Good-bye ATM. Farewell ColdFusion. Adios COBOL.
The global IT training company Global Knowledge recently culled through a number of hiring and pay reports to compile a list of 10 once-hot IT skills that are now . . . going, going, gone.
“There are some things in life, like good manners, which never go out of style, and there are other things, like clothing styles that fall in and out of fashion, but when an IT skill falls out of favor, it rarely ever comes back,” the firm stated in its recent white paper entitled Ten Dying IT Skills.
The Number One dying skill is Asynchronous Transfer Mode, calling ATM “a technology increasingly challenged by speed and traffic shaping requirements of converged voice and data networks.”
The next near-death skill is Novell Net Ware. “Novell’s network operating system was the de facto standard for LANs in the 1990s,” the report states. “But Novell failed to compete with the marketing might of Microsoft.”
Ranked third is Visual J++ due to the programming debacle when Microsoft failed to implement Java-based features Sun Microsystems had requested and Microsoft eventually implemented Microsoft.Net. Next on the list are Wireless Application Protocol and ColdFusion.
Bells also toll for RAD/Extreme Programming, Siebel, SNA, HTML — due to easier to use WYSIYG HTML editors — and for COBOL.
“IBM cites statistics that 70 percent of the world’s business data is still being processed by COBOL applications,” according to the report. “But how many of these applications will remain in COBOL for the long term?”
Would you believe knowledge of virtualization is the hottest IT skill you can have these days? That’s the conclusion of Global Knowledge – which bills itself as the worldwide leader in IT and business training – in light of tightened IT budgets around the world.
“Virtualization is hot,” states a recent Global Knowledge white paper entitled Ten Hot IT Skills for 2009. “Vendors are jostling for lead position in the virtualization stakes and user organizations are seeing virtualization benefits through increased efficiency, lower costs, quick return on investment, and a more flexible computing model.”
Achieving the Number Two rank is Web 2.0 skills. “Organizations have moved beyond establishing web sites for their brands,” the paper states. “Now they are embracing social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where you can find such household names as Ford Motor Company and AT&T. CIOs in a wide range of organizations are demanding IT professionals who can keep them up to speed with the fast-moving Web 2.0 world.”
Networking/Windows Administration came in third, followed by ITIL and then IT Architect/Project Management skills. Rounding out the list are IT Security, Wireless, Telecommunications, Languages (C, C++, C#) and, finally, Business Skills.
“Employment surveys have been telling us for a number of years that IT pros must possess business skills as well as technical expertise,” the paper says, “and in a down economy IT folks who understand the business could be considered more valuable than those who don’t.”
Stay tuned for the list of … gulp … the Top 10 Dying IT Skills.
IT managers clinging to Windows XP as their primary OS don’t plan on relinquishing the popular software until they absolutely must. A recent online poll conducted by IT blog TechRepublic.com got nearly 13,000 quick responses to the question “Is your organization still using Windows XP as the primary OS?” The lopsided vote was 96 percent saying yes, to 4 percent no.
And many IT managers want to keep it that way. Forty-three percent said, “We will always use Windows XP – we do not plan to switch.” A few more—45 percent—said when the inevitable day arrives, they’ll migrate to Windows 7. (Only 5 percent saw Linux in their futures, and 1 percent favored Mac OS X.) “It looks like the real loser in this poll is Windows Vista,” observed Mark Kaelin, a senior editor at TechRepublic.
While it’s tempting to blame these far-away conversions on the bad economy, only 7 percent said the economy had anything to do with the delay. The real reason for holding fast with XP, according to 63 of the respondents was: “XP works perfectly fine — we are waiting for a reason to make the change.”
More results can be found here.
I wanted to write a quick post about Google’s new “Caffeine” search infrastructure. A preview is open for Web developers so Google can collect feedback. Apparently the search engine will be “faster, more accurate and more comprehensive” than the current Google search setup. I would guess the timing of the announcement is in answer to Microsoft’s Bing. There are links to articles about the preview here and here. Unfortunately, a recent article says the preview is down and when I tried it, sure enough I was redirected to an error page that said they were performing “system maintenance.” Hmmm… Here’s a link to the Caffeine sandbox in case you want to try it — hopefully the “maintenance” will be finished soon.
Security breaches remain a nearly insoluble IT problem, complete with new forms of potential attack appearing with alarming frequency. Veteran IT manager and consultant Michael Kassner says your best protection may be turning your attention to some proven security basics.
“Security has been and always will be about effort,” he writes. “If I want to steal a car, I’m certainly not going to walk past a car with the doors unlocked and engine running to the next one that’s locked and has the alarm activated. I think we can agree that under most conditions, the car requiring more effort to compromise is assumed to be more secure.”
He’s compiled a list of 10 practices he believes will increase the effort needed to breach most networks and computers. Beginning with relatively simple steps such as changing default passwords and disabling the accounts of departed employees, he then steps through the importance of network scans and monitoring network traffic. Finally, he proposes the more challenging development of a good security plan and the toughest of all, “Get upper management to buy in.”
“Completely eliminating security breaches may indeed by an impossible task,” he writes in his TechRepublic.com column. “But I get concerned when that conclusion drives the attitude of ‘Why even try, then?’”
Want more detail? Just click here to see Kassner’s 10-point list.
