IBM plans IT center in Iowa -- and job applications pour in
With $12 million in state funding as an incentive, IBM is building an IT center in Dubuque, Iowa, that it says will employ 1,300 workers providing support to IBM's U.S. outsourcing clients.
The state finalized the agreement to contribute to the project on Thursday. And while the money Iowa is pitching in is clearly an incentive for IBM to locate in Dubuque, another reason for the company's interest may be the state's lower IT wages.
[ Intel's CEO recently called on U.S. companies to invest in the future as a way to combat an economic recession | Read InfoWorld's feature "Surprise! Tech is a safe career choice today" | Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]
Indeed, IBM's decision to locate in a renovated building in downtown Dubuque, which has a population of just under 60,000 people, may be part of a trend by vendors to expand in lower cost -- and lower wage -- regions of the U.S.
Mike Blouin, president of the Greater Dubuque Development Corp., said that as part of the deal IBM is obligated to offer salaries that begin in the low-$30,000 range and go all the way up to $70,000 or so, with the average salary in the mid-$40,000.
The Greater Dubuque Development Corp. was involved in the talks surrounding the project. IBM officials declined to comment on the wage agreement.
IBM has already received some 3,000 applications for positions so far, with a third meeting meeting basic requirements for work, said Blouin. Hiring will begin this spring.
Blouin said that 10 percent of IBM's workforce will come from the company's existing labor pool, with the remainder hired locally and from two- and four-year colleges within 100 miles of Dubuque. In fact, IBM has already started recruiting students from nearby Kirkwood Community College.
The lower cost of living was a factor in IBM's decision, said Blouin. The company "is clearly trying to demonstrate that they can bring work to the U.S. shores and do it competitively," he said.
IT salaries in the Midwest can be 20 percent to as much as 50 percent below the wages paid on the East and West coasts, said Nate Viall, a Des Moines-based recruiter who specializes in finding candidates for IBM's i (formerly i5/os) mid-range application development jobs.
IBM, which has some 80 global delivery centers worldwide, said growth in its services business is creating the need for expansion. The types of jobs at the new center will include systems management services and operations, database management and project management services.
A labor group, the Alliance@IBM, said that more than 4,000 IBM employees have been laid off in recent months. IBM won't confirm those figures, but said any cuts are part of an ongoing shift in business. A spokesman for the union said that some employees have been offered jobs in Dubuque, but the union was unsure exactly how many had received offers.
IT services providers have been turning to relatively rural areas to cut costs. Perot Systems in Plano, Texas, for instance, last fall announced it was adding 90 jobs to a services center it has in Bowling Green, Ky., bringing employment at that site up to 300.
According to the Foreign Labor Certification Data Center Online Wage Library , whose prevailing wage data is used by companies that hire H-1B workers, an entry-level computer programmer job in Des Moines starts at around $42,800. That same job in the Newark, N.J. area would begin at $55,000.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Firefox 3.1 delivery slips; TraceMonkey progress questioned
Some Mozilla developers have recommended that the company consider yanking the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, from Firefox 3 .1 to get the browser back on track and out the door.
Their comments came as Mozilla's head of engineering acknowledged that the browser's final delivery date will slip .
[ Check out the InfoWorld review "How secure is Firefox?" And for the full Test Center rundown on browser security, see InfoWorld's special report. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News , or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter . ]
In a message posted to a company message forum , Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," Baron said. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."
Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla developer who works on TraceMonkey, agreed. "I have to concur here," he said in a message on the same forum thread. "TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it's not the whole enchilada of the browser." Hoare, however, said it made more sense to disable TraceMonkey by default -- an approach used through Beta 1 -- rather than pull it from the product.
Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey, and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer . But TraceMonkey bugs, and the slow pace in patching them, were responsible for delays last month , and for a three-week stretch this month when Mozilla put off scheduling the next preview, Beta 3.
The biggest bug now delaying Beta 3's release is a TraceMonkey issue.
But Mozilla will probably not pull the engine, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Saturday. "We're always looking at all of our choices, but I don't think it's likely," he said. "TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."
Saying that Firefox 3.1 in its current form is "quite a stable product," Shaver said patience is a development virtue. "We're taking the time to get this worked out," he said. "No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs."
Comments by developers such as Baron and Hoare are in no way a "revolt" by programmers, said Shaver, who added that such discussions are normal at Mozilla, and during software development in general. "There's always talk about what we should trade off," he said.
Mozilla conceived Firefox 3.1 as a "fast-track" update to June 2008's Firefox 3.0, but the new browser's progress has been much slower than originally planned. At one point, Mozilla was shooting for a final release as early as the last months of 2008, and hinted that it would use just a single beta to do so.
But Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back several times to allow Mozilla to add more features -- TraceMonkey and a private browsing mode among them -- and for additional testing. In November, for example, Mozilla slipped in a third beta to get a better handle on bugs.
"We wanted to be able to develop faster, and see how that manifested on the product side," said Shaver about Firefox 3.1's pace. "Even if we get it out in Q2, we'd be looking at about a year after Firefox 3.0, and that's still faster than we've usually done."
Shaver said he has no regrets about Firefox 3.1's progress. "I'm very happy with how 3.1 is shaping up."
But it's unlikely that Firefox 3.1 will ship this quarter -- for months the broad target Mozilla was touting. "To make it in Q1, we'd have to rush it more than we want to," Shaver said. The schedule being considered now "would put it out of Q1," he added.
There's a possibility that Mozilla will, in fact, slate a fourth beta before it moves on to a "release candidate" build. "We do betas until we're confident we're done with them," Shaver said.
Although Mozilla faces renewed pressure from Microsoft , which may wrap up Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as quickly as next month, Shaver rejects the idea that Firefox is in a race. "No, I don't think it is important," he said when asked whether Mozilla needs to get Firefox 3.1 out the door before IE8. "We're eager to get a high-quality Firefox 3.1," he said. "This is much more about having the product done right than getting it out fast."
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 , still the newest public release of the browser, debuted in early December 2008. It can be downloaded from Mozilla's site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Vertica tailors its analytic database for VMware
Vertica packaged its Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database as a software appliance and unwrapped the bundle on Monday.
"This is almost a no-brainer for us," explains Dave Menninger, vice president of product management and marketing at Vertica. "It's a natural fit for us to operate in a virtualized architecture."
[ Keep up with all the latest in virtualization with David Marshall's Virtualization Report. ]
To that end, Vertica rolled its database together with VMware's hypervisor and the Linux-based CentOS so that users drop an image onto VMware-supported hardware and from there are ready to populate the system with their data.
While the benefits of virtualization are largely associated with hardware consolidation, Menninger explains that "we benefit applications that cross the boundary from one node to multiple nodes." He continues that nodes can be added either as the data warehouse expands or to boost performance.
Philip Howard, research director of data management at Bloor Research, explains that "there won?t be many of the traditional advantages of virtualization because most data warehouses are working flat-out anyway. Perhaps the most obvious time when it would be useful is if you need to build a short-term data mart to query the hell out of for a few months."
That is one scenario in which Vertica's Menninger says it envisions customers using the appliance. Another is among companies with large amounts of data that add to that regularly, such as financial services firms, telcos, and marketing services organizations.
Though major database vendors, notably IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, have yet to officially optimize their data warehouse for virtualization, they are active in the virtualization realm and are likely to branch into this direction in due course, Bloor Research's Howard says.
Seagate sees datacenter power, SSDs as future priorities
Disk drive maker Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, the company's CEO said in an interview with InfoWorld. While short on specific details, CEO Stephen Luczo said the company believes it has a competitive advantage with the issue. "There are architectural items that we?re working on there," Luczo said.
Luczo also said he believed the storage market will come back from the current difficult economy earlier than other sectors because of the continued growing need for storage at both the business and consumer levels. In the meantime, people will adjust their usage in areas like storage until they feel safer economically, he said. "I think at the enterprise, certainly, IT departments have probably figured out lots of ways to get better and higher utilization out their storage infrastructure, and they?ve probably undertaken a lot of tasks to say [for example], if this e-mail hasn?t been read in the last five years it?s probably okay to move it to tape. But at some point, they run out of that, and maybe they run out of that in the next two to three quarters -- who knows?" Luczo said.
[ Related: Seagate discusses its SSD plans for 2009. ]
Luczo panned the notion of small businesses abandoning local disks for cloud-based storage. "You just can?t get that much data up and over the wires right now," he said.
Commenting on solid state drives, Luczo said adoption has been "much slower than anyone would have expected or predicted." The first generation of flash drives has not been offering a performance advantage and they are more expensive for less capacity, he said. "So, until some of the issues with flash are addressed, we don't see it [having] a big impact," said Luczo. Over time, flash will be more significant in areas now the domain of rotating magnetic storage and Seagate will have product offerings for it, he added.
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Borland offers release readiness for software
Borland Software is unveiling on Monday TeamInspector, a "release readiness" system that reveals metrics to give development managers evidence that software is ready for customer use.
Metrics like code analysis, test coverage, standards compliance, and build trends are gathered and revealed, Borland said. The product presents metrics in a dashboard displaying real-time and trend information across projects. TeamInspector becomes part of the Borland Management Solutions software delivery platform.
[ Last year, Borland sold its CodeGear software development tools unit. ]
"TeamInspector provides visibility into the quality of a software organization's output through metrics that tell the real story -- whether the code is solid, has been adequately tested, was built to standard, and is maintainable," said David Wilby, vice president of product strategy at Borland.
Code is monitored across a multi-project portfolio. Features include inspector infrastructure, providing a framework for code inspection, and portfolio dashboards, which aggregate metrics from various tools to display key risk and readiness indicators, such as test coverage. Also featured is a build and continuous integration environment, integrating with software configuration and change management tools and gathering information from multiple sources when events occur, such as a build.
TeamInspector works with a range of ALM tools and processes, Borland said. Available Monday, TeamInspector is sold in packs starting at $20,000.
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Microsoft researchers developing new, more secure Web browser
Microsoft researchers are developing a new Web browser that they say could offer a far greater degree of security than Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox or Microsoft's own Internet Explorer.
The browser, called Gazelle, relies on 5,000 lines of C# code called a "browser kernel" that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC's underlying operating system, according to a recently published paper.
[ For the full Test Center rundown on browser security, see InfoWorld's special report. ]
So far, Gazelle is just a prototype, with other parts of the browser based on Microsoft's IE. Due to the complex nature of the way it processes Web pages for better security, the browser's performance is more tortoise than gazelle, but the researchers think a few tweaks can make it faster.
Gazelle is different from some other browsers in that it considers each part of a Web site -- such as iframes, subframes and plugins -- as separate elements. Some of those elements can pull in malicious content from other Web sites. Google's Chrome runs a Web page and its elements in a single process.
The Microsoft researchers argues that their approach brings more reliability and better security since processes can't interact with the underlying system and are mediated by system calls supplied by the browser kernel.
In the paper, the Microsoft researchers are surprisingly critical of the company's forthcoming Web browser, IE8, which uses an approach similar to Chrome by using tabs to isolate processes.
"This granularity is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads)," the paper reads.
Gazelle goes so far as to separate elements of a Web page that come from the same registrar-controlled domain. For example, content from ad.datacenter.com and user.datacenter.com would be considered separate, whereas Chrome "puts them into the same site instance," the paper said.
Another interesting feature of Gazelle is aimed at blocking so-called race condition attacks. In that scenario, an attacker creates a Web page aimed at making a user click on an area of the page. But just before the predicted click happens, an overlay is drawn into the page, which could cause a user to be attacked.
Gazelle will ignore any clicks in newly exposed screen areas for about one second until a user can see the new screen areas.
Gazelle also aims to limit the dangers posed by programming flaws in browser plugins. Plugins are small bits of code that enable other programs to run within a browser, but they've also been known to contain vulnerabilities that can allow a PC to be hacked.
In Gazelle, the plugins are sandboxed, or isolated from the rest of the system, so that a bad plugin would only affect the particular Web page's plugin process and not the whole PC.
But one huge problem with Gazelle's approach is that existing plugin code would have to be rewritten or ported to interact with Gazelle's browser kernel system calls. That's difficult since plugins are written by a wide variety of software vendors whose development schedules don't necessarily work in perfect sync with those of browser developers.
Other parts of Gazelle borrow from IE code not related to security. For example, the researchers said they didn't want to write a new HTML parser, so they used IE7's Trident renderer and JavaScript engine.
In compatibility tests, Gazelle correctly rendered 19 of the top 20 sites ranked by Web survey firm Alexa. The paper warns that the new security of Gazelle does introduce "performance overhead" -- especially for sites such as the New York Times Web site -- but further work should be able to make it faster.
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Asustek to make Google Android netbook, says report
Google's Android OS continues to extend its tentacles deeper into Microsoft territory. Two weeks ago Archos announced plans to roll out an Android-based tablet phone later this year, and now netbook-pioneer Asustek says it may install Android on an upcoming, low-cost notebook.
According to a Bloomberg report, Samson Hu, who manages Asustek's successful Asus Eee PC business, says his company has engineers working on an Android-based portable, which may ship by the end of the year. The project isn't a done deal, however, and Asustek apparently is still deciding whether to move forward with the mini-note.
[ The InfoWorld Test Center rates netbooks for business. See who came out on top. ]
Let's hope that Asustek green-lights the thing. Certainly, the cost benefits of using Google's free, Linux-based operating system are very apparent to a vendor of low-cost netbooks. And Android plays well with low-power, inexpensive processors used in the Eee series. For consumers, a strong competitor to Microsoft is always a good thing. Besides, Android looks promising. It's intuitive and easy to navigate on the T-Mobile G1 smart phone, although it remains to be seen how well Android translates from phone to tablet and netbook.
The timing of Asustek's announcement is somewhat surprising. Earlier this month, the company said it plans to market fewer Eee models to cut production costs and to reduce customer confusion. (Few of us know the difference between the Eee PC S101 and PC 1000H, apparently.) While an Android-based model certainly won't ease consumer confusion, it will benefit users in the long run by helping Google's OS become a legitimate contender to Windows in the notebook PC market.
PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Test your Web IQ
The World Wide Web has had the greatest impact on our lives of any technology since the personal computer itself. But Web 2.0 didn't happen overnight -- the history of this radical medium spans 17 years of servers, sites, and software. Think you know all there is to know? Test your Web literacy with this pop quiz packed with tech tips and trivia. But watch out! Some of the answers may not be what you expect.
1. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while he was with which organization?
a. NCSA
b. CERN
c. NASA
d. IETF
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Microsoft, Citrix join forces against VMware
Microsoft and Citrix Systems have tightened their virtualization partnership to help both companies compete more effectively with market leader VMware, they announced Monday.
Citrix said it plans to release a new suite of virtualization management tools in April, called Citrix Essentials, that will be offered in two versions -- one for Microsoft's Hyper-V software and another for Citrix XenServer.
[ Read the InfoWorld Test Center's review of Microsoft's Hyper-V | Track the latest trends in virtualization in InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog. ]
Citrix has more advanced management tools than Microsoft for virtual environments, and Microsoft hopes the partnership will help spread the use of Hyper-V in datacenters. In return, Microsoft has pledged to manage XenServer environments with the next version of its Systems Center management software, which currently works only with Hyper-V and VMware's ESX. It will also market and sell Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V to its customers worldwide, the companies said.
In another move to counter VMware's lead, Citrix will offer its XenServer software free starting in April. One or two high-end features from that product, including the high-availability features, will be moved to Citrix Essentials for XenServer, but many of the existing capabilities will be available for no charge, said Citrix CTO Simon Crosby.
Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer each will be priced at $1,500 to $5,000 per server, depending on the features selected, Crosby said.
The announcements were made just as VMware's customer conference kicked off in Cannes, France.
"What this is really about is Microsoft and Citrix as a team going against VMware," said Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.
The tools in Citrix Essentials include StorageLink, for provisioning and managing virtual machines across large storage area networks; dynamic provisioning, which allows thousands of virtual machines to be booted simultaneously from a single master image; and a new "lab management" tool for creating virtualized test and development environments. It will also have a graphical tool for automating a workflow of complex management tasks.
The version of Essentials for XenServer will include the high-availability features that are currently in the Platinum edition of XenSource 5. Those features will not be in the version for Hyper-V.
"Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is a much-needed step, especially for Microsoft," according to Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group.
The storage and provisioning capabilities will be a boost for Microsoft, although the lack of a high-availability option will make some enterprises hesitant about using Hyper-V for production applications, Wolf said. At least initially, he expects the Microsoft platform to be more widely used for virtual test and development environments.
The cross-management capabilities between Hyper-V and XenSource will also give Citrix a boost, Wolf said. Customers could deploy XenServer now, with the knowledge that they can adopt Hyper-V later and manage both from Microsoft Systems Center, he said.
However, both vendors still face a formidable challenge in VMware, Bowker and Wolf said. VMware retains a technology lead in server virtualization, and it has an established presence in many data centers.
"A lot of large enterprises have mature VMware deployments; they're a bit cautious about splitting their infrastructure across multiple hypervisors." Wolf said, adding that Monday's announcements may have the most impact for small and midsize businesses.
Microsoft and Citrix both said they have a price advantage that makes them competitive with VMware. Customers would have to pay VMware $5,000 per server to get the functionality offered in the free XenServer, according to Crosby. However, VMware's Infrastructure 3 software does include features that XenServer will not have.
Microsoft wants to make virtualization part of the Windows platform, just as networking capabilities are a part of Windows today, said David Greschler, Microsoft's director of Systems Center marketing. The fact that companies are familiar with Windows lowers their training costs, he argued. "When they know Windows, they know virtualization."
Both companies see plenty of room for growth in the market.
"Today we're seeing [virtualization] at about 20 to 30 percent penetration," Greschler said, "but we expect that to grow very fast, and it will be in the upper 80 to 90 percent range very quickly."
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