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But Wait, There's More
Foote Partners Says IT Salaries Are on the Up
According to compensation analysts at Foote Partners, IT salaries started to rise in late 2004 and they continued to do so through the early part of 2005. Based on surveys of 48,000 IT workers in North America and Europe from January through April of this year, Foote Partners profiled salaries for 170 different job types. Foote Partners says companies are hiring again and they are also concerned about retaining talent for their existing and often legacy systems.
"But it's really much more than that," explains David Foote, the firm's president and chief research officer. "Employers are once again investing in onshore applications development skills notwithstanding their desire to offshore some applications and business processes. They're demanding more industry-specific experience to go with tech skills mastery, and even systems-specific solutions experience within an industry, which is a fairly new development on the scale that we've been seeing it."
For the 12 months ended in April, salaries for IT workers with non-certified skills were up 3.6 percent, and salaries were up 2.8 percent in the first quarter. IT workers with certified skills tend to get paid a little higher, yet their salaries continued to climb by 4 percent in the past 12 months (again, ended in April), but only grew by 1.6 percent in the first quarter of the year. A year ago, salaries were shrinking. And now, it seems, a lot of certifications (particularly project management certifications) are being required to get that base salary and are not given any incremental value beyond that. The hot skills that IT managers are looking for right now are for Microsoft's SQL Server and .NET and IBM's WebSphere, and the highest-paying skills are for security, extreme programming, storage area networking, Oracle databases and applications, and SQL Server. Generic database and Web programming skills are losing value, and HTTP, HTML, WML, PowerBuilder, and Perl skills are "cold" skills.
Trek Helps Armstrong Win the Tour with Linux-Opteron Workstations
Lance Armstrong last week won his seventh Tour de France, and he did this by working hard, by overcoming cancer, and by working harder. But he also got there through the application of information technology to the design of his racing bikes.
You don't win the Tour de France by riding a bike that normal people acquire at a bike shop. You have custom-made aerodynamic machines, and in the case of Armstrong, his bikes are made by Trek Bicycle, which is based in Waterloo, Wisconsin.
Trek had been using some white box Opteron-based workstations, running both Windows and Linux, to design their bikes. The computer-aided design programs Trek uses are Alias Wavefront and SolidWorks Studio, which run on Windows; the company also uses computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis programs to test the aerodynamic properties of the bike and rider after the design is done.
In years past, Trek could create several time trial bikes for Armstrong in under four months, but this year, the company only had four weeks. So they had to upgrade, and they talked Hewlett-Packard into giving them early access to dual-core versions of the xw9300 Opteron workstation, which could support up to four cores, up to 16 GB of main memory, and most importantly, dual PCI Express x16, high-end video cards for nVidia that would allow for design and simulations to proceed a lot faster because the xw9300 has what is called the Scalable Link Interface. This SLI feature allows the workstation to drive up to four screens (two per graphics card), or to drive one screen like a very fast video card.
Just as Trek has piggybacked on the success of Armstrong in the Tour, HP is hoping some of the magic rubs off and people will take a look at its Opteron workstations. Jeff Wood, director of worldwide marketing at HP for personal workstations, says companies looking for lots of flops in a box--particularly those in the digital media, engineering, and oil and gas industries--are taking a hard look at the xw9300. HP has a more extensive line of Xeon-based workstations, the xw8200s, and has no plans to offer multiple Opteron models. But at $4,000 to $5,000 for an average Opteron-based machine that beats a Xeon-based machine when it comes to performance, HP might have to rethink that strategy.
Novell Releases Service Pack 2 for SLES 9
Commercial Linux distributor Novell has started shipping Service Pack 2 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. SP2 supercedes SP1, which was announced in January 2005, and it includes all cumulative bug fixes and security patches that have been announced since SLES 9 was announced in August 2004. SLES 9 SP2 has been updated for all platforms--X86, X64, Itanium, Power, and mainframe.
SLES 9 SP2 includes the open source Oracle Cluster File System 2, which is available on X86 and X64 platforms as well as on Itanium boxes, to support Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters. The SP2 update also includes support for dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel; the dual-core Power chips have been supported by SUSE for years (dating back to SLES 8). Novell has added NUMA clustering support to SLES 9 SP2, which means that Linux can scale across more than four processors on Power-based machines. The SP2 update formally supports Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based Integrity Superdome machines. SP2 update also allows database performance to be boosted on 64-bit servers by allowing shared memory segments that are larger than 2 GB (a limitation of 32-bit machines that is often carried forward on 64-bit machines). SP2 is available to all customers who have support contracts with Novell. You can get the nitty gritty detail on SP2 on Novell's Web site.
Mandriva Puts Linux 2006 Through the Beta Test
Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva, which is the result of the merger of the former MandrakeSoft, Conectiva, and Lycoris, last week announced that the first public beta of its future Mandriva Linux 2006 release, which will be the merger of the former MandrakeSoft and Conectiva Linuxes and their support services. Mandriva is offering beta code for both X86 and X64 platforms. The software includes a new kernel as well as updates to network management--especially for WiFi networks where Linux is not very strong--the Gnome and KDE user interfaces, and security enhancements. But many features that will be in the final product are not in the beta right now.
Mandriva Linux 2006 is slated for delivering in mid-September. You can get the beta software by clicking here.
SpikeSource Updates Core Stack for New Linuxes
SpikeSource announced this week that it has put out a release of its SpikeSource Core Stack of open source middleware and application development software tools.
The release adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell SUSE Linux Professional 9.2; the Core Stack, which includes over 50 components that are kept in synch and patched on a quarterly basis through SpikeSource as a paid-for service, was already available on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 production release and Fedora Core 3 development release as well as Novell's SUSE Linux Professional 9.1. (It is unclear why Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 is not yet supported.) The updated Core stack also includes PostgreSQL, phpPgAdmin, the pgsql JDBC drives, and the Xalan XML-to-HTML/Text converter and the Xerces Java parser. SpikeSource is still in only alpha release on a Windows version of the Core Stack, which is known as WAMP, short for Windows-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python.
Kaspersky Lab Launches Security Products for Linux, Unix in the U.S.
Kaspersky Lab, a relative newcomer to the antivirus and security business, is trying to carve a niche for itself in the Linux and Unix market, and to that end, the Russian company, which is based in Moscow, has established a beachhead in the U.S. market by setting up an American unit in Woburn, Mass., and is now peddling its products to users of Red Hat and Novell Linuxes as well as for the FreeBSD and OpenBSD variants of the open source Unix platform. This week, Kaspersky is launching Anti-Virus 5.5 for these three platforms in the States, after already launching them in Europe; the software can be used to protect Linux and Unix workstations, file servers, and email servers. With Anti-Virus 5.5, Kaspersky is offering a new feature called Kavmonitor, which does real-time system scanning for viruses. Kaspersky sells a line of Windows antivirus solutions as well.
The new software is packaged as Kaspersky Anti-Virus Business Optimal, with workstation, file server, and mail server variants. The workstation version costs $46.95, while each mail or file server costs $359. This is the same pricing as for Windows workstations and servers.
SMBs Highly Vulnerable to Internet Threats, CA Report Finds
Small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are highly vulnerable to a variety of Internet-based threats, according to a study conducted by Quocirca for Computer Associates. CA says some of the factors contributing to the vulnerability among SMBs are complicated multiplatform environments, poor patch management, a lack of automated backup processes, and reliance on non-experts for IT management. Some of the more alarming statistics have to do with SMB's backup procedures. According to CA, only 25 percent of SMBs are using automated software to manage their backups, and approximately 20 percent of them have no backup capabilities at all. Of the SMBs that do back up their servers, nearly one-third of them haven't checked their ability to recover files in more than a year. "These studies reveal that while SMBs continue to embrace technology, a disturbing number lack the resources necessary to protect their IT assets in a sufficiently organized manner," says Bob Tarzey, Quocirca's service director.
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ARKEIA
