Tag Archive for IBM

RB | December 13, 2011
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U.S. Firms Set Record Hiring H-1Bs

RecessionCorporate America’s assault on the middle class continues. Despite the jobless epidemic, U.S. companies are tripping over themselves to fill high paying job openings with workers from overseas. The BusinessInsider reports that tech titans led by Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM (IBM), have already maxed out their allotment of 65,000 H-1B visas.

GreedThe article says that U.S. companies have set a three-year record in how quickly they reached the cap for H-1B workers.The applications process for 2012 opened on April 1 and on November 23, the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services department announced that the cap had been reached.

But there are more than 65,000 jobs at stake. The USCIS also received “more than 20,000 H-1B petitions filed for persons exempt from the cap under the ‘advanced degree’ exemption,” it said. In addition, petitions for workers who already have their visas are not counted toward the cap.

DepressionThe H-1B visa is a temporary work visa for those classified as “skilled workers” such as IT staff, engineers, doctors and scientists, and the pay is good. For instance, the average salary for a worker that lands a job at Google (GOOG) is $103,129, at Oracle (ORCL) it is $104,080 and at Microsoft it is $96,497, according to MyVisaJobs.com, a firm that helps prospective employees apply for such positions.

According to the BusinessInsider the visa program was established to let employers hire the best and brightest from a global workforce. But some U.S. workers have complained that the program allows companies to ignore U.S. workers and import employees willing to work for lower wages.

Food Line in DetoritThe blog says critics of the program have also complained that H-1B workers have diminished rights and protections, too. They have charged that such workers cannot leave their employers, for instance. Workers must petition the USCIS to extend their visa, change employers, accept a second back-to-back H-1B job and so on.

As with earlier years, Microsoft imports the most overseas talent, followed by IBM and Indian outsourcer Infosys (INFY). The top 25 users of H-1B Visas come largely from the high tech sector.

Top H-1B Visa sponsors according to MyVisaJobs.com

  1. Microsoft 2505 H-1B Visas
  2. IBM 1263 H-1B Visas
  3. Infosys Technologies 1058 H-1B Visas
  4. Deloitte Consulting 887 H-1B Visas
  5. Fujitsu Laboratories of America 747 H-1B Visas
  6. Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) 645 H-1B Visas
  7. Patni Americas 540 H-1B Visas
  8. CVS Pharmacy (CVS) 499 H-1B Visas
  9. Qualcomm (QCOM) 472 H-1B Visas
  10. Larsen Toubro Infotech 418 H-1B Visas
Category: Out-sourcing, Recession | Tags: , , , , , , ,
RB | October 13, 2011
3 comments

Cloud Computing Risks

Cloud computingCloud computing is a term even non-IT folks would have heard about at least once by now fueled by the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and virtualization. The idea is that IT services and processing capabilities could be more efficiently housed in a data center and delivered over the Internet-based on demand.

Dr. Dobb’s, editor-in-chief Andrew Binstock told FierceCIO that the primary advantage of relying on cloud providers is that their combined expertise on the security and reliability front is in all likelihood better than that of most SMBs and even some larger IT shops.

Bob Violino at Internet Evolution writes that cloud computing offers some clear benefits for organizations: lower costs, automated software updates, greater flexibility, and the ability for IT staff to focus on more strategic projects and not day-to-day maintenance tasks.

It’s easy to get caught up in the cloud excitement with major IT vendors such as Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Dell (DELL), Google (GOOG),HP (HPQ),IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) pushing the concept and rolling out cloud offerings. But organizations looking into cloud computing need to consider some key risks as well.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, told shareholders in 2008 that Cloud technology is a fad that lacks a clear business model. “I think it’s ludicrous that cloud computing is taking over the world.” Ellison said. “It’s the Webvan of computing.”

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, sees cloud computing as a trap that will result in people being forced to buy into locked and proprietary systems that will only cost more over time. He told The Guardian: “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.”

Some of the cloud risks are well documented, but as the push for cloud services continues, a few risk points are starting to come into focus:

MicrosoftData Privacy. When it comes to the U.S., the Fourth Amendment states that people should “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…” But web-hosted applications and cloud services are too new for the courts to have been able to provide far-reaching guidance on data privacy online. Data stored outside of the country makes data privacy issues even more complex.

Data privacyInformation security. A report from the World Privacy Forum discusses the issues related to cloud computing and the privacy and confidentiality of information. According to the report, “for some information and for some business users, sharing may be illegal, may be limited in some ways, or may affect the status or protections of the information shared.”

Even when no laws prevent a user from disclosing information to a cloud provider, the report says, disclosure may still not be free of consequences. “Information stored by a business or an individual with a third-party may have fewer or weaker privacy or other protections than information in the possession of the creator of the information.” A cloud provider’s terms of service, privacy policy, and location may significantly affect a user’s privacy and confidentiality interests, the report states.

Computer securityData Security. There are many threats to data online. The application or service provider could go belly up, hackers could attack or just be locked out of your account. The good news is that data portability and security policies are being scrutinized closely by several organizations..

Mr. Binstock observed that no cloud storage provider will promise that they will not access your data under any circumstances. It is also common to find explicit clauses that allow law enforcement agencies access to your data.

Head in the sandBelieving that this is acceptable because there is nothing incriminating in one’s data storage, is, in his words, “intensely naïve.” The obvious problem, notes Mr. Binstock, is that any government agency examining your data is under no contractual obligation to you to keep them safe, or even delete copies that were created.

Chenxi Wang at Forrester noted that an effective assessment strategy must cover data protection, compliance, privacy, identity management, and other related legal issues. “In an age when the consequences and potential costs of mistakes are rising fast for companies that handle confidential and private customer data, IT security professionals must develop better ways of evaluating the security and privacy practices of the cloud services.”

NetworkNetwork. The idea of putting the network health in the hands of the ISPs is very troubling. Have you ever tried to work with an ISP to find out why your round trip latency times are so high? can your organization confidently define: The bandwidth requirements of your apps? The end-to-end throughput needs? Where will your data really be? Will it take the same path today and tomorrow? Who will pick up the phone when you call to say “the cloud is slow?” Will you be able to understand them?

Complexity. As cloud computing evolves, “combinations of cloud services will be too complex and untrustworthy for end consumers to handle their integration,” according to a report from Gartner Inc.. Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow notes:

“Unfortunately, using [cloud] services created by others and ensuring that they’ll work — not only separately, but also together — are complicated tasks, rife with data integration issues, integrity problems and the need for relationship management”

Finances. Cloud computing changes the way software is purchased. The model for purchasing software one time and then choose to opt to purchase the newer version a few years later may be on the way out.  With cloud computing, the vendor can just raise the prices the following month. It requires a different mindset, of subscription fees as opposed to purchase. We will see how the public takes it.

These are some of the issues that must be addressed if companies are to decide that cloud computing offers benefits that exceed the ROI of providing similar services in-house without increasing risk.

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Sure, “the cloud” will work for most people most of the time, but if there are a lot of users, there will be a lot of errors. With 100,000 users, 10% having problems over 10 years is 10,000 unhappy users.

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Category: Cloud computing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
RB | March 16, 2011
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China Creates Cloud Computing City

Cloud City ComputerWorld says that China is employing IBM (IBM) to help it build a city-sized cloud computing center based in northern China’s Hebei Province.  The cloud computing center is being built in Langfang, a city between Beijing and Tianjin in the new Langfang Range International Information Hub, IBM spokeswoman Harriet Ip told ComputerWorld. The complex is expected to be opened by 2016 and be comparable in size to the Pentagon.

Hebei data centerIBM will be supplying its data design services, while Chinese firm Range Technology Development, (Google translation) an Internet data center services provider, founded in 2009, will also be working on the project. There will initially be seven low-slung data centers, spanning up to one million square feet, with room for three more units on either side. There are reports that it include a residential area, most likely for the staff working at the data centers. A ComputerWorld article says the facility will mainly serve government departments from China’s capital and across the country, but will also be open to banks and private enterprises.

ComputerWorld cites IDC data that says despite such large-scale projects, China’s IT budget is five times lower than the US’s. IDC says China’s IT budget is growing at a higher pace than in the US. The research house days China’s full year growth for 2011 will be $112 billion, while the US IT market will be $564 billion.

China’s IT industry isn’t that big at this point and “there is a lot of reliance on the vendors” to design data centers, Dale Sartor, an engineer at U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who visited about eight data centers in China last year told ComputerWorld. Mr. Sartor expects to see accelerating data center development in China, particularly involving very large centers delivering cloud services. Large data centers may soon be the norm. “I got a sense that the cloud is going to be huge in China for both efficiency reasons as well as the ability to control,” said Sartor. “If everything was cloud computing and the government owns it, it’s much easier to keep your finger on the Internet and other issues than [by using] a very distributed model.”

IBMChina’s rapid IT growth has been a plus for IBM, which said its growth in that country in 2010 was up 25% over the year before. According to ComputerWorld, IBM’s  data-center business in China has tripled in the last four years. In 2010, China overtook Japan as IBM’s second largest data center market, with the U.S. as the company’s number one market.

In terms of size, the data centers will be among the world’s biggest. The largest known data center complex is a 1.1-million-square-foot facility in Chicago owned by Digital Realty Trust, according to Data Center Knowledge, which has ranked the data centers by size.

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Not the same Cloud City that Lando Calrissian ran.

What do you think?

Is your data center that big?


Category: China, Hardware | Tags: , ,
RB | March 12, 2011
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Foxconn – The Empire Apple Made

AppleHon Hai Precision Industry Foxconn is now the biggest exporter out of China. The firm churns out products like iPads,  iPhones and PlayStations for Americans. Among its clients are Apple, Cisco (CSCO), Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Sony (SNE).  Most American consumers never head of Foxconn, which is also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, until employees began to commit suicide by leaping off its buildings. However the firm has a longer history.

Terry Gou aka the ‘general’ founded Foxconn in 1974 with a $7,500 loan from his mother. According to a recent Buisnessweek article his first world headquarters was a rented shed in a gritty Taipei suburb called Tucheng, which means Dirt City in Mandarin. Mr. Gou, then 23, had done three years of vocational training and served in the military. He then worked for two years as a shipping clerk, where he got a firsthand view of Taiwan’s booming export economy and figured he ought to stop pushing paper and get into the game. With the cash from his mother, he bought a couple of plastic molding machines and started making channel-changing knobs for black-and-white televisions. His first customer was Chicago-based Admiral TV, and he soon got deals to supply RCA, Zenith, and Philips (PHG).

Mr. Gou’s first step into American consumer electronics came in 1980 when he started supplying Atari with connectors that linked the joystick cable to its 2600 video-game console. At the height of the Atari craze, Hon Hai was producing connectors for the 15,000 video-game consoles that Atari’s Taiwanese plant made daily. Buisnessweek says Mr. Gou wasn’t content to be a mere supplier of dumb parts. He applied for patents on the technology his company developed, and he kept pressing into new areas.

IBMIn the early ’80s, Mr. Gou took an 11-month tour of the U.S. covering 32 states, during which he dropped in on companies unannounced. Buisnessweek reports that during this trip, he spent three days in Raleigh, N.C., motel close to an IBM (IBM) facility to get an appointment after which he came away with a firm order for connectors. “He is really one of the top sales guys in the world,” Max Fang, the former head of procurement for Dell in Asia who did business with Mr. Gou and was his regular golf partner told Buisnessweek. “He is very aggressive and always on your tail.”

Mr. Gou was early to recognize that China offered an almost limitless supply of cheap labor and was not deterred by  the primitive infrastructure or the Communist government. He set up shop in a suburb of Shenzhen across the border from Hong Kong.  In 1991, Mr. Gou listed Hon Hai Precision on the Taiwan Stock Exchange to fund expansion, mostly into China. By 1996, Mr. Gou told Buisnessweek, it was clear to him that China would become a manufacturing juggernaut, and he started investing heavily in his facilities at Longhua Science & Technology Park aka “Foxconn City.”

CompaqIn 1996, Mr. Gou offered to build the chassis for Compaq’s desktop computers at a fraction of what it would cost Compaq to do the job itself.  “He had this vision and the guts to do anything in a big way,” Mr. Fang is quoted in Buisnessweek. “When I first visited the factory, I saw the whole value chain nicely and effectively designed, starting from a big coil of sheet metal at one end that was cut, formed, welded, and stamped to make the top and bottom of the chassis. Then they did the in-line subassembly, adding a floppy drive, the power supply, and cables. It was all shipped to customers who only had to install the motherboard, CPU, memory, and hard drive. After this revolution by Terry, final computer assembly was easy.”

Buisnessweek says that to sustain an efficient Chinese workforce, Mr. Gou quickly discovered that he had to offer housing, food, and health care, additional costs that kept most of his competitors out of the country. He had to do everything himself. Michael Marks, then chief executive officer of contract-manufacturing giant Flextronics (FLEX), saw Foxconn’s Shenzhen operations taking shape in the late 1990s, “They were making wire out of ingots of copper,” says Mr. Marks. “They had chicken farms to lay the eggs for the cafeteria. One building had 2,000 toolmakers. We had none at the time. But we did after that.”

DellFoxconn was transforming the industry. It was shipping bare-bones computers to IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Apple (AAPL). In 1998, when Mr. Gou won his first order from Dell (DELL) to make the chassis for its desktops, Dell insisted he do it in the U.S., close to the final market. “I bought a company in Kansas City. We quickly needed tooling shops and stamping,” Mr. Gou told Buisnessweek. “That factory was a money loser, but Terry had to build it to accommodate Dell against his own will,” recalls Mr. Fang. “For Foxconn, it bought a ticket into the Dell business.”

Category: Business, China | Tags: , , , , , , ,
RB | February 16, 2011
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Big Blue Wants to Patent Patent Trolling

Conceivably Tech reports that IBM (IBM) has filed a patent application with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to automates the management of intellectual property. The system that would manage Big Blue’s intellectual property (and other who could afford IBM’s costs) comes with a “defend” module to formulate a strategy in the case of patent infringement.

TechEye says that Big Blue’s patent is designed to automate the patent process from the beginning to end including suing other companies that the computer believes are infringing on a copyright.  The patent components are divided into a “direct” part, which includes the overall strategy such as R&D, portfolio, filing, budgeting and forecasting. “Control” covers factors such as market alignment, invention evaluation, IP valuation, and inventor training. “Execute” includes trade secret protection, trademark creation, IP landscaping, technology monitoring, and competitive intelligence. Conceivably Tech quotes the “defend”, “influence” and capitalize modules of the application:

“defending against infringements and invalidations of said IP rights based on said business strategies and monitoring market and competitor actions to develop risk management plans; an influence computer module including a standards influencing unit, a legal and regulatory influencing unit, and a policy influencing unit; and capitalize computer module for identifying potential licensees and potential assignees of said IP rights, and managing licensing negotiations, cross-licensing negotiations, and assignment negotiations based on said business strategies.”

TechEye points out the irony of how the software was created. They point out that an IBMer collected all the experience IBM gained from filing more than 100 patents every week and put the data into a chart. From there Big Blue decided that  given the way the IP world is shaping up these days, they should patent IP themselves. Thus IBM has patented the patent process. What they came up with is:

TechEye concludes that IBM’s patent application is really an automated troll.  They conclude that if the patent office approves this, then it means that every time you patent something you have to give IBM a fee to see if you did it differently from its process. Otherwise its software might send you a subpoena.

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This must seem like a god-send to organizations whose business model has de-evolved into patent trolling. Some of these cases I have written about are the CSIRO Wi-Fi patent activities, all the craziness in the smartphone market and MSFT co-founder Paul Allen’s attempts to sue most of the web.

Gotta give it to IBM, its like TechEye says, “If you can’t beat the trolls, patent the process that creates them.”

Do you believe the U.S. Patent Office is still useful?

Does IBM deserve to collect a tax from every innovator?

Category: Business, Policy | Tags: , ,
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