Navtej Kohli IT updates Blog - Trends in IT

Hot IT trends by Navtej Kohli

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:07:00 -0500

Hottest trends in 2008 on Navtej Kohli IT Blog

Technology is the key that unlocks all doors to success. 2008 has
witnessed many familiar technology trends maturing from sideline fads
to powerful forces in their own right. Check out the hot trends by Navtej Kohli, your sure ticket to success.

1. Data leaks and IP Theft - Even as viruses grow more
dangerous and zombie botnets flood us with spam, security experts are
turning inward. The real threat is from within. One disgruntled sales
manager jumping ship to a competitor and taking customer lists along
can do more damage than the latest worm, while being much harder to
detect.

Security vendors are tackling this problem with new solutions that
range from enterprise rights management to data discovery and policy
generation to data-leak prevention. If your security profile doesn’t
take IP theft and data leakage into account, you should look at vendors
like Liquid Machines, Proofpoint, Reconnex or Vericept.

You may soon have access to these features through your existing vendors, as well.

2. Virtualization - Until recently, virtualization has
been focused on data-center optimization. With virtualized servers,
hardware utilization goes up and flexibility increases. At the same
time, costs associated with hardware and ongoing maintenance drop.

Now that the technology for server consolidation has matured,
virtualization could expand beyond the data center. VMware, Sun, Citrix
and Novell all have mature technologies. Meanwhile, behemoths like
Microsoft and Oracle have entered the space, further validating the
technology.

In the longer term, desktop virtualization could give users greater
flexibility and IT better control. Many analysts have dismissed virtual
desktops as yet another thin-client mirage, but what is more likely to
happen is that virtualization will line up with other trends like
service-orientated architecture (SOA) and mobility to deliver on-demand
applications to whatever device users happen to favor, be they PCs,
thin clients or smart phones.

3. Software as a Service - Speaking of services, the
software as a service (SaaS) market continues to grow. SaaS has slowly
been expanding beyond the mid-market, and since it dovetails well with
other trends like virtualization and utility computing, 2008 could be a
breakout year.

4. The Mobile Workforce - If your concerns about
mobility are still centered on rogue access points and weak wireless
encryption, you’re not keeping up. With the release of the iPhone, the
long-hyped computer-like smart phone phenomena finally arrived. Each
iPhone within the enterprise represents an uncontrolled node that could
introduce viruses, leach out intellectual property secrets and
generally undermine your security policies. You should have plenty of
options for protection in 2008.

5. Windows Vista - The question here is what should
you do about Vista. The typical enterprise isn’t showing much love for
Vista, and Microsoft has responded by keeping XP on the market longer
than it had planned to. However, with their heavy investment in Vista,
don’t expect this to go on indefinitely.

This means CIOs have a decision to make. Do they give in, cross their
fingers and hope that Microsoft fixes all of Vista’s glitches, or do
they start weighing their options? Open-source vendors, predictably,
see Vista as an opportunity. Some have even been touting desktop
virtualization as a way to tentatively try Vista, while having a stable
Linux operating system running alongside just in case.

Navtej Kohli on Paglo's IT Search Engine

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:08:00 -0500

Navtej Kohli has a news to tell. Paglo Launches Its Search Engine for IT!

Here is the complete story:

When we discuss improvements to search technology, we tend to focus on
the open web while overlooking its more novel uses behind the firewall.
So it's good to point out advancements being made behind the scenes
from time to time, even if consumers don't directly benefit.

Paglo is a Palo Alto-based startup is launching a product into public
beta that empowers IT professionals with keyword search. Its crawler
doesn't index documents, images, and other forms of media found on the
internet. Rather, it identifies the resources within a corporate or
organizational network (such as devices, users, and software) and
essentially makes the information available about them Google-able.

Since Paglo is a hosted solution, IT departments need only to install
an open source crawler that will send indexed data to Paglo's servers,
where they are held in a designated silo. We're told the process of
setting up Paglo for a given department takes only minutes, after which
IT admins can sign in from anywhere to search their networks.

In addition to simple keyword search, users can set up Google
Alert-like notifications for when certain changes occur within a
network (for example, when memory gets low on a particular machine).
Search queries can be saved as tables, graphs or lists and displayed
alongside each other on a dashboard for quick viewing. These queries
can also be shared through a built-in community with other IT admins
who might be interested in seeing how you keep tabs on your resources.

Paglo signed up 800 companies during its private beta period, which
started last Fall. The service will remain completely free through at
least the summer, after which it will be sold on a subscription basis.

After YouTube its Aol - Navtej Kohli

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:08:00 -0500

AOL to launch video portal in India soon - After Youtube, next in waiting is the Indian Version Of AOL video portal.

Navtej Kohli IT blog brings the current update:

Time Warner Inc's AOL Internet division will launch versions of its
video service in Canada, India and Taiwan on Thursday as part of an
aggressive global expansion.

By autumn, it will also introduce versions of its video portal, AOL
Video, in the UK, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president
Fred McIntyre said in an interview.

The expansion is part of Time Warner's plans to refashion AOL as a
free, advertising-dependent website, as well as to transform itself
into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.

"If you look at usage patterns on online video, it is the first global
broadband user behavior," McIntyre said. "It happened everywhere in the
world at the same time."

International availability of online videos from the US has been held
up by copyright licenses, which are negotiated on a regional basis,
Internet executives said this week at the Reuters Global Media and
Telecoms Summit.

But AOL said it has sealed deals with local programming partners for its regional sites.

The availability of shows from US programming partners, such as Hulu, a
joint venture of News Corp and General Electric's NBC Universal, or CBS
Corp, is unclear and varies depending on partners

The foundation of the services is built around AOL's video search
technology, Truveo, which has indexed, or searched and sorted related
information on than 170 million videos in 16 countries including
Russia, Hong Kong, Germany and France.

"What users are interested in, and what the biggest problems are,
usually is about not being able to find what they're looking for,"
McIntyre said.

unched in the US in December, will also be introduced in other parts of Europe and South America this year.

Despite its sluggish online advertising growth over the last few
quarters, AOL.com has been riding a high, attracting record numbers of
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Unique visitors to AOL's programming sites rose 12 per cent to 55.4 million in April, its seventh consecutive month of growth.

Courtesy: Reuters

Navtej Kohli - Embracing Criticism is a way to Improvement

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:22:00 -0500

Let me initiate with something quite obvious: I like information
techonology; thats why I have launched this blog Navtej Kohli Blog IT: and I like working with almost any platform, operating system adn application you can through at me.

However, I do not think that there is anything in the market that is
completely good and perfect. As such I always found bugs and fissures
that need improvement or are implemented the wrong way for a particular
fashion. So I feel like critically demonstrating the application or
platform so as to add to its improvement, but nobody likes criticism.
In general, their is no problem, because many software manufacturers
embrace (valid) criticism of their products, versions, in order to
provide betterment in their product line to customers thus giving them
more money and market share in the long term. Unfortunately, not all of
them see it in this way.

I've been in the receiving end of the criticism more that i'd like to.
No, I dont like getting told that something I did was wrong. But
shooting the messenger is exactly the wrong thing to do ( Even though
sometimes I think that it would help my ego). In the end, criticism
helps me to do my job better, but I still don't like it....

Navtej Kohli’s forecast of Virtualization services market in next five years

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:15:00 -0500

Virtualization services are witnessing a boom as more and more large
enterprises are holding on to it. Taking into account the prevailing
trends, virtualization services are anticipated to grow by more than
40% around the x86, per annum.

The IDC report forecasts that the virtualization services market will
levitate from its current annual level of $5.5 billion to a hefty $11.7
billion by 2011.

Also, the supply of qualified consultants for handling work is falling
short as the market is growing rapidly. Matt Healy IDC analyst said
“The growth of [virtualization] services at this point is a
resource-constrained equation – not a demand-constrained equation.”

“You don’t necessarily have all of the people you need to be able to do
these things. But big organizations will be able to get them quickly,
and we will not stay in this state for very long,” he further stated.

According to the IDC report the Global virtualization services market is tend to grow in this way:

1. All key players in the consulting market will grab the big slices of
this lucrative pie. As big projects require multitude of qualified
consultants, because of several intricacies in the virtualization
consulting, only a handful of small-level consulting firms have
resources to manage complex virtualization consulting jobs.

2. Virtualization growth in the enterprise will happen in three phases:

• Phase I: It includes pre sales consulting. Here
sales person make contact with prospective companies, pitching them
about the efficiency and cost benefits of virtualization.

• Phase II: After Pre-sales, this is the next step.
Most enterprises today are undergoing this phase. Every enterprise must
ensure that the in-house IT workforce and the system admins understand
how virtualization integrates into their data center – and companies
know they have to pay for this expertise.

• Phase III: It’s still in the making. It will happen
when virtualization is no longer its own market. Clients won't be
soliciting requests for proposals for virtualization help, but instead
will assume any large consulting firm handles it as a matter of course.

Also Read Navtej Kohli Sports Blog, Navtej Kohli Biography Collection and Navtej Kohli Interest Blog.

Navtej Kohli’s Review on Corporate / Business Blogging

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:51:00 -0600

Being in the IT industry for last 10 years, I am in touch with many
bloggers, some of them are corporate / business bloggers. When we used
to have discussion on corporate blogging, we get to know a variety of
reasons for business blogging… What I have noticed is that in many
cases, business blogging is all about generating relationships and
awareness through blogs in the niche market, before the audience /
prospects are even looking for business products and services.

So there are basically two types of business blogs, type 1 that
generates awareness about the business ins and outs and build
relationships through some sticky features ( usually the updated
content, community development and news about the niche market)ex:
SunSilk Gang of Girls Blog, type 2, having blogotorials that usually
depicts about the business products and services offered.

Both the variants of corporate blogs have their own significance and
eventually they help in decision making process of a prospective
customer. They retain the customers by building relationships and when
time comes, they will look into the blogtorials to browse through the
details of products and services offered. Since the customer will
already be having relationship with the business, it will help him to
decide upon a product or service quickly and blogotorials prompt that
action.

Now from the backend or on the management side of these
corporate/business blogs, two main approaches have emerged viz;
bottom-up blogging and top-down blogging.

Famous bottom-up blogging corporations include Microsoft and Sun. In
both the companies, their real employees post the blogs whatsoever come
in their mind. So by nature, it’s un-filterd, majorly fun, and somewhat
risky. However, when done in a proper way, it can change the face of
the corporation.

Majority of corporate blogging companies prefer top-down approach,
where they devise a blogging strategy with inputs from executives, hr
department, corporate communication department and legal. The
implementation part is also well defined that governs who will blog for
the company, on what subjects, at what time and place. Famous top-down
corporations include General Motors and Cisco.

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Navtej Kohli Comments on Better IT Management for Banks

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:34:00 -0600

According to a recent research conducted by McKinsey, into the IT
operations of banks in Europe, Asia, and Latin America identifies
practices that help growing and established institutions get the most
out of their technology investments.

McKinsey report stated 2 main important points -

1. Some measures that bank managers assume are important, such as scale
and levels of IT investment, turn out to be less critical.

2. Far more important is the way a bank’s IT unit forms its technology
strategy together with the business. Leading banks also take a more
disciplined approach to IT architecture, create standardized platforms,
and wring more business value from technology investments.

Source: McKinseyquaterly.com

-Navtej Kohli

Top IT trends in India

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:47:00 -0600

The local Indian market will come into its own for technology
outsourcing. India is already the largest local market in Asia Pacific
after Australia and Japan, and the booming Indian economy will mean
there is significantly more technology outsourcing to be done by local
Indian companies in 2007.

"A one per cent growth in the national GDP will translate into a 20-22
per cent growth in the domestic IT market," says Alok Shende, director
ICT practice (India), Frost and Sullivan. Utkarsh Palnitkar, partner,
Ernst & Young (E&Y) concurs: "There will a double digit growth
for the $8 billion domestic market."

"This will be especially true of the government, financial services and
telecom sectors - estimated size of $2.5-3 billion for contracts of up
to $25 million each," pitches in Sidharth Pai, Partner, TPI.

The BPO industry will continue to move up the value chain. "Outsourcing
is set to go up from low value intermediates / APIs to late stage
intermediates/ APIs/ formulation side," says Palinitkar.

Even the scope will evolve to include services, Akilesh Tuteja,
Executive Director, KPMG says, "Scope of outsourcing will increase from
labour based to service based. This will also be seen across tier I
companies."

Also 2007 will see the bid market, that is Fortune 1400 and below
companies outsourcing to India. "The Fortune 1400 and below companies
will now jump onto the outsourcing market," shares Shende.

Even consolidation is set to increase as firms look at improving
topline based on matching of synergies. Favouring the European Union
due to continuation of favourable valuations for more M&As to take
place vis- -vis United States, Palnitkar says: "Inorganic avenues of
growth are being seriously looked at by domestic companies to take
advantages of the flattening of the world."

While the reason for acquisition could be pipeline,
relationship-building or technological competence for IT India Inc
where the top five still contribute to a major chunk of the industry's
revenues, "the consolidation will be among the top 10 players to
consolidate their market share," says Shende.

India Inc will once again be in the news for winning the big ticket
contracts. "In 2006 the frequency had come down as companies go through
a 4-5 year cycle for reviewing their contracts and 2007 there will be
announcements for major international deals taking place with India Inc
winning a few," says Shende.

KPMGs Tuteja adds, "They will be less focused on cost a s a driving
factor. Contracts will be used for driving top line growth by CIOs."

About IT companies moving to tier II- III towns, Pai reasons firms
"want to move away from the congestion in Bangalore and NCR (Delhi/
Gurgaon/ NOIDA) belt." Shende agrees, "the action will now move to tier
II-III cities as the top 3-4 cities reach saturation".

IT Trends and Strategies

nospam@example.com (Navtej Kohli) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:56:00 -0600

Navtej Kohli gives you the latest list of trends in IT.

The pace of change in information technology today is greater than
ever. This research section includes analysis of current trends in IT
from the perspective of financial and strategic management. Articles in
this section include industry practices, case studies, overviews of
vendor solutions, and practical advice for ensuring successful
implementation.

The following is a list of recent research in this section.

Recharging the IT Budget Chargeback Debate

The heated debate over chargeback practices has become muffled over the
last few years as IT spending recovered from the downturn in the early
part of the decade. But when pressure mounts on CIOs once again to more
firmly restrain IT budgets, arguments over who should own the
costs--the business units or the central IT organization--is likely to
re-emerge. This article assesses the current state of IT budget
chargeback practices, based on a special survey conducted by Computer
Economics of IT managers. It outlines which IT budget line items are
typically charged back to business units and how much of the IT budget
is usually recovered in such fashion. We conclude with recommendations
for IT managers considering cost allocation strategies for the future.

The Shifting Mix of Data Center Costs

Understanding trends in data center costs is key to managing data
center spending. For example, IT executives know that hardware costs
are declining. But by how much? And what about other costs, such as
software, personnel, and facilities? Is the long-term trend up or down?
This article examines the major categories of data center cost for Unix
and Windows servers on a per-unit basis for the years 2002 through
2006. It also analyzes how these costs have been changing and makes
recommendations based on these trends.

Windows and Linux Data Centers Lag Behind Unix in Realizing Economies of Scale

In this article, we examine total data center spending per server OS
instance across data centers of varying sizes. We break down these
metrics for Windows, Linux, and Unix systems. Interestingly, Unix data
centers experience significantly better economies of scale than Windows
or Linux shops. We report the metrics and examine the reasons for the
greater efficiencies in large Unix shops compared to other operating
systems.

More trends to follow.