LOS ANGELES-- En Pointe Technologies, Inc. a NASDAQ listed company, a leading provider of business-to-business information technology products, services and solutions, in the USA, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire stock of two privately-owned Pakistani companies, Ovex Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd and Ovex Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd. that provide business process outsourcing ("BPO") services in the international and local market.

The two companies, headquartered in Lahore, also have offices in Islamabad and Karachi and together employ more than 700 highly-skilled and trained staff members. Ovex currently provides back office operational and financial accounting services for En Pointe directly as well as back office support for various U.S. customers under a contractual arrangement with Premier BPO, Inc. Ovex has also been providing call center services for domestic customers since December 2005.

"We believe that these acquisitions will both help reduce our internal costs for back-office processing and will provide us another source of solid growth in the outsourcing market, complementing our investment in Premier BPO, Inc." said Bob Din, CEO of En Pointe. Mr. Din added, "We are very excited about the growth prospects for Ovex, particularly when leveraged with En Pointe's infrastructure and U.S. customer base. Following the closing of the acquisitions, Ovex will continue to be under the leadership of Mr. Omar Saeed, CEO, who has a proven record, a superior management team and over the past three years has demonstrated an ability to deliver what he promises. Mr. Saeed's success is evidenced by the fact that Ovex has had a 100% customer retention rate since commencing operations in 2003."

"This will be a landmark transaction for the BPO industry in Pakistan. We believe that En Pointe is the first U.S. publicly-traded company to make a BPO acquisition in Pakistan," said Mr. Omar Saeed and further added, "We believe that Ovex, is already one of Pakistan's largest and most experienced business outsourcing providers and expect Ovex to become the first BPO enterprise in Pakistan to reach the 1,000 employee mark by the end of 2007." “As a subsidiary of a U.S. based publicly-traded company, we believe that Ovex will be able to offer our own domestic publicly-listed companies an optimal level of performance in servicing their business transactions, including the competency, integrity and transparency expected of public companies," Mr. Saeed added.

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This joint venture will involve the business process outsourcing of computerized accounting and taxation operations, where back office in Pakistan will be handling information technology based functions for clientele initially based in United Kingdom. Initially, the companies will have a humble start with around 20 dedicated financial professionals but hope to expand this rapidly as work processes are streamlined. This mutually beneficial business relationship will result in the establishment of a standard for other enterprises to follow, create confidence in the eyes of foreign investors and hence contribute positively to the business process outsourcing industry in the country, which has yet to reach the mark in the realm of professional services.

SKP Consulting Ltd. is one of Pakistan’s oldest and largest consulting firms with over 25 years of experience in the business services sector. Headquartered in Lahore, it has a network of 10 branches all over Pakistan with nearly 200+ professionals serving its clients who are based all over the world. SKP consulting is one of the few consulting firms in the country which are actively involved in the export of services of foreign clients. The central philosophy of SKP has been to promote the idea of a ‘global village’ which has led to work with a lot of foreign clients who have an active interest to invest in Pakistan. Information technology has been one of the core businesses and one of its critical success factors has been to productively merge financial services with information technology.

The chairman of MGI Wenham Major Ltd, Mr. John Joyce, FCCA, has visited Pakistan on 17th of October 2006, to sign the newly formed company documents and review operational setup.

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Bank of Punjab contracts KalSoft for its Hi-tech Banking Solution

Bank of Punjab (BOP) has embarked on achieving excellence in its I.T. infrastructure, to upgrade its banking processes for achieving strategic business objectives. Established in 1989 in pursuance of The Bank of Punjab Act 1989, BOP was given the status of scheduled bank in 1994. BOP is working as a scheduled commercial bank with its network of 266 branches at all major business centers in the country providing all types of banking services such as Deposit in Local Currency, Client Deposit in Foreign Currency, Remittances, and Advances to Business, Trade, Industry and Agriculture. KalSoft, a Premier Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading Enterprise I.T. Solution Provider of Pakistan, has introduced advancement to the conventional style of banking to boost the economy and enhance the reputation of Pakistani IT industry by signing this contract.

Faisal Azmat Khan, Chief Manager IT Division of BOP, on this auspicious occasion said: “Bank of Punjab is faced by an extremely difficult, demanding and complex problem made up of various factors like legacy systems, budgetary constraints and a widely dispersed branch infrastructure. To cover the wide technological divide between existing systems and envisioned ones that may carry the Bank through the next decade, we have picked KalSoft as a reliable partner to bridge this gap. It is our hope to achieve success via IT Smart Solutions verses throwing money at the problem. We believe that with the help of KalSoft and Microsoft success is assured.”

KalSoft earned this contract from amongst 20 major IT players of Pakistan, having satisfied the careful and comprehensive assessment criteria observed by BOP’s I.T. steering committee. BOP's quality certifications, presence in Lahore and size of the organization played a vital role in their success.
 

Teradata is yet again proven to be the best choice platform when it comes to Data warehousing. Gartner, in its recently published Magic Quadrant Report has rated Teradata to be the strongest candidate across all size Data warehouses and rates Teradata the best cost effective solution above 10TB. According to Gartner Report Teradata’s recent pricing structure has also enabled Teradata to remain price competitive in smaller warehouses.

This report compares the different players across several parameters such as: Product Services, Overall viability, Sales & Execution, Customer Experience, Market Understanding, Product offering strategy, etc. Teradata has been placed at the highest level in the Magic Quadrant (The leaders Quadrant) as the leaders in the terms of its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR), is the global technology leader in enterprise data warehousing, analytic applications and data warehousing services. NCR is based in Dayton, Ohio and employs approximately 29,300 people worldwide. NCR is one of the multinational companies that chose Pakistan to establish their global consultancy center.

ALP signed  contract with Executive Research whose CEO is Inge Geerdens to build Cvwarehouse.com. Executive Research core business is based on a Human asset bringing candidates into contact with companies and companies with candidates in a confidential and personal way. Soon need arise for a portal and website through which they can be connected with the candidates who can enter data directly in their system. As this needs to be done at lightning speed, they needed to host this solution with capable hosting provider. Alp BSM rose to the challenge in concentrating with other partners to get a cvwarehouse.com portal up and running in a compelling time frame. Alp Business Service Management lived up to their expectations.

With the next opportunity a similar concept but for youngsters together with MTV, Executive Research challenged Alp-BSM. In six weeks time Alp BSM- built wannawork.be which was a product of cvwarehouse.com. This was build for growth and immediate branding for youngsters. Alp-BSM managed to make it public in six weeks time, meeting their deadline.
 

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He said the ‘Think.com’ programme would also be used to improve professional capabilities of the teachers. Think.com turns students into multimedia authors for a global community and allows peers to think and learn together.
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Central Board of Revenue is working on the development of a National Integrated Tax Management System to ensure revenue collection in a rapid and cost-effective manner.
 

“As a part of the reforms in revenue collection system, this fully IT-based system will not only help the tax assesses in filing their returns electronically but also bring down the operational cost of the revenue collection agencies significantly,” said Member Direct taxes, CBR, Salman Nabi.

He said, with the introduction of electronic taxation system, Pakistan would become a pioneer country in South Asia in the field of a fully automated taxation system. The e-filling would be made compulsory for filing of withholding tax returns for large companies in the near future.” Later, this might be made mandatory in other segments of national economy too,” he added. He said that Pakistan is among the few countries in the world with cost-efficient revenue collection system. Salman Nabi said that CBR had tallied the CNICs of 1.9m assesses.

With the data of the National Database and registration authority (NADRA). “A pilot project for data cleansing had been launched at Lahore to make only authentic data available with the CBR,” he said.
 
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US-based WYSE Technology Inc has offered to support to Pakistani universities for further improvement in the standards of information technology education, which will enable Pakistani students to compete at international level. Promotion of IT greatly depends upon quality education and it is the key to acquire a respectable position among the community of nations. 

These views were expressed by Dr John Kish of WYSE Technology Inc USA, who recently visited Pakistan and met Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad and other senior government officials for the field of IT during the past few years and managed to play a leading role in the region and occupied a distinguished position in the region. 

Dr Kish, a PhD in mathematical logics from John Hopkins University, observed that some foreign companies have concerns over the mode of IT education in Pakistan as compared with international standards. WYSE Technology Inc is keenly planning to uplift the standard of IT education in Pakistan to bring it on a par with international standards. 

Pakistan government must be appreciated for adopting investor- friendly policies to keep up with other nations of the world, particularly in the field of information technology. Keeping in view of the current policies of Pakistan, WYSE Inc is considering making Pakistan a hub of its commercial activities in South Asia, Dr Kish added. Wyse Technology is the clear market leader in thin client technology and as many as 38 percent world market share (the highest amongst competitors), continuously surpassing the industry growth rate, invests $18 million on research and development each year.

Thin clients can help many companies to gain more for their hardware investments to achieve security, manageability, affordability, and reliability. It also provides best solution for networking environment to get users up and running quickly, well integrated into the overall corporate computing infrastructure. The new technology may greatly help to improve profitability centralizing management of computing resources. IT staff can maintain all security software, making sure it is consistent and up-to-date across all thin client users.

Offshore outsourcing companies in India are up against competition from multinational services companies who have an edge both on price and the ability to offer services from multiple offshore locations, according to sourcing consultancy Technology Partners International (TPI) of Houston, Texas.
A number of multinational services companies such as IBM in Armonk, New York, Accenture in Bermuda, Perot Systems in Plano, Texas, and Unisys in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, have set up services operations in India to take advantage of the low cost of Indian manpower.

Although multinational services companies previously avoided purely offshore outsourcing contracts, they are now bidding for contracts that require the entire delivery of the services to be done from offshore locations, according to Siddharth Pai, a partner at TPI. Their bids have often been at lower rates than those of their Indian competitors, he said on Saturday.

The multinational offshore operations appear to have taken a decision to accept lower profit margins to gain market share, despite their high cost structure resulting from the higher salaries with which they attracted staff from Indian outsourcing companies, Pai said.

Multinationals are able to offer lower prices than Indian companies, because the expectations of the financial markets about their profit margins are far lower than for Indian outsourcing companies, according to Paul Schmidt, a partner at TPI. The margins expected for multinational service companies is less than 15 percent, while it is close to 30 percent for Indian outsourcing companies, he said.

As the scale of the offshore operations of multinational companies has increased, their costs have also dropped as they are amortized over a larger number of clients, Pai said.

TPI announced the initial findings of its report on the "State of Global Service Delivery." The study is based on a survey of 212 respondent companies from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, according to Schmidt, who is a co-author of the report. The study covers off shoring to both wholly owned subsidiaries and to third-party contractors, he added.

As clients gain experience and maturity in off shoring over a period of five years or more, they started exploring the option of off shoring to multiple locations, both with an eye to lowering costs further, and also to mitigate the risk involved in off shoring to only one location, Schmidt said. Multinational service providers are more likely to bag the business, as most of them already have operations in a number of offshore locations including India, China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, Schmidt added.

Although Indian outsourcing companies have been expanding outside India, customers looking for a single vendor to service their requirements from multiple locations are likely to prefer a multinational service provider, according to Schmidt. Indian vendors claim that they have a global footprint, but the reality on the ground is that they don't have large enough operations at all these locations, he added. Clients are also in general more comfortable dealing with multinational service providers, Schmidt said.

One of the findings of the report is that many companies off shoring to locations like India had to lower their expectations about productivity improvements and cost savings. Many companies came in with high expectations that an offshore worker could be more productive than a domestic worker, Schmidt said. In the survey, TPI found that some of the more experienced companies, that had been off shoring for more than four years, had lowered their expectations, so that they now required two offshore workers to do the work of one, he said.

A key implication of the lower productivity offshore is that if staff costs go up without increase in productivity, then the cost advantage of off shoring could be lost, Pai said. "You only have to come to half the level of the cost in the U.S. for the cost arbitrage to disappear," he said. As staff costs spiral in offshore locations like India, the ceiling might have reached much faster if there are no corresponding improvements in productivity, according to Pai.

Source:  IDG News Service( by John Ribeiro,)
 

The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals says companies will look to entrust their outsourcing relationships to individuals who have earned official certification.
Would you feel more confident about your company's outsourcing relationships if they were overseen by someone deemed an outsourcing expert, with the professional certification to prove it?

The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, a member-based organization launched last year, is of the mind that companies will look to entrust their outsourcing issues to individuals who have earned an official professional badge of accomplishment.
In fact, IAOP, whose mission is to "build outsourcing as a profession and an industry," just graduated its first group of newly minted certified outsourcing professionals, or COPS, for short.

In fact, IAOP's first COPS graduates have an array of career experiences, including individuals who have spearheaded and overseen outsourcing pacts related to R&D, manufacturing, real-estate, and other areas of business in industries such as pharmaceutical, consumer products, consulting, and yes, IT.

What they all have in common is demonstrated experience in designing, building, implementing, and managing outsourcing relationships, says Corbett.

COPS creates a common framework and lexicon for professionals involved with outsourcing, setting standards for experience and knowledge related to selection processes, governance, legal issues, and many other activities involved with outsourcing, including how to successfully drive value out of outsourcing relationships, Corbett says.

"Outsourcing is a career path in its own right," he says.

The first crop of COPS was granted to 13 individuals who have an average of 15 years experience in outsourcing. The main requirement for the certification is for candidates to have had end-to-end responsibility for three different outsourcing projects at two different companies.

Certification candidates undergo peer review based on their COPS application, which must describe demonstrated experience in outsourcing, including information about specific outsourcing projects and their significance at their companies. They're expected to have experience in challenges like scoping out outsourcing opportunities and identifying early warning indicators that outsourcing relationships are going awry or have problems that need to be fixed.

IAOP also offers four-day, intensive master classes that can help individuals round out training in key areas, including governance and legal, Corbett says.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com

Infosys Works Hard to Keep Staff

In the Indian outsourcing industry, attracting and retaining staff is critical to keeping the business growing. To keep its staff, Infosys Technologies pays them the same or, at times, better than the rest of the outsourcing industry in India, and has set up large state-of-the-art facilities that pamper the staff with on-campus beauty salons, shopping arcades, subsidized restaurants, jogging tracks, and large gyms.

The job also gives staff an opportunity to be posted abroad, which is a key attraction for a lot of Indian staff.

Infosys, like other Indian outsourcing companies, does not have a trade union. The company does not encourage unions, nor have the employees shown any inclination to unionize. Part of the reason is that salaries in the Indian outsourcing industry are afar higher than in other sectors of the Indian economy.

Trade unions have instead complained about the large number of hours staff work at outsourcing companies. IT services staff often work late in the evening, as they need to deal with customers in the United States and Europe, in different time zones than India.
"I am usually late at the office, either completing work or to get a call through to a customer or a colleague in the U.S.," said an employee at Infosys' Bangalore facility.
Business process outsourcing staff has to work night shifts to service customers in the United States.

"Work in all offshore operations is hard, and I am usually in the office for 11 hours a day, apart from about two hours of commute time," said a software engineer at the Indian software development subsidiary of a U.K. company. "The salary at Infosys at my level is lower than what I currently get, but every software engineer wants to work there for the brand image Infosys has," he added

On the bright side, there are fewer layers of management at Infosys than at many other offshore operations, and opportunities for career growth are high, said the Infosys employee in Hyderabad. Software engineers can even look forward to careers in consulting, even though they have not gone through business school, he added.

However, software engineers working in product development would rarely consider employment with outsourcing companies like Infosys. "In the services industry you are working on a small portion of a project for which the specifications have been laid out by the customer, so you don't get a feeling of ownership," said an engineer at the Bangalore product development subsidiary of a multinational technology company.

I.B.M. has moved its global procurement headquarters to Southern China from the suburbs of New York City to “capitalize on emerging market opportunities.”

I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., spends 30 percent of its $40 billion annual procurement in Asia, the company said in a statement yesterday, confirming the move to Shenzhen that was first announced to suppliers in May. This is the first time that I.B.M., the world’s biggest computer services company, has moved the headquarters of one of its largest divisions to China.

Companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft are expanding in China to take advantage of lower costs and to gain market share in the world’s most populous nation.

The government will increase the number of public wireless "hot spots" from 900 to 5,000 by next year as part of the plan, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told an audience late Tuesday evening while launching the Wireless@SG initiative marking 25 years of a drive to boost information technology in Singapore.

"We must create digital opportunities for all Singaporeans, and never allow a digital divide in our society," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told the audience..

Lee said about 10,000 needy households with school-going children will qualify for subsidized computers, and efforts will be made to help the elderly and disabled use the Internet. The Straits Times newspaper reported that families that earn less than 200 Singapore dollars ($125) a month can purchase a computer for S$285 ($179)

The plan will offer free 512 kilobits per second wireless access for at least two years through telecom operators SingTel, iCell and QMax at public wireless hot spots across the city, said a press release from the government's Infocomm Development Authority, which is running Wireless@SG.

SingTel will offer the service free for three years; the others for two years.

"The three operators will bump up the number of Wireless@SG 'hotzones' in high-traffic, public areas ... to make wireless broadband a ubiquitous access mode by September 2007," the statement said. The hot spots will be concentrated at town centers, business districts and shopping belts.The development authority will pay up to 30 million Singapore dollars ($18.9 million) of the expected S$100 million ($63 million) cost for the wireless networks.
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UN Forum Focuses on Internet's Future

Participants met to prepare for the forum, taking place in Athens, with online Webcasts and participation through blogs. Access, control, diversity, combating child pornography, spam, phishing, freedom of speech, Internet control and network protocols.
Nitin Desai, who will chair the meeting, said the technology is young and people have not really sorted out how the Internet should be treated. He compared debates about the Internet to those about the chemical composition of ink and the design of the paper when the printer was invented, which missed the point.

I"The real impact of printing was completely for other reasons altogether, and I sometimes feel that we are not even asking the right questions, in many of these discussions, but that will come," Desai said. "This is a very young technology. There's lots of time to get things right."
He said the Internet has helped maintain access to information in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq.
"Do not underestimate what this technology has already done in democratizing access to information ... most important of all in political mobilization," he said, adding that the treaty banning landmines could not have been possible without Internet connections between the countries involved.

Desai said that much of the discussions about the Internet recently have centred on the tension between openness and control.

"This has always been there and it will always be there," he said. "We will always have to continue to act to protect it because it is in the very nature of government to try and restrict people's liberties."

He said that the forum would give representation to everyone with a stake in the Internet and promote discussions to "keep people honest."

For problems like child pornography and spam, Desai said that existing laws prohibit those acts. The Internet just poses new problems in terms of scope and being able to track down culprits, he said.

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Red Hat Stock Continues Plunge after Oracle Linux Support News

Oracle plans to start offering its own version of Red Hat, along with services, such as software patches and support, for customers who run Oracle database and other applications on Red Hat servers. Oracle’s so-called Unbreakable Linux 2.0 will cost $99 per year for support services and updates. Red Hat charges from $399 to $999 per year to support Red Hat Linux servers of varying sizes. Most of Red Hat’s revenue is derived from its services and support business, while the software itself is relatively inexpensive compared to competitive server operating systems.

Oracle says that Red Hat’s efforts will cause incompatibility issues among machines running Red Hat Linux and Oracle’s version of the software. The Linux company responded to the news with a Question-and-Answer Web site, stating its position on Oracle’s Linux push.

Oracle’s Linux plans have affected other Linux companies, such as Novell, whose stock fell 2.6% to $5.97 as of 2 p.m. Friday.

Embedded developers have long maintained real-time patch sets outside the mainline Linux kernel, but those days may be coming to an end, according to representatives of Linux developer service provider TimeSys Corp. That company announced Thursday (Oct. 12) that basic support for real-time features has been added to the mainline Linux kernel.

The new real-time features are available in the Linux 2.6.18 kernel, and will be further extended in future kernel releases. TimeSys, meanwhile, has expanded its LinuxLink developer service to include real-time Linux extensions.

Real-time performance enhancements available in the 2.6.18 kernel include priority inheritance support to prevent priority inversions, and extensions to the generic interrupt handling layer across all architectures, including embedded architectures such as ARM. Technology contributors include Ingo Molnar of Red Hat and Thomas Gleixner, senior open source developer at TimeSys. Additional real-time features that are currently available as patches will continue to be merged into subsequent kernels.

A LinuxLink subscription is a web-based service that provides tools, open-source code, technical reference information, and other embedded development resources. In addition to the latest Linux kernel, LinuxLink provides cross-compiled packages for target processors, a cross-development environment, source-level debugging support, and access to on-line and interactive support.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.18 Linux kernel Sept.19, 2006

Source: http://www.informationweek.com
 

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Competitiveness, Not Off-shoring, is EU Weakness

More than 3,000 domestic and international venture capital and private equity firms, about 380 focus on software and software services. Intrigued by this private equity activity, we decided to follow venture capital investment in the software sector in search of

. This piece is the first in a regular series where we will analyze venture capital investments in the software space through data analysis, company profiles, trend analysis, and interviews with company managements and venture capitalists.

According to Price Waterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the software sector continues to lead all other sectors, even biotech, in terms of venture capital investment. In 2Q06, VCs invested $1.26B in 231 deals, compared with more than $1.31B in 215 deals in 1Q06 and $1.32B in 240 deals in 2Q05.

And this money is not funding pipedreams in garages. Seed and startup investment accounted for about $46M, and early-stage investment tallied about $128M. By contrast, expansion-stage investments were a whopping $579M, and later-stage investments were $511M in the quarter.

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The rise of business process utilities, Are you ready for the next step in the evolution of outsourcing?
“Converging Trends in Outsourcing: Moving Toward the Light,” a Gartner report written by Allie Young, has a lofty title but raises a very down-to-earth concern about where outsourcing will eventually lead us. We are witnessing the convergence of a number of business/IT trends, the outcome of which is still unknown.

The big trend in outsourcing is, of course, BPO (business process outsourcing). Companies are saying they don’t want to continue to own and maintain processes and technologies that are not core to their businesses. However, BPO is still about customized business processes. A company turns over its assets, people, processes, technology, and facilities to the service provider and says, “You run it.”
In the past, outsourcers used offshore facilities to reduce their own costs, but this has changed. Now it’s the customers who are demanding lower costs. So after the outsourcer has wrung out all of the excess overhead, the next move is to go completely offshore to further reduce customer costs.

That’s fine for two or three years, but in short orders all of the cost reduction will be wrung out of off shoring as well. The next step will be BPU (business process utility) computing.
For the BPU model to work, the process or business unit owner -- say, the vice president of HR -- has to accept the fact that HR processes are not a competitive differentiator for the company. BPU is all about standardized processes and a one-to-many architecture. So whereas BPO for the most part uses a company’s existing architecture, BPU does not. Lisa Stone, vice president at Gartner, says there is typically less than 15 percent customization in a utility model, unless the company is willing to pay for it.

BPO will grow around types of services, not around competitive differentiators, with the caveat
that a company must be willing to accept “good enough,” according to Gartner’s “Converging Trends in Outsourcing.”

The twist, the study says, is that by 2007 more than 60 percent of BPO decisions will be made at
the business-unit level without the involvement of IT. By 2008, the study says, more than 30
percent of new software purchases will be delivered via the utility model, with more than 70
percent of utility offerings targeted toward business units or line managers, rather than toward
IT organizations.

If BPU services are no longer purchased by the CIO, who has knowledge of the enterprise’s overall IT architecture, but are purchased instead by individual process managers -- who have profits and losses to worry about and who may say, “I just want to get the job done at the lowest cost” -- those companies are heading down a dangerous road.

For example, Linda Cohen, vice president of the strategic sourcing group at Gartner, tells me
about one Gartner customer whose vice president of HR bought into an HR BPU solution. “It was no problem until it came time to tap into the new tax regulations and it didn’t operate with their
SAP infrastructure,” Cohen says.

The trend toward outsourcing non-core processes is a given. But it must be kept in mind that
these decisions “affect the IT landscape deeply,” Young notes in her Gartner study. Although the
business process owners may want to take the lead in sourcing service providers, the final
decision should be made by the entire executive team.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com

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High-Impact Trends Emerging in Enterprise Computing

A new dawn in high-end computing has emerged, according to Gartner, which the analyst has labeled the fourth era in enterprise computing.
Creating the new era are economic forces like globalization, the rapid pace of change in new areas of IT such as biotechnology and nanotechnology (microchip-based and molecular technology), and worldwide, a higher value placed on intellectual capital over traditional forms of capital like property.

Gartner senior vice president of research Asia Pacific, Bob Hayward said in the first era, the IBM 360 class M/4 computer was the "first class" computer designed for commercial use.
This phase, he said, was driven by the need to automate labour-intensive business processes. Big iron computing and mid-range server architecture has all but died, but is continuing to power on in industries like manufacturing, he said.

The second era of computing was driven by industries' focus on productivity and flatter corporate hierarchies.

This in turn created huge challenges on total cost of ownership and made mid-range server architecture popular, Hayward said.

The Internet phenomenon which emerged in the 1990s created the third stage of computing where network connectivity to automate separate islands of information was the main IT concern of business, he said.

The world has now reached a fourth phase in enterprise computing, marked by users' need for ubiquitous access to information for their work from wherever they may be in the world, Hayward said. "Now there is more focus on organizations improving their business, enabling new business models, attacking new markets and increasing their efficiency," he said.

Classic examples of innovators in the Internet era were pure play (businesses only enabled by the Internet) dotcoms, Ebay, Yahoo and Amazon, all of which, Hayward said, "seem to have survived" the Internet industry fallout.

Commenting on the hottest new technologies which will dominate IT R&D activity over the next few years, Hayward said JavaScript (Sun Microsystems' computer language) would be seen as the solution to "all our computer problems". Also, speech recognition solutions would be a popular technology among CIOs.

"Organizations are always looking to the next big dream to improve productivity," he mused.
Wireless technologies like Bluetooth would be used at some point in the infrastructure of most large companies by late 2002 to 2003, Hayward said.

Steve Tucker, IT manager of regional aircraft service operator National Jet Systems, disagreed with Gartner that the developed world had reached a new stage of enterprise computing.
He argued that Moore's Law of computing -- the idea that chip performance doubled every 18 months, and originated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 - underpinned the IT industry's evolution and "still applied" today.

"Computing power is seemingly growing at an exponential rate now, but it has always been growing, according to Moore's Law -- we are just dealing now with much higher levels of growth in that exponential process, than before," he said.

Specifically, Tucker said vendors like AMD had raised the bar in the computing industry and brought unprecedented competition to micro processing powerhouses such as Intel. Also, companies like Nvidia had pioneered technologies with more technology in their processors than mainstream CPU manufacturers, he said.

Overall, he believes the profile of the IT industry as a whole has been raised significantly in the last five years or so, and consequently, "generated shareholder interest and therefore competition in all sectors".

Source: Computerworld
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Air Travel to Become More High-Tech, Study Says, Half of Airlines will Offer In-Flight Communications By End Of 2007

Study says half of airlines will offer in-flight communications by end of 2007

Almost half the world's airlines plan to offer some form of in-flight communications for passengers by the end of 2007, with most favoring Internet access, e-mail and SMS (short messaging service), Perhaps surprisingly, more than a third of airlines surveyed also said they expect to let passengers use mobile phones on planes by that time, according to the Airline IT Trends Survey, published annually by SITA, a big provider of IT services to the air transport industry.t

"Mobile telephony -- which is the least mature and probably the most controversial option -- will be embraced by 36 percent of airlines by 2007, which is quite remarkable considering the product is not yet available," said Peter Buecking, SITA's president, in a presentation Thursday that was shown over the Web.

The findings are based on responses from senior IT executives at the world's top 200 airlines, as well as big players in cargo and other markets, said SITA, which has headquarters in Geneva. The airlines that responded account for two-thirds of the world's airline revenue, it said.
The communications services are designed to snag new customers and build loyalty at a time when many airlines are struggling to turn a profit. Airlines are also turning increasingly to self-service systems, such as online ticket sales and check-in kiosks, to cut costs and move customers through airports more quickly, the survey found.

Seventy percent of the world's airlines now sell tickets through the Internet, and 30 percent of all tickets issued are electronic, up from 19 percent a year ago, SITA said.

Sixty percent of the airlines questioned reported using self-service kiosks. Most of those are tied to a particular airline today, but many will be general-purpose kiosks by 2007, where passengers can check in with any airline, SITA found. More passengers may also be able to print boarding passes before leaving for the airport, a measure that could reduce crowding at airline counters. That's because almost two-thirds of airlines said they plan to introduce bar codes on tickets, rather than magnetic strips, by the end of 2007.

The bar codes could also allow passengers to present their boarding passes at the gate on a mobile phone or PDA (personal digital assistant), rather than using a paper copy.
Paul Coby, SITA's chairman and the chief information officer at British Airways PLC, said airlines will be "the world's first fully Web-enabled industry."

Better technology could help reduce bumping to some extent, by helping airlines build more accurate models for determining how much they need to overbook flights.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com

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The U.S. government needs to get more serious about Cyber Security, but Congress should look at broader ways to combat security problems than focusing on bills that address specific issues such as spam or spyware, a group of executives from IT security product vendors said this week.

Members of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), meeting in Washington, D.C., Thursday, repeated their call for Congress to create an assistant secretary for Cyber Security position at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Two bills introduced in Congress this year would elevate the DHS Cyber Security job to assistant secretary.

Members of the year-old CSIA, meeting as a rash of data breaches have been announced in recent months, said they committed this week to helping Congress and administration officials understand Cyber Security issues. Coviello and other IT security firm executives questioned Congress' current approach of passing laws focused on specific Cyber Security concerns in reaction to the latest headlines.

Instead of trying to define scams like spyware or phishing in bills, Congress should focus on broader concepts such as how to protect private data and on comprehensive Cyber Security legislation, said Thomas Noonan, chairman, president and chief executive officer at Internet Security Systems Inc. Currently, 18 bills in Congress deal in some way with Cyber Security, he said.

Panel members also called for more law enforcement resources to deal with Cyber Security and more consumer education efforts that stress individual responsibility while using the Internet.