Five Trends That Challenge Technology Offshoring: technology is changing the landscape

Having your job get shipped overseas sucks and having it shipped away in a cruddy economy is a double whammy, but tech vendors will put jobs where they can get an acceptable (note, not necessarily the best) work done at the lowest cost. I think there are lots of companies doing offshoring with the wrong premises. This article lists valid reasons why the competition is going to change in the future.

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Enterprise 2.0 Offerings that Integrate with SharePoint Technology

It's hard to imagine staid corporations getting on the social networking bandwagon, until you realize the potential for this technology to help with collaboration and make employees more productive. Microsoft is no slouch when it comes to providing businesses with the software capabilities they need. In fact, many of these Enterprise 2.0 functions are already built into SharePoint.Despite a rapidly changing world and readily available technology that makes anything and everything possible, it still sometimes seems as if the corporate world is lagging behind; remaining stuffy and boring. After all, not many of us can relate our corporate experience back to ultra cool and laid back office environments such as the one at Google. I think this article provide valuable insights into the collaboration space using SharePoint.

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Why Recession Is Causing Enterprises to Rethink Open-Source: threat to the ISVs?

Budget limitations and continued improvement in software and associated services are making open-source software alternatives such as MySQL, SUSE Linux, OpenOffice.org and plenty of others look mighty good to IT managers and CFOs.The trend is alarming for SMB ISVs as organizations are moving towards "good enough" solutions and trying to cope with the cost of IT. The real question is how ISVs should think about this in the long-run and how patents and IP can become a huge factor in the valuation and positioning of the company.

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Open Cloud Manifesto: Much Ado and to Do

The Open Cloud Manifesto is now available for viewing on Scribd, laying out a set of goals for cloud computing, and folks are wondering what all the hubbub is about.Based on the news chatter in different magazines, the market is not agreeing on standards when it comes to the cloud computing initiatives. Cloud computing is here to stay, I hope that the industry can agree on the interoperability.

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Cloud Computing: What UC Berkeley Can Teach You

Last month the UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (aka RAD Lab) published Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing." The report is an excellent overview of the move to cloud computing. It identifies some key trends, addresses the top obstacles to cloud use, and makes some excellent points about cloud economics. It also, in my view, understates a few aspects of cloud computing as well, primarily as a result of addressing the topic with an academic detachment. Overall, it's well worth tracking down and giving a read.

RAD defines cloud computing as having the following three characteristics:.

1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for Cloud Computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning. .

2.The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs. .

3. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed, thereby rewarding conservation by letting machines and storage go when they are no longer useful..

This article is good to read...

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Leaving computers on overnight = $2.8 billion a year and this is something to think about

Admittedly I don't think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it'll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning -- not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."The amount of electricity that we are using to things that we do not even think about is unbelievable such as leaving desktops and monitors open during the night. This article demonstrates what it means in terms of money.

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8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams: good article to read

Besides Twitter Search, the following 8 Analytwits are some of the more useful web applications to analyze Twitter streams. Each of these tools serve specific purpose. They crawl and sift through Twitter streams; also, aggregate, rank and slice-and-dice data to deliver some insights on Twitter activities and trends. This article is a pretty good summary of some tools in the Twitter world.

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Microsoft won't let companies host Azure on premise : makes sense to me

Microsoft is restricting the Azure platform to its datacenters, shooting down rumors that it might let companies host Azure services on their own networks. It is official now, Microsoft will keep Azure inside its own data centers, which makes a lot of sense to me. This platform will evolve and lots of IP will be going to the platform... and versioning this to outside data centers could be a nightmare.

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Microsoft Offering Free CRM Add-ons, Services: competition is heating up!

Microsoft opens its Convergence conference in New Orleans by announcing that a variety of its newest CRM add-ons and services will be offered at zero cost. The free items include eight new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Accelerators, or business-oriented software extensions, and a new SLA for CRM Online customers. The competition in the SaaS field is getting even more heated with the annoucements from Microsoft.

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