IT Hiring Expected to Climb for 3rd Straight Year

Posted on by gregl

IT hiring has been on the upswing for three years running, according to Computerworld’s annual hiring survey. Today 29 percent of IT executives polled say they plan to increase their IT staffing in 2012. That’s up from 20 percent polled in 2009 and 23 percent in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the most popular skill these executives want is programming and application development, including web development and upgrading internal systems. Just over 60 percent will seek these skills, up significantly from the 44 percent who sought these same skills in the 2010 survey.

Expanded project-management skills also are high on the list, especially the ability to identify users’ needs and translate them into effective solutions that the IT team can develop. Other skills the executives mentioned included technical support and business intelligence.

Of course cloud computing and virtualization are prompting a growing number of IT staff openings in networking, VMware, data center operations and integration, according to the executives polled.

EasyStreet Business Success Story by AMAX

Posted on by Karen Karger

 

AMAX is the supplier of the Indirect Evaporative Cooling units used in EasyStreet’s Data Center 2. AMAX recently posted a Business Success Story about EasyStreet and how EasyStreet selected this solution as part of our long-standing commitment to sustainability and energy conservation. Thank you to AMAX. (We sure don’t need supplemental DX air conditioning on a chilly day like today!)

Click here to read the success story.

 

 

Gartner Says Tablets are Top IT Trend for 2012

Posted on by gregl

Tablet technology is changing the computing paradigm, according to Gartner analyst David Ceary. “The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support,” he told his audience at the recent Gartner Symposium in Orlando.

In commenting on the Gartner finding, TechRepublic.com chief editor Jason Hiner writes: “From both an employee and customer standpoint, tablets have been driving a huge change in the way people interact with information over the past two years and the process is likely to accelerate in 2012 as the price of tablets drop, Android’s tablet software improves, and Microsoft gets into the game with a legitimate play in Windows 8.”

Number Two on the Gartner list for 2012 is mobile-centric applications and interfaces. “When building user interfaces for multiple screen sizes and operating systems, new types of tools are needed to take the data feeds from applications and transform them so they are usable on the target device,” Ceary noted. “There is no automatic way to do this — it takes engineering skills to design the right outputs.”

The big surprise on the Gartner list was cloud computing’s slip from Number One for 2011 to tenth position for 2012. One reason, Ceary said, was that cloud computing is being absorbed into other operational IT areas.

To learn about Gartner’s other top trends, click here.

Are You Safe in the Cloud?

Posted on by Karen Karger

 

 

 

EasyStreet CEO, Rich Bader, will be sitting on a Portland Business Journal panel hosted by Convergence Networks and Oregon Institute of Technology:

Wednesday, January 25, 2012
7:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Hilton Hotel, Pavilion Room
921 SW Sixth Ave., Portland

Please Join Rich and his fellow panelists to discover what your business needs to know about Cloud Computing.

Click here for more information and to register.

IBM: CIO Success Hinges on Leveraging Technology

Posted on by gregl

“CIOs increasingly help their organizations cope with complexity by simplifying operations, business processes, products and services,” according to the most recent CIO Midmarket Perspectives report from IBM, which involved interviews with 622 CIOs in growing and mature markets.

“To increase competitiveness, 83 percent of Midmarket CIOs have visionary plans that include business intelligence and analytics, followed by mobility solutions (72 percent) and virtualization (67 percent),” the report states.

“Perhaps the most useful insight to emerge from this study, however, is not what makes CIOs the same, but what makes them different,” it continues. “The primary differences among the CIOs we spoke with lie in their organizations’ business needs and goals, and how CIOs can achieve those goals by leveraging business and information technology.”

For a copy of “The Essential CIO: Insights from the Global Chief Information Officer Study,” click here.