Jenny Thomas
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IT Salaries In North America To Creep Up A Bit In 2013
January 14, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreMost of us who have managed to stay employed during the last few years of tough economic times are just grateful to be working. Economic unrest has forced companies to drastically downsize or completely shut down, and IT departments have not been spared as many businesses struggle to survive. In many ways, the IT department has done better than other parts of companies, thanks to the ubiquity and necessity of computing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been stress.
The good news is that IT pros will see an improvement in pay this year, according to the 2013 IT Salary
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2013: The Year Of IT Economic Recovery?
January 7, 2013 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreSince we are just a week in to the new year, it might still be a little too soon to say with absolute confidence how the various economies of the world are going to fare. However, the Gartner analysts are bullish about saying we should see pocketbooks opening a little wider for IT spending in 2013, predicting worldwide IT spending will total $3.7 trillion this year, a 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trillion.
Just to be clear, since we’re all a bit beat up by the economic uncertainty that has characterized the past several years, this is
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IT Spending To Increase In 2013, World Ascends To The Third Platform
December 10, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreThe overall global financial outlook for 2013 is cause for concern. Many countries in Europe are heading into recession, and in the United States we are driving toward the fiscal cliff that threatens to send us plummeting into a second Great Recession. But lest we believe our financial woes are the only thing that binds our planet together, the folks at IDC say the world is in the middle of a technology shift that occurs only once every 25 years, and they are making some predictions for next year that indicate our addiction to electronic gadgetry is a worldwide phenomenon.
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You Have The Right To Remain Online
December 3, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read more“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” . . . And access to the Internet.
We should probably cut our Founding Fathers some slack on not including our right to surf the Web in the Declaration of Independence, but according to a new survey conducted by the Internet Society, access to the Internet should be considered a basic human right.
The Global Internet User Survey gathered responses from more than 10,000
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The Daily Grind Of Social Business
November 26, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIn our private lives, social media is unavoidable. Even if you don’t have the uncontrollable urge to post every time you visit a Starbucks, at this point, the vast majority of us have succumbed to peer pressure and joined at least one social network where we can go to see pictures of our friends and find out what they ate for lunch.
In our work lives, personal social media usage is largely frowned upon, but using social technology as a business tool is unavoidable and, for many, a critical component for success. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity
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Cloud Services Revenue To Reach $43.2 Billion In 2016
November 12, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreIt will come as no shock to IT Jungle readers that cloud computing is no longer a distant trend on the horizon. We have been forecasting the push toward cloud computing for years, and more recently we have been reporting on the growing number of IBM i solution providers that are introducing cloud services.
For a platform that is often wrongly accused of being behind the times, the IBM i platform looks to be staying in pace with other similar platforms when it comes to the move to the cloud. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be informed as to where
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Paging Doctor Watson
November 5, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreLast week, we told you about IBM‘s Watson supercomputer heading to college, and now comes news that Watson has aspirations in the medical field.
While it is unlikely that Watson will be seeing patients any time soon, IBM researchers want to focus on Watson’s question answering technology, which enables the Jeopardy! champ to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly find important correlations between facts buried within huge volumes of data, ultimately assisting healthcare workers to make better decisions about patient care. Performing differential diagnosis–the kind of thing that House MD does with a mean
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Watson Gets Schooled By College Students And Professors
October 29, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreWe all know IBM‘s Watson Q&A machine’s claim to fame is its 2011 debut on the TV game show Jeopardy! But just because Watson became a household name for stomping its human competitors into the ground with its superior intellect (well, data retrieval speed) doesn’t mean Watson can’t benefit from some good old-fashioned brain power.
You see, Watson was not built to entertain the masses and humiliate trivia champions. Its computing abilities allow Watson to cull through vast amounts of big data and process information in ways that mimic the human brain while understanding natural language and at least
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Manta’s IBM i COBOL Training Trifecta
October 22, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreEarlier this year, Bill Hansen, president of Manta Technologies realized a long-time goal: the introduction of a COBOL training series.
According to Hansen, COBOL was the one training course customers consistently asked for over the years, so he is pleased to announce the rollout of Manta’s third COBOL course in the curriculum: COBOL Input Programming.
“The pleasant surprise is the people who were asking for COBOL training have turned out to be customers already,” said Hansen. “As courses are coming out, I am seeing them being gobbled up by the COBOL shops.”
Manta has already introduced two COBOL training
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Employment Up! IT Jobs Down?
October 15, 2012 Jenny Thomas
… Read moreJobs, and the lack of them, are big news in the United States. And by now most of us have probably heard that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had some encouraging news in its September jobs report, revealing the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, marking the first time the jobless rate has been below 8 percent since December 2007. If that wasn’t enough to reinvigorate job seekers, the BLS also revised its July and August job reports, confirming the creation of jobs in those months was actually higher than originally reported.
Great news, on the surface, but the