Hyperconnectivity Impact

The title of an IDC white paper released in May and sponsored by Nortel, A Global Look at the Exploding ‘Culture of Connectivity’ and Its Impact on the Enterprise, makes the content of the study apparent.

For the study IDC surveyed, “2,367 men and women across 17 countries in various industries, company size classes, and age segments.” All respondents were fully employed, over 17 years old, used a PC at work, and owned or used a PDA or mobile phone for either business or personal activities, and had access to the Internet.

From the survey results IDC distilled four distinct clusters of users. Barebones Users, Passive Online, Increasingly Connected, and Hyperconnected. Barebones Users, at the low-end of the connectivity scale are defined as: “Those who are online but pretty much stick to email, desktop access to the Internet, and cell phone use for voice calls.” The other end of the connectivity spectrum is reserved for the Hyperconnected: “Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.”

Twitter

Even before it won its first SXSW award in March of 2007 Twitter has been making waves. Since then the messaging service has achieved a valuation, “pegged at way north of $70 million,” according to leading tech blogger Om Malik who also notes that its most recent round of funding raised the company another $15 million.

Originated as a browser-based microblogging tool allowing users to post updates of up to 140 characters to groups of followers (rather than just to individuals), Twitter has spawned a plethora of tools now piggybacking on its success; from desktop clients which free users from Twitter’s browser-based origin to those that allow searching of the stream of Twitter messages known as ‘tweets’.

Once the playground of ‘tech elite’ early adopters Twitter is now being utilized by businesses to monitor their status and brand among not only those early adopters, but among the rapidly growing number of more mainstream users now using the service.

Twitter is now on the way to rearing its head in full and in doing so has also become the center of one of Web 2.0’s greatest love-hate relationships.

Software-as-a-Service: Moving Up

According to reports from McKinsey & Company and Forrester, adoption of the Software-as-a-Service model is on the rise. SaaS is moving beyond its place in the small and medium sized business (SMB) space and is increasingly being implemented in larger enterprises. “For platform vendors, the only falloff in interest comes at the largest enterprises, those employing more than 25,000 people. In short, nearly every company – or division of a larger enterprise – is a customer or a prospect for SaaS platforms,” states McKinsey’s 2008 Enterprise Software Customer Survey. This thought is mirrored by Forrester research: “SaaS use is growing across types of applications, companies, and user groups.” The momentum created by this movement is pulling in established software vendors and fueling quick-moving startups. As both vie for position, it is acknowledged that some will fall, but the model is predicted to survive.

Web 2.0: Going, Going, Strong

Forrester Research defines Web 2.0 as, “A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.” According to Forrester’s research and blogs, everything is rosy in the Web 2.0 world. Recession or not, the space should continue to heat up for at least the next five years.

IC3’s Internet Crime Report

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently published its seventh annual Internet Crime Report. The organization works in partnership with the White Collar Crime Complaint Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and serves, “as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime.”

Between January 1st and December 31st 2007 the IC3 processed 219,553 complaints: 206,884 complaints were received via their website (a drop of 0.3 percent from the previous year), the remaining 12,669 were referrals from other agencies. Though the IC3 tracks numerous types of complaints, those which come via the website typically, “do not represent dollar loss but provide a picture of the types of scams that are emerging via the Internet. These complaints in large part are comprised of fraud involving reshipping, counterfeit checks, phishing, etc.” 2007 was the second year in a row that the number of complaints to the IC3 website dropped; 231,493 complaints were received in 2005 and 207,492 in 2006.

Some IT Numbers

The Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, released last month, reports that of the 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees surveyed 82 percent expect to maintain current information technology staff levels in the second quarter of 2008, 14 percent expect to add to staffing levels, and 2 percent foresee reductions. Similar numbers are easily found; that there is to be growth in the IT sector is likely to seem obvious. Not so obvious is the difficulty IT departments may have in fueling that growth.

Some IT Numbers

 

According to the results of Harvey Nash’s 2007/08 Strategic Insights Survey, “In the next 12 months, more than half of all the technology leaders surveyed in this report will have moved jobs. With 23% already in their jobs for less than 12 months and a further 34% planning to move within the next 12 months, we could be about to witness one of the most dramatic migrations of technology leaders in recent times.”

The Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report reports that of the 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees surveyed 82 percent expect to maintain current information technology staff levels in the second quarter of 2008, 14 percent expect to add to staffing levels, and 2 percent foresee reductions.

Interesting to read concurrently with the Nash and Half reports is the Computing Research Association’s bulletin from March 1. The bulletin summarizes some data from the forthcoming The Taulbee Survey, “the principal source of information on the enrollment, production, and employment of Ph.D.s in computer science and computer engineering and in providing salary and demographic data for faculty in CS & CE in North America.” Information on graduate degrees will not be released until May, but undergraduate data has been released early. “According to HERI/UCLA, the percentage of incoming undergraduates among all degree-granting institutions who indicated they would major in CS declined by 70 percent between fall 2000 and 2005. Unsurprisingly, the number of students who declared their major in CS among the Ph.D.-granting departments surveyed by CRA also fell. After seven years of declines, the number of new CS majors in fall 2007 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,915). Nevertheless, the number of new majors was flat in 2006 and slightly increased in 2007. This might indicate that interest is stabilizing.”

 

 

 

February Search Engine Rankings

comScore released their search engine rankings for the month of February. Google, at the top of the list with a 59.2 percent share, is followed by Yahoo! with 21.6 percent, Microsoft with 9.6 percent, AOL with 4.9 percent, and Ask.com with 4.6 percent. Noted is the drop in search activity for February: the 9.9 billion searches at the core search engines represents a 6 percent drop from January.

The Digital Universe

A year ago this month, IDC produced a white paper for EMC entitled, “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010,” this month the forecast was revised. The digital universe that a year ago was merely expanding is now “diverse and exploding.” IDC computes the size of the digital universe last year at 281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes and reports that, “By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.” From another perspective: “The number of digital ‘atoms’ in the digital universe is already bigger than the number of stars in the universe.”

Adobe’s AIR

After being in beta since last June, Adobe released its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) on February 25. AIR is one of a fresh batch of technologies promising to bridge the gap between desktop and web. It is already in use by eBay, SalesForce.com, the New York Times, and a host of developers. At the moment AIR is available for Windows and Mac, a Linux release is expected later this year, and hopefuls expect a mobile version as well. Like Adobe’s nearly ubiquitous Flash, AIR is also free.