New research reveals that 41 percent of students do not feel well-informed about the range of careers open to them. Only 13 percent feel their education institutions have fully equipped them to make career decisions. CompTIA surveyed more than 1,000 students to understand what motivates them.

The vast majority of respondents showed themselves to have skills employers want. They are hard working (89 percent), quick learners (79 percent), good at solving problems (76 percent), have communication skills (71 percent) and are able to work in a team (78 percent). Furthermore, most students are ambitious with a clear idea of what they expect from their future professions. A good salary (85 percent), variety (66 percent) and ongoing development (62 percent) are the most important considerations.

Respondents in the CompTIA survey want schools and universities to do a lot more to help them understand career options:

• 55 percent want information integrated into school lessons about what careers different subjects can lead to

• 61 percent feel they need more information about careers other than those directly related to their field of study

• 51 percent want better careers advice at school or university.

This trend is particularly notable in IT and technology, which is struggling to attract the 110,400 new entrants a year it needs to keep up with the industry’s growth.

According to Kevin Streater, executive director for IT Intelligence at the Open University:

“For far too long there has been a false assumption that IT is too technical for most people to get into. The reality is that anyone who is educated, motivated and passionate about technology should consider a career in the industry. At its core, it is very much a career where you can keep learning, keep developing and keep your hands on technology. Contrary to popular opinion there are plenty of unfilled vacancies for young people, and plenty of young people with exactly the right aptitude and ambitions to fill them. The problem is largely one of making young people aware of these opportunities and how to get into them.”

These figures are significant when you consider overall job growth for the country was well under 1%. The report also predicts that IT job expansion in 2012 will overtake 2008 as its all-time-high growth year.

[Source: TechServe Alliance]

“We’ve added a critical piece to our puzzle with the acquisition of Toolbox.com,” said Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah. “The IT community relies on itself to make decisions and be informed. Owning the leading professional networking site is a significant strategic advantage for Ziff Davis.”

Toolbox.com will become part of Ziff Davis’ B2B Focus, which was formed when the company acquired Focus Research.

This makes the fourth acquisition for Ziff Davis in the past year.

Toolbox.com has 2.3 million registered members.

Ziff Davis sites already reach 40 million per month. Properties include: PCMag, BuyerBase, LogicBuy, Geek.com, ExtremeTech, AppScout and B2B Focus.

All that began to change in 2007, when Apple released the first iPhone. Suddenly flip phones with cameras were no longer the height of consumer phone technology. With the iPhone, Apple introduced a devices that was both popular with consumers, and capable of meeting the same needs as a business smartphone. Not long after, Google released their Android operating system, and a whole armada of touch screen smartphones hit the market in short order. Before long, people in the business world began wanting to bring in their personal iPhones or Android phones for use in business. As these phones have gained in popularity, more and more companies have begun instituting BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – programs, where employees use their personal phones for business, rather than being issued a work phone.

Recently, Good Technology, a company that specializes in mobile solutions for business, conducted a study (press release; PDF) on these BYOD programs and their effect on busness. The results of the study, which says that the “traditional model of supporting only company-owned devices” is becoming “increasingly obsolete” show that BYOD is gaining popularity in the business world. Of the businesses surveyed 72.2% supported BYOD, and a further 3.9% planned to so so in the next year, while 14.8% were considering the program, but with no specific timeline. Some industries are more willing to embrace the concept than others: the financial and healthcare industries are more likely to allow employees to bring their own devices, while retail businesses and the government are less likely to do so.

Interestingly, larger companies are more likely to allow employees to use their own devices: 80% of companies with BYOD programs have 2,000 employees or more, 60% have 5,000 or more, and 35% have 10,000 or more. Of the companies with BYOD programs, half require employees to cover all related costs, while 45% provide employees with either a stipend or the opportunity to claim the costs as a business expense. The companies that provide a stipend appear to have the most success with their BYOD programs.

These programs are not without their problems, however. Though the study does not cover it, BYOD can cause some concerns for corporate IT departments. As employees are increasingly using a wide array of devices for both personal and business use, it is becoming harder and harder for IT to maintain the level of security and implementation control that they enjoyed in the golden age of the Blackberry. A number of companies – including Good Technology – have sprung up to help deal with the problem. Recently, in a move that some think may signal the beginning of their eventual exit from the handset market, Blackberry parent company RIM announced Blackberry Mobile Fusion. The new security software is designed to integrate iOS and Android devices into Blackberry’s vaunted device security system.

Does your company support BYOD? What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments.

FailDesk is the brainchild of two IT guys and the editor of Geeks Are Sexy, who have taken up the cause to comfort and cheer up their IT comrades who “work so tirelessly and diligently to make sure ‘the system stays up.’” Launched earlier this month, the site is a one-stop destination for their brethren to commiserate and find “IT-related humor while at the same time giving you a place to submit your own funny stories, pictures or videos.” Here’s a sample of some of their offerings, which I have to admit are pretty solid knee-slappers:

Beyond the quick-laugh images you’ll find there, some war-torn IT soldiers have submitted personal accounts of some of the more vexing and humorous incidents they’ve encountered in the battlefield. The stories are equal parts likely to make you shake your head in amused disbelief and cause you to lose your faith in humanity’s ability to find their way out of a plastic bag. Worthy of note: going from what submissions I’ve read on FailDesk, printer problems are an epidemic. I wonder how many times some of these IT support guys’ eyes have glazed over as they drifted into a grinning fugue while fantasizing about this.

If you plan to submit something, put your best foot forward because you may even be given a prize if your story is good enough. It’s also worth mentioning that I will not be held responsible for any loss in productivity due to any IT guys at my office turning their attention to this site instead of working to keep the system up.

Note, I am only using Oracle as an example here because the pricing of Amazon RDS for Oracle Database is public. This post intends to make no judgments on Amazon or Oracle’s price points whatsoever.

Pay-per-use software pricing limited to entry level product
Amazon RDS for Oracle Database offers two price models, “License Included” or “Bring Your Own License (BYOL)”. The License Included metric is fancy terminology for pay-per-usage, and includes the cost of the software, including Oracle Database, underlying hardware resources and Amazon RDS management.

Three editions of Oracle Database are offered by Amazon, Standard Edition One (SE1), Standard Edition (SE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), listed in order of lowest to highest functionality.

It’s important to note that pay-per-use pricing is only offered on the lowest function edition, namely, Oracle Database SE1. This should not be a surprise as Oracle, like other established vendors, is still experimenting with pay-per-usage pricing models. Customers can also run Standard Edition One using a BYOL model. This fact, along with Oracle’s list pricing, helps us do some quick and interesting calculations.

Oracle Database SE1 software price-per-hour ranges between $0.05 to $0.80
The License Included and BYOL prices both include the cost of the underlying hardware resources, OS and Amazon RDS management. The only difference between the two options is the price of the Oracle Database software license.

This allows us to calculate the per hour cost of Oracle Database Standard Edition One as follows:

The Oracle list price for Oracle Database SE1 is $5,800 plus 22 percent, or $1,276 for software update, support and maintenance. Like most enterprise software, customers could expect a discount between 25 to 85 percent. For lower priced software like Oracle Database SE1, let’s assume a 50 percent discount. Although, most customers buying Oracle software are encouraged to enter into Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs) which frequently offer discounts at the higher end of the spectrum.

All told, Oracle Database SE1 after a 50 percent discount would cost a customer $3,538 (($5,800 + $1,276) x 50%) for 1 year or $4,814 ($5,800 + $1,276 + $1,276 + $1,276) x 50%) for 3 years on a single socket quad core machine like this low end Dell server. Note that Oracle doesn’t use their typical processor core factor pricing methodology for products identified as Standard Edition or Standard Edition One as they are targeted at lower performance servers.

A single socket quad core machine would offer the performance of somewhere between the Amazon “Double Extra Large DB Instance” and the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance”.

Consider the long term costs of per-per-usage

Using “Double Extra Large DB Instance” pricing, with our calculated cost an Oracle Database SE1 software license on Amazon of $0.40/hr, we can calculate a 1 year cost of $3,504 and a 3 year cost of $10,512. These figures represent a 1 percent lower and 118 % higher cost of using Amazon’s per-per-usage offering versus licensing Oracle Database SE1 through Oracle for on premises deployment or a BYOL for deployment on Amazon RDS.

There are obviously multiple caveats to consider, like the ability to get lower or higher discounts from Oracle, or comparing with the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” price point.

A customer that is unable to get a 50 percent discount from Oracle could save licensing costs by using Amazon’s pay-per-usage offering for Oracle Database SE1. For instance, with only a 25 percent discount from Oracle, the customer could save up to 34 percent on a 1 year basis, but stands to pay an extra 46 percent a 3 year basis.

Comparing the cost of Oracle Database SE1 using traditional licensing on premises with Amazon’s pricing through RDS, it appears that customers should look hard at Amazon’s per-per-usage offering for up to a 1 year term, but stick with Oracle’s traditional pricing model if the software is going to be used for the typical 3 to 5 year period that companies like to amortize costs over.

The obvious rebuttal to the above calculations would be that a customer electing for a pay-per-usage model would not necessarily run for 24 hours a day for a full year. While this is true, buyers should understand the long term cost implications before making short term decisions.

Originally published on rand($thoughts);

Original Article (03/29): Cisco announced its intent to acquire newScale, a “self-service, service catalog, and lifecycle management software” provider for cloud-based IT. The above video does a pretty good job of explaining what newScale is all about.

newScale claims to have over two million users globally, and counts companies like AT&T, American Express, Boeing, and Allstate among its customers. It fact, its customers come from a wide range of industries, including: automotive, chemicals, consumer goods, education, energy, financial, healthcare, insurance, IT outsourcing, manufacturing, oil/gas, pharmaceuticals, public sector, retail/hospitality, services, technology, telecommunications, and transportation.

“Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical,” said Parvesh Sethi, SVP of Cisco Services. “With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco will be able to accelerate the deployment of cloud services through a service catalog and self-service portal that allows customers to easily manage their IT infrastructures.”

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second half of Cisco’s fiscal year 2011. newScale’s team would report to Cisco’s Advanced Services organization.

A couple weeks ago, Cisco announced its first-ever cash dividend, with a quarterly dividend of $0.06 per common share to be paid on April 20, 2011, to all Cisco shareholders. “As the role of the network expands across the IT sector, Cisco’s leadership position in the markets we serve is strong, and the time is right for Cisco to pay our first-ever cash dividend,” said Frank Calderoni, Executive Vice President & CFO of Cisco. “This dividend complements our leading position, and is an important part of our commitment to bring value to shareholders.”

Also about two weeks ago, Cisco completed another acquisition – that of Inlet Technologies, a provider of Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) digital media processing platforms. That one was about $95 million.

Drew Meyer, Senior Director of Marketing for Networking product vendor Netgear shared some thoughts on the transition with WebProNews. 

"It’s a big deal for companies of all sizes because it is a fundamental change in the way the Internet works, but it is also a very subtle transition for most users," says Meyer. "Small businesses that keep older networking hardware in service longer may find they need to upgrade – but only once their networks break down. Channel partners play a key role in educating small and midsized customers."

On what kinds of techniques businesses can embrace while they gear up for the switch to IPv6, Meyer says, "The old and the new (IPv4 and IPv6) will coexist in most networks. Modern servers and software have provisions for dual mode support, but older equipment may require replacement since it cannot support the latest software patches and firmware upgrades. We expect this to happen invisibly as network equipment is refreshed driven by other solutions, like virtualization or mobile access."

"We see it as a side benefit of modernizing midmarket networks and have plans for it across our entire product line of managed, smart and unmanaged switches," he adds.

"Developing markets like China and new applications like mobile devices and home automation demand more Internet connectivity than ever before, so first movers are positioned to become the new leaders of the next generation Internet," he says. "Winners offer simple ways for smaller companies to adopt, and losers will be those vendors who do not educate their channels and end users on the availability of the new function. Midmarket customers purchasing reliable, affordable and simple solutions will be automatically prepared for the IPv6 transition."

World IPv6 Day has been set for June 8. On that day, major web properties like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo will join content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight Networks for a 24-hour global trial of the new protocol.

"The frequency and sophistication of attacks on technology infrastructure and malicious attempts to access data, requires reliable, capable and innovative information security," said Peter Altabef, President of Dell Services. "SecureWorks is a recognized industry leader in information security services and its offerings and expertise will immediately enhance our solutions portfolio. We look forward to welcoming SecureWorks team members – who bring their passion and dedication to serving clients with best-in-class security services – to Dell and our clients."

"Dell’s global scale and relationships with clients provides a tremendous opportunity to rapidly expand SecureWorks’ business," added Michael Cote, CEO and Chairman of SecureWorks. "With Dell’s commitment to our clients, our team and our market, I am confident that SecureWorks will flourish as part of the Dell Services organization and that our clients will continue to be well-served and well-protected by the services on which they rely."

Financial terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed, and the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, though it is expected to be close early this year. 

SecureWorks has been around since 1999. It’s based out of Atlanta and has about 700 employees. It’s revenue for Fiscal Year 2010 is projected to be over $120 million.

Rackspace considers the move a way to better position itself in Silicon Valley, as Cloudkick was originally funded by Y Combinator, and its headquarters is in San Francisco, "making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering Fanatical Support and innovation in cloud computing," a representative for Rackspace tells WebProNews.

"Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500 enterprises to nimble startups — and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools," she says. "Through this acquisition, Rackspace will deliver even better support through superior management tools that will be available directly to customers and also to the Rackers who serve them."

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient," explains Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman. "But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some.  Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl. It takes cloud computing to a new level: into automation of the work of system administrators. In addition to providing robust cloud health information, Cloudkick enables automation around deployment and scaling.  It makes cloud computing more powerful, with less expense."

Cloudkick, which launched two years ago has been working with Mozilla, Vimeo, ProPublica and National Instruments, and is a member of the OpenStack community, the open source cloud project founded by Rackspace itself. 

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.