BARCELONA, Spain–In a mobile world, size shouldn’t matter, but context should.

That was the message from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz as she demoed the company’s new Livestand service at the Mobile World Congress 2011 here today.

Livestand, announced last week, aggregates and personalizes all types of content for users and optimizes it for every type of device. Dubbed a “digital newsstand,” it serves up stories, information and ads based on a person’s interest and eliminates the need for publishers to create multiple versions of content for different devices.

For mobile devices, where small screen size spoils the display of content created for the PC, relevance is particularly important, Bartz said.

“The screen sizes are going to be all over the place,” she said. “The whole concept is publish once and have it available on any device.”

She demonstrated Livestand on an iPad. In contrast to Yahoo’s regular Web site which is cluttered with text, images and ads, the Livestand interface looked clean and simple. Tailored to a specific Yahoo employee helping with the demo, the site showed modules that included a surfing magazine, surf and weather forecasts, a surfboard buyer’s guide and news about sports.

Livestand automatically personalizes the content based on machine learning and human editorial oversight, which Bartz called the “secret sauce.”

Friends can share content with each other on Livestand and exchange comments on it via Facebook and Twitter.

“We at Yahoo consider that advertising is also great content,” Bartz said as the demo showed a Nike video and a sports watch ad. Later in the demo a friend’s comment popped up in real time related to the ad.

In a question-and-answer session after Bartz and three other technology CEOs gave their vision of the future of mobile computer, Intel’s Paul Otellini said there would be Intel-powered smartphones out later this year.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s John Chambers said video would be a focus for mobile in the near future, requiring service providers to beef up their network performance and management capabilities.

And SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son proudly discussed how his company’s $20 billion purchase of Vodafone Japan in 2006 is paying off now, fueled by data demand over smartphones. But at the time he was called crazy for the move, the share price dropped, and the company lost $1 billion every year for four years, he said. Since then mobile data traffic has grown 30 times, he said.

“People started saying mobile is no longer profitable and so on,” he said. “It was a risky bet…[but] sometimes craziness gives a good return.”

“Mobile carriers are becoming dumb pipes,” he added. “That’s the depressing reality.”

Watching IBM’s Watson supercomputer make its debut tonight on “Jeopardy,” one thought dominated: why, oh, why did they make him sound like Hal’s diffident nephew?

This was the future freaks’ big chance to make themselves acceptable to the human race. This was national television.

Watson had been created by human beings who pride themselves in their ability to teach a machine, rather than a child, to be as smart as they are. So why did they not think about giving Watson a little character? A shock of long, green hair, perhaps. Oversize purple ears would have been a plus.

At the worst, a voice resembling Morgan Freeman with a lisp would have been welcome.

Instead, this technological Trojan Horse presented himself to a nationwide audience with all the presence of boiled soot.

To be fair, it wasn’t even Watson before the cameras. It was an avatar created to represent him, as his vast bulk and din wouldn’t have made this a TV event for the aged, never mind the ages.

I understand that many scientists will have felt entirely giddy at the idea that a computer could compete against two “Jeopardy” superstars: a nice man from Seattle and an equally nice man who used to live in Pennsylvania but is now is hoping to be a TV star in LA.

But if this is the future, some might wish to google details of that elegant euthanasia clinic in Switzerland.

Watson performed very well. If, by performance, you mean getting quite a lot of “Jeopardy” conundrums correct.

Former “Jeopardy” champion Ken Jennings, the man with a preacher’s side parting and the remnants of Conan’s ginger hair, stood transfixed as Watson beat him to question after question, answer after answer.

However, this is a best of three. And Jennings and fellow humanoid competitor Brad Rutter allowed the machine to strut its stuff. They knew he had to falter. This machine had never seen the bright lights before.

Perhaps sweating backstage while his avatar faced the orchestra, Watson suddenly managed to repeat one of Jennings’ wrong answers.

“No, Ken said that,” explained Alex Trebek, the professorial host of “Jeopardy.”

If Watson had wanted to endear himself to the world, his programmers might have given him a line like: “Silly, me. I’m just a stupid ole’ piece of metal.”

Instead, he stood there like a nerd who’s been looking for the local chess club and has stumbled into the Playboy mansion.

This first show was a little stunted, as Trebek spent considerable minutes explaining to the audience why the less familiar contestant was less expressive than some but more expensive than all.

It was a fine ad for the forthcoming IBM empire, though those with eyes for these things would have been more warmed by the footage of IBM’s engineers preparing for Watson’s big day. Most of them had PCs, but one was definitely stroking a Mac.

Watson’s dilemma, which became increasingly clear as the show went on, was that he has to have a certain level of probability before pressing his button. Machines don’t guess. That would be far too blessedly human.

The mean-spirited (i.e. excessively human) might have rejoiced on one particular exchange.

The contestants were asked to find the question to: “From the Latin for end, this is where trains can also originate.”

Watson, still impassive, but allegedly 97 percent confident (his confidence levels were shown on screen when the clues were given), replied: “What is finis?” He should have considered terminus.

This was only the beginning. Tomorrow is Double and Finis Jeopardy. Wednesday, there’s more. Even now, Watson is tied with Rutter on $5,000 and $3,000 ahead of the mesmerizing Jennings.

Can this possibly end well?

Percento Technologies is sponsoring and exibiting at the Independent Banks Association of Texas in Austin this week. For more on the IBAT event – Click Here!

For more on Percento’s Financial Technology Support group – click here.

Another loooong week has ended. My word of the week would be “Optimism.” I don’t want to hype the managed services market. But most of the sources with whom I met this  week expressed optimism about their Q1 2011 outlooks. The only thing that depresses me a bit: There are a bunch of blog entries the MSPmentor team didn’t have time to write for the week ending January 21, 2011. Here are seven of them:

7. Making Her Move: A well-known PR veteran in the MSP market has apparently joined a major NOC (network operations center) specialist in Northern California. If true can someone please confirm?

6. Managed Virtualization: For the most part, MSPs already manage PCs, servers and mobile devices. Now, SolarWinds is hoping to help MSPs manage virtual machines. Key to the effort: SolarWinds’ buyout of Hyper9.

5. Money Matters: Ricoh is investing roughly $300 million in managed document services and managed print services over the next three years. The news comes two weeks after Konica Minolta acquired All Covered, a national managed IT services provider. We’ll be watching to see if Ricoh’s efforts involve the channel.

4. Breaking Down the Wall: Sounds like ConnectWise is set to more aggressively promote StreamlineIT, which knocks down the wall between MSPs and corporate IT departments. It sounds similar to Autotask’s TaskFire. But here’s my usual qualifier that puts loyal readers to sleep: I don’t actually run this stuff. We’ll be checking around to see how ConnectWise partners are using StreamlineIT, and we’re doing the same poking around in the Autotask camp.

3. Compliant Coming?: Yes, I’m aware a video company alleges there’s an unpaid invoice issue with a managed services marketing company. It’s the second allegation against the managed services marketing company in recent weeks. Who’s right and who’s wrong? I can’t say for sure. I know and respect sources on both sides of the fence, and I hope the matters get resolved. If the allegations ever turn into a legal case we’ll be sure to name and cover all parties responsibly. In the meantime one request: I wish the Florida VAR would halt its email flame war against the managed services marketing company, and instead simply state the alleged facts of the case…

2. Done Deal: We’ve completed our work on the MSPmentor 100 survey results. The entire list will be unveiled during a live webcast on February 16. But here’s a teaser: We’ve got enough data to break out results for North America, Europe, Australia and Africa. We’ll be writing the accompanying report during a flight to San Francisco on January 26. If you want a sneak peek be sure to look over my shoulder.

1. New Dashboard?: Cisco apparently is beta testing some type of managed services dashboard. Alleged code-names include (A) Winkin’ Owl, (B) Chocolate Sauce… (C) Thunderbolt and (D) Tampa Lightning. (Hint: Always go with C when in doubt.) We’ve asked Cisco for confirmation of the effort.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

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Following its modest growth last quarter, the PC market saw its strongest quarter of the year, while managing to miss the expectations of research firms IDC and Gartner.

According to the Quarterly PC Tracker Survey released today by IDC, overall worldwide PC shipments grew 2.7 percent year-on-year during the fourth quarter, with Gartner reporting a slightly larger 3.1 percent as part of its quarterly report. Both numbers missed the firms’ expectations, which IDC had predicted at 5.5 percent and Gartner at 4.8 percent.

IDC said that one of the big reasons for the “modest” gains centered around PCs getting competition from tablets like Apple’s iPad, as well as people being happy with computer hardware they already own. That trend is expected to continue into the new year, the report said. Gartner had similar sentiments, pointing to the iPad, along with other consumer electronics like game consoles cutting into the PC’s turf.

There were, however, some standout numbers and market share changes among the top hardware vendors. Making a comeback, IDC had Dell bouncing back to the No. 2 spot in total PC shipments during the fourth quarter, ousting Acer, whose drop IDC attributed to poor sales of mini notebook PCs. Gartner, on the other hand, kept Dell in No. 3, putting it about 1 percent below Acer in terms of its fourth quarter market share and praising its timing on refreshing its lineup of professional PCs.

The reigning king of market share and overall shipments among the top five PC makers during both the year and the quarter, continued to be Hewlett-Packard. Even so, IDC said HP had 5 percent decline in shipments in the U.S. and 1 percent worldwide. Gartner painted a similar picture, saying the company’s professional business had grown, as had its sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. However, “weak” consumer PC sales in the U.S. as well as difficulty breaking the Asia/Pacific region had offset the company’s growth.

Shining above some of its competitors, Lenovo saw a 21.1 percent year-on-year growth worldwide, which IDC analyst Jay Chou told CNET could be attributed to the company’s reach in both consumer and commercial businesses. Chou also lauded Lenovo’s business as being “geographically balanced.” Toshiba too saw double-digit growth, shipping 12 percent more PCs than it did during the same time last year, according to IDC.

Apple, which is recorded as part of Gartner’s U.S. vendor report, came in just under Toshiba in terms of fourth-quarter shipments, though bested it and all the rest of the companies on year-on-year growth at 23.7 percent. In fact, Toshiba and Apple were the only two vendors in Gartner’s top 5 to increase shipments in the U.S. year-on-year.

Going into 2011, Chou says that “consumer fatigue” for products like mini notebooks, along with “softening demand in Asia” and other parts of the world could cut into the firm’s predictions for a growth of 10 percent over the course of the year. But that “aggressive competition” could bring the market back up in the last two quarters. That softening demand Chou was referring to is the Asia/Pacific region (which does not include Japan), increasing 7 percent during the fourth quarter, which IDC notes is the first single digit growth quarter since the first quarter of 2009.

Source

Percento Technologies

Like many budget-constrained IT executives, PHI Inc. CIO James Quinn will be heading into 2011 with a list of worthy projects that the global helicopter transportation company will nonetheless be deferring — at least for the time being. But there are certain kinds of projects you won’t find on that hold list.

Key among them are projects that are “customer-facing or anything that saves dollars,” says Quinn. “Anything that involves process improvements and anything that can show a fairly fast ROI is also getting pushed to the front.”

On the expense side, PHI will continue to reduce costs by outsourcing “keep the lights on” operations, even farming out the maintenance of production databases. The company is also renegotiating its agreements with just about all of its IT and services providers, including those whose contracts haven’t yet expired.

IT shops in all industries are approaching 2011 the same way Quinn is: They plan to vigilantly manage flat budgets and further slash already significantly reduced costs. Indeed, IT executives who responded to Computerworld‘s 2011 Forecast survey ranked budget constraints and economic pressures as their No. 1 challenge in the year ahead. And six out of 10 respondents indicated that even though the economy appears to be improving, the cuts they made in the past 18 months or so will become permanent.

Even more notable is that the projects IT executives say rank highest on their 2011 priority lists are those designed to cut costs even more. Most of those projects fall into three broad categories: revamping and then automating various business processes; consolidating data centers and implementing technologies that help save money, such as virtualization and cloud services; and outsourcing or using software-as-a-service providers for routine tasks. The idea is that by automating and outsourcing the work that just keeps the lights on, IT departments can focus their valuable staff resources on innovative projects designed to grow the business.

But don’t expect a big run-up in IT job openings. For the most part, CIOs don’t expect to invest in additional full-time staff next year. Rather, the focus is on investing in new technologies that will automate operations and lower costs — and decrease the need for additional employees. The technologies that survey respondents said they are piloting or beta-testing are server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and mobile and wireless devices.

“We’re being very aggressive, going back to vendors to work multiyear deals in exchange for cost reductions today,” Quinn explains. “We’re seeing our customers do that to us, and we’re doing the same thing with our vendors.”

“Even in this downturn, we’re seeing a significant investment in technology,” says Adam Noble, CIO at GAF Materials Corp. So are his CIO peers, he says. “They’re not hiring, but their investments are going up.”

Energy company Southern Co.’s generation business is contemplating virtualizing all of its servers and desktops, says CIO Marie Mouchet. “It’s an option we’re considering systemwide. We have application virtualization and desktop virtualization pilots under way. We have had a lease program for our desktops, which we rotate every few years. As they expire, we’ll be evaluating moving to virtual desktops,” she says.

As for new IT jobs, “we are not looking to hire additional people to meet needs,” Mouchet says. Instead, the company plans to upsize and downsize using contractors.

But there are also organizations where investments in both technology and staff are at a standstill. Among them is the Tennessee Technology Center at Shelbyville, one of 27 such centers across the state that along with six universities and 44 community colleges make up Tennessee’s higher education system.

“One of the biggest problems is that there isn’t revenue flowing into the state, and one of the first places they look to cut is education. We’re doing without 20% of the IT budget we had last year, and last year we had 10% less than the year before,” says Steve Mallard, the center’s IT director.

He says he’s looking for any and all ways to keep costs down, including using more open-source software, bringing on student interns to work in IT, recycling hardware, and building 40% of the computers and virtually all of the servers in use at the center.

Push-button Processes

At the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, automating the state’s vital-records systems is the top project queued up for 2011. By making birth, marriage, death and divorce certificates and other documents available electronically, the state hopes to both cut costs and improve services to citizens, says CIO Bob Martin. The project comes on the heels of a recently completed $4 million statewide data center consolidation project.

But completing the vital-records project — as well as the dozens of smaller “cleanup” projects Martin has in the works for 2011 — will be difficult, since the agency doesn’t plan to fill the 10% to 15% of IT positions vacated through attrition in the past year or so.

Making matters even worse is that statewide, about 35% of government employees, including many in IT, are eligible to retire in the next three to five years.

“It’s a tough balancing act because at the same time that we’re being asked to automate more and more — which makes perfectly good sense — there is a shifting and shuffling of roles and responsibilities among existing staff,” Martin says.

“We can’t fill those positions, and they may be taken away for good as part of a statewide budget fix,” he adds.

Anoka, Minn.-based Rural Community Insurance Services, which provides crop insurance to the agricultural industry, is looking to revamp and streamline how customers interact with the company online. “Our customers have to do a lot of work and provide a lot of information, but we can actually prepopulate much of that information with data we already have from other agencies,” explains CIO Rick Greenwood.

By prepopulating crop data and codes and other information into applications, “we can complete 70% of information that customers would otherwise have to key in. After that, all they have to do is validate the information and provide a digital signature, which is a big efficiency,” he notes. “We’re looking for internal efficiencies, but we also have to look at how to make our customers more efficient.”

Similarly, Jeffrey Pattison, CIO at Inttra Inc., a Parsippany, N.J., company that provides e-commerce systems to the ocean freight industry, says, “We’re trying to keep service levels up and keep costs as low as possible.” One way to do that is to build more rules-based technology into customer-facing systems, which can then be customized by individual users to streamline their own operations.

“If we can run and grow more efficiently, we can free up more dollars to do R&D and innovative work,” Pattison says.

In the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, CIO Daniel Chan’s biggest project for 2011 is called Functional Roadmap. The initiative involves working with an outside consulting firm to review just about all of the organization’s business processes and then re-engineer them, automating wherever possible.

“Right now, we have 27 different programs that our clients may be eligible for, and each program is administered very differently. We’re looking to consolidate to one or two processes from 27 different ways of doing things,” Chan says. “Ten [percent] to 20% improvement is not acceptable. We’re looking for multipliers of five or 10.”

Running for Cloud Cover

Chan is also looking outside of his IT organization for solutions. “I think we spend entirely too much time tinkering with hardware,” he says. “Over time, we can outsource most of our IT infrastructure. Instead of buying and building and managing servers, potentially we could engage a cloud provider and rent capacity. We are experimenting in-house with cloud, but there are still a lot of security-related concerns.”

Haggen Inc., a 32-store chain of supermarkets in the Pacific Northwest, has already extensively consolidated its data center operations by virtualizing servers. “Now we’re looking at storage rationalization and optimization,” says CIO Harrison Lewis. “Before, we might just acquire more storage, but now we’re looking at Tier 2 and Tier 3 data and moving it off to a private cloud.”

A recent internal study showed that 49% of data that Haggen had been storing hadn’t been accessed in two years. This has prompted a more rigorous review of all IT assets, with an eye toward distinguishing exactly what offers a competitive advantage and should be kept in-house and what should be outsourced.

“If it’s not an area where we need to do a great deal of customization, software-as-a-service makes sense,” Lewis says. In 2011, Haggen will be evaluating other SaaS options, including Google’s suite of productivity applications. “From everything I’ve seen so far, it can make sense for us,” notes Lewis.

The bottom line, says Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron, is that companies will focus on continuing to drive down costs throughout 2011.

“As the IT organization focuses more on process, they’re also consolidating IT, moving to shared services, and there is a huge acceleration in their ability to automate services,” he says. “The whole concept of preprovisioned environments — with cloud and virtualization — takes automation to the nth degree.

“All of these accelerants are going to continue to drive down the cost of delivering IT,” adds Cameron, not only in 2011, but for the foreseeable future.

Source

Managed IT Support Firm – Percento Technologies

DUBAI, UAE — Senior business and technology leaders will convene at InterContinental Dubai Festival City from 21-22 February 2011 for CACS in Dubai, an internationally respected event that features governance, security, assurance and risk management experts from around the world.

Hosted by ISACA, a global information technology (IT) association of 95,000 IT professionals, CACS (Computer Audit, Control and Security) will include a keynote presentation by Neeraj Kumar, Senior Vice President of Internal Audit and Chief Audit Executive of Emirates Group. Neeraj Kumar will explain how to use technology to improve proactive risk-focused auditing and continuous monitoring.

CACS in Dubai will also offer educational sessions on key IT security and governance issues facing enterprises today, including:

• Implementing COBIT: A Public-sector Case Study, presented by Naveed Ahmed, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, Dubai Customs, UAE
• IT Governance to Support Corporate Governance: A Case Study, presented by Avinash Totade, CISA, CGEIT, Dubai Aluminium Company, UAE
• E-government Security: Threats and Challenges, presented by Abbas S Kudrati, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
• Metrics and Indicators for a Changing Security Landscape, presented by Ramsés Gallego, CISM, CGEIT, Entel IT Consulting, Spain
• Social Media: Business Security, Governance and Assurance Perspectives, presented by Urs Fischer, CISA, CRISC, IT GRC Consultancy, Switzerland
• Designing Next Generation Security and Audit for Cloud Computing Environments, presented by Eddie Schwartz, CISA, CISM, NetWitness Corp., USA
• The Future of Information: Real Challenges and Opportunities, presented by Norman Marks, SAP, USA
• Automating IT Risk and Compliance to Reduce Costs: A Series of Case Studies, presented by Anil Jogani, CISA, CGEIT, Milan Solutions Limited, UK

ISACA chose Dubai as the location for the conference because it is an important city in the global economy as well as the region’s crossroads, serving as a center of business and technology. ISACA’s United Arab Emirates Chapter was established in 1997 to bring together business and information technology leaders in the region. The ISACA UAE Chapter is a strong network of professionals from all the emirates of the UAE: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah.

“CACS in Dubai will help attendees add value to their enterprise by providing them with practical guidance on critical IT-related issues facing organizations worldwide,” said Vatsaraman Venkatakrishnan, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CRISC, Vice President of IS audit at Emirates Airlines and Chair of ISACA’s Conference Development Task Force.

Attendees who register by 12 January 2011 will receive an early-bird discount. Registration forms for the conference and two pre-conference workshops–Using COBIT for Effective IT Assurance and the Risk Management Workshop: Featuring ISACA’s Risk IT Framework and Guidance–are available at www.isaca.org/cacsindubai.

About ISACA

With 95,000 constituents in 160 countries, ISACA^®  is a leading global provider of knowledge, certifications, community, advocacy and education on information systems assurance and security, enterprise governance and management of IT, and IT-related risk and compliance. Founded in 1969, the nonprofit ISACA develops international IS auditing and control standards, which help its constituents ensure trust in, and value from, information systems. It also advances and attests IT skills and knowledge through the Certified Information Systems Auditor^® (CISA^®), Certified Information Security Manager^® (CISM^®), Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT^® (CGEIT^®) and Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control™ (CRISC™) designations.

ISACA continually updates COBIT^®, which helps IT professionals and enterprise leaders fulfill their IT governance responsibilities and deliver value to the business.

Source

Information Technology Professionals: Percento Technologies International