Links List 12.18.09

December 18th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Is Santa scary or what? With the holiday season is in full swing – we’re gonna get a foot of snow in VA this weekend!! – I couldn’t resist sharing this collection of photos that shows just how much toddlers love Santa.

A recent Gartner survey of billion dollar companies indicates IT will see larger budgets in 2010. 62% expect IT to play a vital role in business recovery, with many companies renewing focus on revenue growth than on the cost cutting that occurred in 2009. 43% of executives plan to increase IT spending, 45% expect IT spending to remain flat.

As the European Commission mulls over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, HP has partnered with Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat to bring together service offerings, incentives and training to help lure worried Sun customers. According to HP, they have gained 350 Sun customers over the past year.

“In my experience, CIOs have three core agendas: risk, cost and cycle time. If you look at risk, clearly there’s a degree of uncertainty over Sun – both because of what’s happening with the EC and because customers planning their infrastructure don’t feel there’s a clear roadmap from Sun.”

Tom Johnson, a business development manager at HP

Oracle released a 10-point list of commitments to the European Commission (EC), which seems to have helped them gain favor in their quest to gain regulatory clearance. Meanwhile, MySQL creator Monty Widenius launched an email campaign urging the MySQL community to contact the EC to oppose the deal.

Here are some interesting lists to round out 2009, including some for fun. Next week, I’ll pull together some predictions for 2010 that are circulating.

IDG’s Top 10 technology stories of 2009:

1. Oracle (tries) to buy Sun
2. Windows 7 launches
3. Chrome OS
4. Yahoo/Microsoft deal
5. Government 2.0
6. Steve Jobs comes back (again)
7. Microblogging/social networking
8. EU fines Intel
9. Droid
10. IT – forecasted to lead the economic recovery

Washington Technology’s eight stories to watch in 2010 (and beyond) includes the growing acceptance of cloud computing. As security issues are addressed, the benefits of moving to the cloud are clear: lowered costs, new services and increasing capacity. Kudos to Vivek Kundra, who we’ve followed since his appointment, for carrying the government cloud banner! Other notables:

• Mergers and acquisitions involving companies with significant government business
• The delay in confirming the GSA administrator
• Contract protests (causes project delays, no penalty for protests that have no merit)
• Leadership changes at two of the largest government contractors, General Dynamics and SAIC

The tech industry’s top mergers and acquisitions in 2009 were each well over $1 billion, including:

• Oracle-Sun $7.4 billion
• Dell-Perot Systems $3.9 billion
• Cisco-Tandberg $3.4 billion
• HP-3Com $2.7 billion
• EMC-Data Domain $2.1 billion

There’s even a top 10 list of data disasters and remarkable recoveries, including our favorites:

• Two colleagues got in a fight in a server room, resulting in a server falling off a rack. (Are these two responsible for adding to the 2009 unemployment numbers?)
• A businessman running late for a meeting placed his laptop on the roof of his car and drove off in rush. When he turned a corner, the laptop flew through the air and crashed into a wall. (I can see how that happens!)
• “Somehow” a laptop was dropped from the second floor of a business. (I added the quotes around “somehow”, since I’m used to hearing “it broke”, which makes me ask who was touching it when “it broke”?
• A hard drive plummeted 200 feet to the ocean’s floor. It was discovered six months later; 99 %of the data was recovered. (Was this person “working from home” when this happened?)

For fun…how many of YouTube’s most watched videos of 2009 have you seen (over and over again)? BTW, “YouTube” is the most searched for term by children ages 13 – 18.

5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)

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