Offshoring shrinks number of IT jobs, study says
The number of IT jobs at large corporations is declining significantly, but within 10 years, this exodus may end as companies run out of jobs suitable for moving to low-cost countries, a new study says.
The Hackett Group, a management consulting firm, examined services occupations in the bull's-eye of offshoring -- finance, human resources, procurement and IT. What it found is that only about 4.5 million of the 8.2 million jobs in these fields that existed in the U.S. and Europe at the start of 2002 will still exist in 2016.
This estimate of the jobs decline is specific to 4,700 companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more in the U.S. and Europe, Hackett said. Read more...
Meg Whitman fluffs HP’s age, gets corrected by shareholder
Meg Whitman has spent her first six months at Hewlett-Packard talking to customers and employees and learning how the business works, but apparently she didn't get much of a history lesson.
"HP will be 70 in 2014," she said proudly at HP's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. Few Silicon Valley companies can boast such longevity, she said, and her job now is to set HP up for "the next 70 years."
It's a line Whitman's been using for the past few months as she tries to drum up enthusiasm for the new, reinvigorated HP she hopes to build. The only trouble is, it appears to be wrong, as an elderly shareholder gently pointed out to her.
"I believe HP was founded in 1939," he said during the question-and-answer session after her talk. Wouldn't that make HP 75 in 2014? Read more...
Chrome beats IE market share for one day
Google's Chrome took the crown as the world's most-used web browser last Sunday, March 18th. But as the world suited up to go back to work on Monday, Internet Explorer re-gained the lead.
So says online service StatCounter, although the service also urges us all to take its data with a grain of salt. That's because while it collects data about 15 billion page views per month from three million websites, it says its results “are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 14 days from publication. Read more...
Google locks up cloud apps and throws away the keys
Google has introduced certificate-based authentication for developers requiring secure connections to the advertising broker's cloud.
Google Service Accounts - announced today in a post in a blog post - will validate web apps' access to the company's servers with a certificate rather than passwords or shared keys. Read more...
Clojure inventor Hickey now aims for Android
Clojure, pronounced "closure," is a functional programming language that's geared toward the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) but also accommodates Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and JavaScript environments. Rich Hickey, founder of data management technology vendor Datomic, is the author of Clojure. After speaking at the Clojure/West conference in San Jose, Calif., last Friday, Hickey talked with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Clojure, including mobile application development ambitions, and about Datomic.
InfoWorld: When did you develop Clojure? What was your intention in doing so?
Hickey: I started in 2005, and the first version I released was toward the end of 2007. It's kind of a Lisp for the JVM. My intention was to make a dynamic, functional programming language for the JVM.
InfoWorld: Why did you see a need for that? Read more...
7 simple steps for thwarting hactivists
More data was stolen from corporate networks last year by hactivists than by cyber criminals, according to a new report from Verizon.
The Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report includes analysis from 855 cyber security breaches worldwide that involved 174 million compromised records. More than half -- 58 percent -- of all data that was compromised last year was the result of politically motivated attacks rather than those motivated by financial gain.
Verizon said most data breaches could be avoided if network managers followed best practices in information security. Read more...
Cloud security registry slow to catch on
Last August the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas a registry that it hoped would serve as a place for prospective cloud users to go to easily inspect and compare cloud vendors' security controls. But to date, only three companies have submitted their cloud security data, making the registry of limited use.
The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) is designed to index the security features of cloud providers using a 170-point questionnaire that end users are then able to peruse. Soon after the CSA announced STAR, big names such as Google, Intel, McAfee, Verizon, and Microsoft all agreed to take part. So far though, Microsoft is the only one of that group to have followed through. Read more...