Links List 10.31.09

November 3rd, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Everyone is looking for signs that the economy is improving. Third quarter results from within the tech community may point to an upturn. Some of good news from the industry includes:

• Clean technology will generate jobs due to billions of federal stimulus dollars
• Venture capital investments rose to $4.8 billion for 637 deals – a 17% increase in dollars from the previous quarter
• A memory chip maker in Seoul reported a net profit of $207 million after seven consecutive quarters of losses
• Western Digital finished Q3 with 44.1 million hard drive shipments compared to 39.4 million shipments in the same quarter last year
• Riverbed Technology’s Q3 revenue increased 12% from Q2 – an increase of 18 percent from the same period a year ago. Their WAN optimization technology helps improve application response times, particularly needed in SaaS applications.
• Apple’s Mac sales increased 17% from last year’s quarter, evidence that for consumers, some things are indispensible

Enterprise spending on cloud computing is expected to increase 28% this year to $3.2 billion, with most of the money going toward public cloud services. However, Gartner estimates that by 2012, IT shops will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private clouds as costs decrease and management efficiencies increase. While others are debating between private and public clouds, Bechtel has successfully implemented a private cloud using virtualization and automated provisioning – since 2005, they have gone from 2000 IT employees to 1100, and increased server utilization from 2-3% to an average of 60-70%. They have shifted 60% of their applications to the cloud and expect the others to be moved by the beginning of 2010.

We’ve written about the speculation that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun may signal the demise of MySQL. But the backers of an Oracle takeover of MySQL are beginning to speak up, suggesting that the opposition may be trying to squash the deal so that MySQL could be purchased (by Microsoft) if Oracle is forced to sell it. Others say the merger would not damage competition and that the EU should not be involved in the decision.

“Opponents are “spreading what can only be described as fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only possible argument in favor of the EC blocking Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL is that it is damaging to competition, not that it is damaging to MySQL itself. Otherwise we are asking the EC to rule on whether Oracle is open source-friendly enough to own MySQL, and that is neither something that an organization like the EC is equipped to answer nor something that it should be asked to decide.”

Matthew Aslett, analyst at The 451 Group

While technical IT training is important, CIOs are advised of the growing need to train IT employees in a wider range of managerial skills that will benefit the business – hiring, terminating, teambuilding and emotional intelligence to help managers recognize and consider the emotional and cultural effects of the economic downturn.

On Sale!

• Lower prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand compute instances, effective on Nov. 1. Charges for Linux-based instances drop 15% — a small Linux instance costs just 8.5 cents per hour, instead of 10 cents per hour.
• Microsoft has cut its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services in half. The new $5 per user per month brings Microsoft much closer to Google Apps Premium Edition.

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