Links List 6.12.09

June 15th, 2009 by Julia Lim

Gartner research is showing that nearly half of all businesses reduced their IT budgets in the first quarter of 2009. IT budgets are expected to decline a total of 4.7 percent this year, according to the research. The sharpest drop (10 percent) was in professional services, telecommunications and technology. However, most of the CIOs surveyed said they were hopeful the economy would begin to rebound in 2010. Even federal IT teams are expecting some form of budget or project decline, as we found out at FOSE.

With IT budgets shrinking how are CIOs supposed to manage? Denise Dubie suggests investing in best practices to streamline work, save staff hours and ultimately cut company costs. “According to a Forrester Research report, 62 percent of more than 500 IT decision-makers polled said improved consistency and quality of IT processes were among the key changes to contributing to a more positive view of IT by the business.”

Some very cool cloud computing research projects are popping up just in time for next week’s HotCloud conference, including “nebulas” (distributed voluntary resources donated by end-user hosts creating nebulas that could complement public managed clouds, perhaps for free!), CloudViews (common storage system using some kind of protected inter-service data sharing) and a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform (still in conceptual stage but focused on “closed box execution” environment for guest virtual machines in pubic clouds).

“The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers,” says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. Ever the contrarian, the NY Times Magazine breaks the rules and tells the data center story for the public-at-large. The general population doesn’t care about the infrastructure running their shiny gadgets unless it’s not working – they want services to be ‘always on’ or ‘always there’ but have no idea what it actually takes to deliver on the always-on promise.  The Times does a good job of breaking the data center down for the angry user who just wants to know why they can’t play Call of Duty online with 65,999 of their closest friends. 

The keynotes from Interop have been archived and posted online for the world to see.

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