCloud (from VMware) is used to build public clouds from Terramark, Hosting.com, and others.
There's a big push in cloud computing from the government and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has come up with version 15 of the definition of cloud computing:
"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."
My favorite definition of the cloud is "anything that exists outside the firewall." I like it because it's simple and broad. It covers everything. We can put applications in the cloud, data, development tools, hardware, even complete data centers. Whatever we need in IT, we can access it in the cloud. And we're doing it.
So, get ready for 2010. We're running "The Cloud," a 60-minute Web session, on December 8th. At 11:00 am EST. This session covers the concepts, the technologies, the vendors, and the terminology involved in the cloud, so you're ready to understand job requirements, read resumes, and interview candidates. You'll be able to attend meetings with co-workers and vendors, and follow your company's move into the cloud.
Get ready – enroll now. And don't forget to "Bring a Friend."
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1. How was Bill Gates' house designed?
2. Is SSD here to stay?
3. Sticking with SSDs – Is SSO here to stay?
4. What is the current release of Microsoft Office?
5. What is the relationship between gorilla and monkey testing?
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Gartner's Top 10 Technologies |
Gartner's published their annual list of the top 10 strategic technologies, and that's always interesting. It's also interesting that five of the 10 are on the list for the first time. IT is changing:
1. Cloud computing We've been hearing about this for the past few years.
2. Advanced analytics BI (Business Intelligence) plus. Analytics keep gaining importance.
3. Client computing* Companies are providing employees with stipends to purchase their own systems and then giving them the ability to access business applications through virtualized environments.
4. Green IT Anything that reduces energy consumption and a corporate carbon footprint.
5. Reshaping the data center* A new design for data centers which uses pods and adds power, air conditioners and generators only as needed.
6. Social computing Facebook, Twitter, etc.
7. Monitoring user activity* Getting harder with cloud computing, targeted attacks, etc.
8. Flash memory* Fast, rugged, and uses less energy than hard disks. Costs more initially, but the price gap is getting smaller. Also called SSD (Solid State Disks).
9. Virtualization for availability VMware's VMotion; Microsoft's Live Migration.
10. Mobile applications* Moving applications to cell phones.
How many of these affect you? Yet, it's more important than ever to get up to speed and stay current. Things change so quickly in IT, and this includes both the technologies and the jobs. Enroll NOW in our CSTA (Computers: Systems, Terms and Acronyms) Program where we cover ALL of these up and coming technologies.
* First time on the list.
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Green IT
We hear a lot about green IT, and how important it is. In fact, it's listed as #4 in Gartner's list of top 10 technologies (see article above). But what's actually involved?
green IT Creating environmentally sustainable computing or IT. It is "the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems including monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems, efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment.
carbon footprint General information. Associated with green IT, it's the amount of greenhouse gas produced by any activity. Usually expressed in equivalent tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). One of the goals of green IT is to lower a corporation's carbon footprint.
cloud computing Technology that relies on hosting and the Internet. Anything, including development tools and environments, storage management, and database processing and management, can live in "the cloud." This means that users will subscribe to hosted functions and the host will supply the resources needed - disk space, servers, etc. Various vendors are providing cloud systems ranging from hosting disk space to complete IT environments with network management and data center capabilities. The word "cloud" refers to the fact that users have no idea where their programs or their data actually reside.
eWaste General information. Associated with green IT, it describes loosely discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken electrical or electronic devices. Electronic equipment can contains some serious contaminants such as lead, cadmium, and beryllium so recycling and disposing of e-waste is complex.
multi-core processor Computer architecture where a single piece of silicon holds two or more processing cores. Dual-core architecture, building two processing cores on a single chip is common, quad-core (4 processors) is growing, octo (8) exists and Interlagos processors, with between 12 and 16 cores on a single chip, are planned for release in 2011 by AMD.
virtualization Systems technology. Pooling together resources throughout the entire enterprise into a single unit that can be managed from a single point. This allows resources to be assigned to a user only as needed, and returned to the pool when free. The resources most commonly affected are storage and servers. Server virtualization software builds a pool of servers that can be allocated to tasks, applications, databases, or the Internet, as needed. Virtualization software defines virtual machines which allow multiple operating systems to run in one physical machine. This increases the flexibility of the total enterprise.
wireless Communications that use radio frequencies and satellite transmissions for voice, video, and/or data communication. Wireless video and voice have been in use for decades, and data communications uses many of the existing technologies. As the use of wireless for data increases, technologies, standards, and functions are appearing and being defined by IEEE.
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1. Not sure if it's true, but there's info out on the Web that it was designed using a Mac. :-)
2. The growth of Solid State Disc (or Drive) technology is amazing. It pops up in every article about storage. It's expensive, and they don't hold as much data. But. Here's a list of benefits:
SSDs are standards based
Silent
Low power consumption
Fast access
Fast read
Durable with no moving parts
Lightweight
3. SSO (Single Sign-On) has just appeared in Oracle's ESSO Anywhere, " which is a security product that provides single sign-on from a private cloud so that employees, partners, suppliers and other enterprise affiliates may streamline access to web-based, client server and mainframe applications anywhere – anytime. Sure looks good.
4. This is here to remind you that Office 2010 is on the way – very soon. There's been so much news about Windows 7, that no one's paying much attention to the release of Office 2010 which is planned for a beta release this month. The current release is Office 2007. There was an Office 2008, but that was Office 2007 for the Mac.
5. I'm not sure it's a relationship – but gorilla testing is really monkey testing conducted in an intense and robust manner. Both terms refer to random testing without an organized and planned out scenario. Gorilla testing runs more tests with more data in a shorter time span. It kind of makes sense..
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