Links List 01.22.10

January 22nd, 2010 by Valerie Barber

The $7.4 billion Oracle-Sun deal received approval from the European Commission, effectively ensuring Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The deal was announced many moons ago and the US government approved it on August 20, 2009. However, the EC took another five months to perform due diligence to insure the deal would not deter free trade in the 27-country European Union, where 20% of Oracle’s business comes from. The merger still needs approval from regulators in Russia and China (and Michael Widenius, creator of the MySQL database is still opposed), but Oracle said it expects “unconditional approval” from those countries and that it “intends to close the transaction shortly.”

For Government IT, 2010 is expected to be the year for building out strategies to deliver on many of the technologies and philosophies of 2009. Under the direction of the US’s first federal CIO Aneesh Chooprah and the first federal CTO Vivek Kundra, here are some of the predictions fro Government IT in 2010, which seem right on the mark.

• Cybersecurity – despite more reports of breaches, the Department of Homeland Security will make strides toward a solidified cyber offense and defense strategy for both the government and civilians.
• Cloud Computing – The federal government will push data center consolidation, forcing more agencies to think about their own private clouds. GSA’s cloud will provide more shared services via a private cloud.
• IT Procurement – while there are significant changes planned in how agencies buy and deploy IT, concerns around transparency and cybersecurity are stumbling blocks. No-bid contracts and on-the-fly installations are quick, but can hide the details of government spending and include security shortcuts.

Gartner predicts that by 2010, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets, dumping or foregoing assets as they move to the cloud and increase their use of virtualization technologies. As hardware ownership shifts to third parties, they predict major shifts throughout all of the IT hardware industry, which will impact IT careers. Read all of  for IT in 2010.

“For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more strategic projects; enterprise staff will be either reduced or re-skilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.” 

Gartner’s key predictions for IT in 2010

VMware’s VMware Go, a tool aimed a making virtualization easier for small- and medium-sized businesses, has been released from beta. VMware Go automates the installation and configuration of the ESXi hypervisor, eliminating the skill and resources barrier SMBs may face. VMware Go is free.

Want to connect to the White House? There’s an app for that. Just in time for the State of the Union address, you can get a free iPhone app that streams live video from the White House, links to the White House blog and the briefing room. Up next: mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, a mobile-ready version of WhiteHouse.gov.

Finally, I came across the “8 IT personality types” that I found pretty funny – probably because I fit one profile and have witnessed all of the others. My favorites:

• The Empty Suit – has memorized most of the important acronyms the surfs Wikipedia after the meeting to find out what everyone was talking about. (Isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?)
• The Scary Sys Admin – your company can’t run without him and he knows it. He’s a good guy, but if you get on his bad side you may be locked out of your computer and possibly your bank accounts.
• The Angry Support Drone – will do what you ask, but no more. Install the printer – yes. Test it to see that it works – no – you just asked to have it installed.
• The Human Roadblock – whatever task or project, the response is, “It can’t be done”. Followed by a painful explanation of why it will fail and ending with “It was a stupid idea to begin with”.

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