Pay heed to domestic market, IT firms told
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Indian software companies, which have been busy conquering the world and neglecting their backyard, should not continue doing so. This is because the domestic market is going to grow into a huge opportunity
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At Computerworld&#8217;s Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, attendees said IT departments should look for ways to give their companies a business edge -- even at the risk of suffering some technology failures.
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(InfoWorld) - News coming out the chip sector has been great so far this week, but analysts warn that economic woes such as the housing mess might still spoil the party. The consensus among analysts appears to be that corporate and personal spending on technology products will be hurt by the housing issues in the U.S., but nobody knows how bad the impact will be, according to Peter Sutton, head of research at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Taipei. Demand for technology products, especially computers and mobile phones, in the rest of the world is going strong, he said, but even that demand could pull back in the event of a U.S. slowdown because many developing countries depend on exports to the U.S. for income. By the end of this year, people should know how bad the loan and home foreclosure situation will be, according to Sutton. The housing market in the U.S., he said, is expected to bottom in the first quarter of next year. The fear is that the housing issues could hurt consumer spending at some point later this year, but so far the technology industry isn't showing any signs of trouble. The flow of good news started in Asia on Monday with the world's largest contract chip maker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), reporting record high sales in August and revising up its third quarter financial guidance. The company, considered a bellwether for the overall tech industry because of the variety of gadgets it makes chips for, said consolidated sales in August rose 10 percent year-over-year to NT$30.02 billion (US$907.0 million), beating its previous record of NT$27.96 billion from July of last year. TSMC also predicted its third quarter revenue will likely hit between NT$87 billion to NT$89 billion, higher than a previous forecast of NT$85 billion to NT$87 billion, and said its gross margin would come out at the top end of expectations. Some customers asked TSMC to ship some chips earlier than expected, a spokesman for the company said, but the company won't comment on how that might impact the fourth quarter. Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek followed up TSMC's news, announcing an agreement to buy certain telecommunications chips products from Analog Devices Inc., of Norwood, Massachusetts, for US$350 million in cash. The deal itself isn't huge, but merger and acquisition activity normally takes place when companies see bright prospects for the future, and MediaTek is looking to use the acquisition as part of its mobile phone chip strategy. Among the products the company acquired is a chipset used in TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) basebands and radio receiver products, which will help it increase its presence in its main market, China. TD-SCDMA is the 3G (third-generation) telecommunications standard being pursued in China. Positive corporate news for chip makers didn't stop in Asia. As the work day opened in the U.S., technology industry watchers were treated to theÂ long-awaited launch of Barcelona, the new quad-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices. The Sunnyvale, California company announced a number of companies are already using the chips, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Gateway. The world's largest chip maker capped Monday with the biggest news of the day.Â Intel raised its third quarter revenue forecastÂ to between US$9.4 billion and US$9.8 billion from a previous range of US$9.0 billion and US$9.6 billion, and said its gross margin would be at the upper end of guidance due to stronger than expected global demand for computing products. Despite the strong chip news and outlook for the current quarter, which ends Sept. 30, the future remains uncertain. "Near term data shows little evidence of order cutbacks in the tech supply chain," said Warren Lau, chip analyst at Macquarie Research Equities. "But having said that, the question remains: will the sky come crashing down because of the meltdown in the U.S. subprime markets?"
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International expansion is becoming increasingly important to retailers as they face fierce competition at home, a report says.
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(InfoWorld) - IT security professionals need to take steps to properly manage how employee-owned consumer devices are used in the workplace, analysts warned at Gartner's IT security summit in London this week. With powerful consumer devices becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the enterprise, and homeworking on the increase, Gartner said it was important that technology privileges reflected genuine need to avoid security problems. A survey by Gartner found that 15 percent of businesses will have at least some workers using their own devices by the year-end. Brian Gammage, VP at Gartner, said it was crucial that the management of user-owned technology reflect the needs of staff carrying out day-to-day tasks, rather than simply the person's rank within the organization. Individual requirements of users in completing their work, weighed against the security risks they posed, ought to be the judging factors. "It is vital to set policies on user-owned devices, and for the policies to reflect user profiles," he said. "It is amazing how most companies focus on the technology they own and not on other devices and who is using them." One key area of risk being largely ignored was the technology being used by outsourced workers, in spite of the fact they were often handling sensitive data for the company they were serving and its customers. It was vital this technology was properly managed, Gartner said. "I spoke to one major business that was even considering changing outsourcers to a company that would employ people working at home, on their own machines, handling sensitive information," said John Girard, VP at Gartner. "They asked me what I thought, and I said I'd take a note of their name and make sure not to do business with them." But while it is important to set the right policies, analysts stressed that user-owned devices were no more of a security threat than other employee-controlled devices within the workplace. Gartner said the key questions to ask when setting employee owned technology policies are: -- Who is using the technology? -- How controlled is the PC environment as a whole? -- What are the legal, compliance, and service-level agreement implications? -- Who is responsible for buying software licences and security technology for these machines? -- Who is responsible for updating security? -- Who pays for support? -- How does the company ensure that employees purchase the right machine for the job? -- What level of remuneration there is for employees for handling their own IT? Computerworld UKÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Businesses may be spending millions on expensive security technologies aimed at thwarting data leakage and compliance violations, but many companies are still failing to sufficiently address access controls for protected information and IT systems.According to the latest report from Ponemon Institute, most IT workers readily admit that their companies are doing a sub-standard job of keeping tabs on the level of access available to employees, temporary workers, and independent contractors.In Ponemon's 2008 National Survey on Access Governance, based on interviews conducted with roughly 700 IT professionals, 78 percent of those people surveyed reported that their employers are not regularly reviewing policies or tools that control admittance to their systems or information.The situation has resulted in an environment where many workers retain the ability to view sensitive data or manipulate IT systems that they should not be able to access based on their job responsibilities, researchers said.Some 69 percent of those interviewed said that their companies' access policies were either enforced poorly or not at all, with only 30 percent of respondents stating that their organizations go to the trouble of validating their guidelines.The overwhelming lack of proactive efforts to keep a handle on issues of access are somewhat shocking based on all the attention being given to data security and compliance issues over the last several years, and many business could greatly improve their overall standing simply by improving their policies and enforcement capabilities, said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of research firm."Traditional approaches, including homegrown technologies and manual management processes, have proven to be fraught with failure and risk. Unless enterprises acknowledge business as usual is failing, we believe rampant access mismanagement will continue to plague organizations," Ponemon said. "When it comes to access rights, companies don't want to constrain workers and make their jobs harder, but they have to manage things in a more systemic way that look at the risk versus the benefits, and many organizations are obviously having difficulties with that."Approximately 55 percent of those participating in the survey said that their employers' ability to grant access based on a worker's role and job function is either poor or nonexistent, including 42 percent who said that their companies have no policy to manage things in such a manner.The rapid pace of change in the responsibilities among today's workforce is one of the biggest hurdles that companies struggle to overcome, said executives with Aveksa, a maker of access control software that sponsored the Ponemon report."This entitlement drag issue is a major problem. IT organizations are under pressure and often either valued or devalued by business based on how quickly they deliver access," said Brian Cleary, vice president of Marketing for Aveksa. "Clearly, the findings here show that that while companies are doing a good job of providing initial or changed access, there is no automated way to go back and make a determination to understand if a workers' current level of access is appropriate."Lessons learned from Jerome Kerviel Issues of access control are of fundamental importance to corporate risk management, perhaps best exemplified by the recent reports of the activities of Jerome Kerviel, a stock trader at French firm Soci?t? G?n?rale who is accused of losing nearly $8 billion of his company's capital in unapproved transactions carried out by circumventing rules built into the brokerage's IT systems.Had Soci?t? G?n?rale been actively monitoring the access controls for its transactional systems, Kerviel likely would have been caught long before he gambled away such a stunning amount of money, the experts contend.A major factor contributing to the continued loopholes in access management is a lack of support for improving policies and applying technologies used to govern the issue by senior management in many companies, according to the report. Some 74 percent of respondents indicated that senior management in their companies does not view access governance as a strategic security imperative. "It seems that the perception is that it's still tough to get senior executives to sign off on the necessary funding, but situations like Soci?t? G?n?rale may help prove how big of concern this really needs to be," said Ponemon.Another major contributor to the problem is the need for cross-organization collaboration, which complicates issues of access dramatically.And while 83 percent of those people responding to the survey said that collaboration among business units, audit and compliance groups, and IT security departments is vital to keeping their operations in line with government regulations, 57 percent said those teams never partner to oversee access issues."This has to be an area of great concern, because if companies consistently score poorly on compliance audits it's been proven that this actually starts to diminish their reputation and brands," Ponemon said. "And as more organizations suffer losses, there will likely be new regulations put in place that make it even harder to operate; most businesses I know don't want more regulations, but if more people fail to create their own controls, more regulators will get involved."
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Business & money: US pension fund backs demands for changes Bank insists share price shows strategy is right
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The company has attractive fundamentals, but unusual remuneration schemes are worrisome.
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In a new blog entry, Richard Thomas shares some of his opinions on a problem he's noticed in the area of IT with companies not realizing one thing - the cost of living differences.   So you got companies like Yahoo, PriceGrabber, IBM and others trying to hire and at some points almost begging for people to apply they are sure to have something to offer right? Move to the silicon valley and if your a good programmer you can make $65-90K a year easy so it makes sense doesn't it?   In his opinion this is one of the major barriers that faces companies - not being able to attract developers with offers that make sense for the area. They flash large numbers at them, hoping that they'll accept only to find that they can't live quite how they expect.
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IT security professionals need to take steps to properly manage how employee-owned consumer devices are used in the workplace, analysts warned at Gartner's IT security summit in London this week.
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As Google Inc.   nears the end of its first quarter as a public company, industry watchers say one of its emerging challenges is how to keep soon-to-be wealthy workers from cashing out and moving on.
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The U.S. software industry is larger than the food processing industry in terms of revenue, according to an IT trade group that wants Congress to&#160;raise the annual cap on H-1B visas,&#160;give permanent residency to foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges, and back trade policies that give companies unfettered access to global markets.The Software &amp; Information Industry Association (SIIA) Thursday released a report that assembles a variety of economic data in an effort to give policy-makers a better understanding of the software industry&#39;s importance to the U.S. economy. For instance, the SIIA said that software vendors and digital content providers employed a combined total of 2.7 million people in 2006, a net gain of more than 400,000 jobs over the 1997 level. That&#39;s a 17 percent increase in head count, the group said.SIIA president Ken Wasch acknowledged that the timing of the report&#39;s release was a little awkward, coming during a time when the stock market is falling, interest rates are being cut, and Congress is working to craft an economic stimulus bill.&quot;Our industry is not going to be able to repeal the economic business cycle,&quot; Wasch said. If the U.S. economy goes into a recession, he added, &quot;our industry will be impacted as well.&quot;But Wasch claimed that the software industry has outpaced other economic sectors and the economy as a whole on growth over the past few years. &quot;In an economic downturn, surely it&#39;s not going to be good news for our industry,&quot; he said. &quot;But our industry ought to be performing better than industries that are fading in economic importance.&quot;Nonetheless, Wasch contended that maintaining the industry&#39;s current level of growth in the U.S. will require immigration reform. Without the ability to add talented workers as needed, &quot;we&#39;re creating an incentive for the industry to create knowledge centers outside the United States,&quot; he said.The average annual wage paid in the software industry during 2006 was $75,400, according to the SIIA, which said that figure is about 78 percent higher than the median wage for all workers in the private sector.The numbers cited by the SIIA are largely based on statistics from government reports and, consequently, tend to be one or two years old. But the intent of such reports from trade groups often is to add weight to their congressional policy initiatives.For instance, the SIIA is calling for improvements to science, math and technology training overall in U.S. schools. That is a common argument made by tech industry groups, which also cite a shortage of skilled talent in the U.S. and the need to bring in qualified workers from overseas. Wasch said he thinks permanent-residency green cards should be &quot;stapled&quot; to the diplomas of U.S. college graduates from foreign countries.But on the issue of math and science training, the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research and analysis group in Washington, concluded in a report released in November that &quot;the U.S. is not at any particular disadvantage compared with most nations, and the supply of qualified [science and engineering] graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally.&quot;Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, called the SIIA&#39;s report &quot;a defensive document&quot; in an e-mail response to questions about it.Hira said he thinks that a better comparison than measuring the U.S. software industry against other sectors is to look at the growth rates of the large offshore outsourcing companies vs. the growth of software jobs in the U.S. &quot;I think everyone will be taken aback,&quot; he wrote. &quot;The growth of IT labor demand in the U.S. is a pittance compared to the explosive growth in India.&quot;Another policy issue of importance to the SIIA is trade barriers. Wasch said that the European Union and countries in other regions are placing what amounts to a &quot;patchwork quilt&quot; of restrictions that impede the flow of data -- for instance, limiting the ability of companies to store information about overseas customers on systems in the U.S. The trade group would like to see some standardization of such restrictions, he added.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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After years of hearing that investing in IT was a smart strategic plan, business executives seem to have gotten the message, according to a new Gartner CIO survey released today -- but only when the dollars are going to technology efforts that have visible benefits for the bottom line, primarily externally facing initiatives involving customers or partners.
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Firms from China and India are most willing to pay bribes abroad to do business, a survey suggests.
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(InfoWorld) - It may now be the turn of Indian companies to offshore outside India their IT services requirements. Indian CIOs will have to consider outsourcing offshore, because of the shortage of IT skills in the country, and inadequate services standards of local service providers, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Indian companies have been looking at India alone for outsourcing, said a spokesman for Gartner India on Tuesday, who asked not to be named. They will now have to look at other locations like Singapore, Hong Kong, and even the U.S., he added. The services offshore will come at a premium to Indian prices, but will at least ensure that Indian CIOs get quality services, the spokesman said. Demand for skilled IT personnel as a result of initiatives like the Indian government's recent national e-governance program (NEGP), and resource-hungry Indian offshore service providers, are outstripping local supply, according to Gartner. Rapid economic growth in India is exacerbating the problem, and local chief information officers areÂ finding it difficult to manage the shortage of skilled local IT resources as internal business units become even more demanding in the area of IT requirements and schedules, the research firm added. Indiaâs gross domestic product (GDP) grew 9.2 percent in the countryâs fiscal year to March. A recent Gartner survey conducted among more than 1,400 CIOs worldwide showed that IT budgets in India had the highest growth of 16.19 percent, compared with an average of 3.16 percent in the rest of the world. Gartner warned in February thatÂ the problem for user organizations in India may only get worse as outsourcing companies start hiring business line managers from user organizations to build their vertical industry expertise. As large Indian outsourcers grow in revenue by 30 to 40 percent each year, they will hire business managers from the banking, manufacturing, and retail industries, that bring the business knowledge that can be integrated into their services offerings, it added. The focus of Indian outsourcers is primarily on markets in the U.S. and Europe where margins are far higher than in India, according to Gartner. Multinational services companies have targeted outsourcing deals by large Indian companies but the focus so far has been on very large deals, Gartner said in February. If Indian CIOs outsource work offshore, that may get Indian companies to try and reverse the trend, the Gartner spokesman said. An alternative to offshore outsourcing is for Indian CIOs to work with second and third-tier providers in India who are interested in local business, said the Gartner spokesman. The right provider may be able to provide domestic resources and perhaps a higher level of attention to issues and demands, he added. Â
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Online marketplaces that offer eBay-like services for matching companies with freelance developers are attracting the attention of some IT managers who want flexible workforces -- and lower labor costs.
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Ministers press IT firms to bring down costs but parents of school students will have to contribute