But Wait, There's More

Microsoft Rechristens Longhorn "Windows Vista"

The next release of Windows, which has gone by the codename "Longhorn" during the past four years of development, will be known as "Windows Vista" when it ships next year, Microsoft announced last week. "Clear, confident, connected" and "Bringing clarity to your world" were the words used to describe the new operating system during an event at the Microsoft Global Business Conference in Atlanta on Friday (you can watch the clip here, if you're interested). The company also announced that the first beta release of Windows Vista Beta 1, targeted at developers and IT professionals, will be available by August 3, 2005. Does that mean that the next release of Windows Server will be called Windows Vista Server? Maybe, maybe not. Some people have suggested that Microsoft will opt for the more conservative "Windows Server 2007" for their new server operating system.

Windows Genuine Advantage 1.0 Goes Live

Windows users now have to prove they are not using a pirated copy of the operating system before they download and install updates to Windows XP, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2000. This week Microsoft announced that, effective immediately, the Windows Genuine Advantage program is now live. Users must first authenticate their copy of Windows via WGA (a process that is handled automatically with an ActiveX control and a single click of the mouse) before they download any updates via Windows Update, Microsoft Update, and the Download Center. The one exception to this new rule is security updates, which will remain available to all Windows users without WGA validation. "During the 10-month pilot of WGA, we have been very encouraged by the large number of customers, more than 40 million in all, who chose to participate in WGA," says Will Poole, senior vice president of the Windows Client Business at Microsoft. More than 80 million people use Windows Update, Microsoft Update, and the Download Center every month.

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.

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.

Dell Shoots for $80 Billion in Sales by 2009 or So

You have to have goals in life, and no one would ever accuse PC and server maker Dell of lacking in ambition. At the company's shareholder meeting a few weeks ago, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins said Dell believed it could get into the same revenue class as rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Specifically, Rollins pointed to the upper deck and said that Dell's management believed that the company could reach $80 billion in sales within the next three to four years. That would be a stunning feat. Dell had sales of $31.9 billion in its fiscal year ended February 2001, and sales actually dipped a tiny bit in fiscal 2002. That dip occurred during most of calendar 2001, which was also when the IT industry was hammered pretty hard by what could only be called an economic depression. Dell's sales recovered a bit in fiscal 2003, growing to $35.4 billion, and continued to grow in fiscal 2004 to $41.4 billion and to $49.2 billion in fiscal 2005. At current growth rates, Dell should be able to easily hit $80 billion in sales in fiscal 2009, which ends in January of that year. Dell is hedging a little by saying $480 billion in three to four years, just in case the IT market doesn't grow as fast as it would like. While Dell's server market is growing nicely, Dell is going to have to sell a lot more servers to add more than $30 billion to its revenue. Rollins said that Dell would focus on products and services where it believed people were spending too much on technology, and singled out servers and storage, notebooks and other wireless devices, printers, and televisions and monitors as key growth areas. He also said that Dell would be expanding into other areas of the world with its direct marketing model. However, European and Asian IT vendors have been pretty agile themselves, and have kept Dell at bay.

Barcoding Unveils RFID Compliance Kits

Barcoding last week unveiled three new RFID compliance kits designed to help companies get a jumpstart on the long road to complying with the RFID mandates of Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense. Companies looking to dip their toes into the RFID waters without fully committing to a million-dollar implementation may want to do a little experimenting with the RFID Evaluation/Lab Kit, which includes an RFID printer/encoder, a portable RFID reader, a fixed mount RFID reader, RFID tags, and RFID encoding software. Companies already facing mandates may choose the Slap & Ship RFID Kit, a bare-bones collection of hardware and software designed to help companies meet minimum requirements, without spending a lot of extra money on features that probably won't be used. Finally, there is the RFID Readiness Kits, which is designed for companies that anticipate the future use of RFID without losing any of their current barcode investments. Barcoding, which is based in Baltimore and was named this April to ICIC magazine's list of the top 100 inner city companies to work for, charges between $3,000 and $15,000 for the kits.