Cloud computing to create over 2 million jobs in India

Cloud computing will generate some 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, and India alone will create over 2 million, predicts a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC). 

Pointing out to a strong linkage between cloud, innovation and entrepreneurship, the study said most companies look at migration to cloud computing as a way to free up existing resources and work on more innovative projects. Freeing up budget allows organisations to shift some of their legacy work to the cloud and invest such freed budget in IT innovation that supports business innovation and in turn create new jobs.

"A common misconception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator - a major one," said John F Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president at IDC in a statement. 

The Microsoft-IDC study estimates that the revenues from cloud innovation could reach as high as $1.1 trillion a year by 2015 from $400 billion in 2011, where some $28 billion was spent worldwide on public cloud IT services (as compared to over $1.7 trillion of spending on total IT products and services industry) creating 1.5 million jobs. 

The study predicts over two million jobs each to be generated in the communications and media and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million. Though there is no such break-up available for the Indian market, the footprint is expected to be more or less similar to global markets, said Ramkumar Pichai, general manager, customer and partner experience, Microsoft India. 

On the security, privacy and regulatory-related concerns that prevented rapid cloud adoption, he said Microsoft offered the best in class data centre security and also flexibility to organisations to shift between private cloud, public cloud and on premises software, apart from enabling organisations inter-operate between the three. 

"We at Microsoft expect cloud computing to emerge as the most disruptive force for technology industry and enable India to emerge as the global innovation hub from global services hub now, apart from helping the Indian economy grow multi-fold," he told ET. 

According to the Microsoft-IDC regional forecast, the US accounted for 62% of worldwide spending for public IT cloud services last year compared to 35% of worldwide IT spending. Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), a complex mix of developed and emerging countries, has more cloud-created jobs than North America, primarily because of its workforce, which is nearly four times as large. 

Coming to Asia Pacific region, the study observed that except for a few small countries that account for only about 5% of the total workforce, the region is dominated by two countries in terms of job creation - China and India.

What Kind of Software Company Should You Work For?

Peter Griess still has plenty of years ahead of him, he has already worked for NetApp, Yahoo, and now Facebook. He was part of a nine-person startup that worked on some interesting social email apps that eventually got acquired by Yahoo. Along his career he has seen very different kinds of cultures in these various software engineering departments, and as I was listening to his talk, I thought about the many software companies that I have covered over the years.

I would break them down into three different kinds of cultures (the names are my own construct):

Mature Turtles. Until the Internets came along, this was your typical enterprise software company, such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun/Oracle and others. It was a slow adopter, came out with new releases once a year or so, after careful testing and lots of quality control. The company would have extended maintenance windows of several years, because customers would latch on to one release and stick with it, without upgrading because they were fearful that changes would break something that was mission-critical. Developers had firm specs before they wrote any code, and took that code through a lengthy dev/test process before it ever left the premises. There is a hierarchy of engineers and different silos depending on which pieces of the code you are working on, and usually you can't cross over easily from one silo to another. Customers often had to wait months to see their suggestions make it into a code base.

Why work for them: Not all departments are as evil as others. For example, being a data scientist at IBM right now is probably one of the best gigs going. If you can deal with the silos and the hierarchies, then this is a good place to learn some solid skills. Griess told me there is another reason too: 'You can go really deep on a specific project. Not all projects lend themselves to rapid iteration: those with deep technical challenges often require a fair amount of thought and supporting infrastructure (which often must be built specially) before they will work at all.' 

Middle Earth. This is the type of company that was founded in the early Internet era, say the late 1990s. They want to be a changeling but are stuck in the slow-moving past. Yahoo and Cisco are good examples, but there are lots of others. They have large and mature markets but don't know what to do with them. They have oddball product strategies and conflicting products that segment their own focus and split their development teams' attention. Silos are still ever-present, and accentuated by frequent acquisitions that were never really absorbed into the corporate mainstream culture. They have legacy products and users who are reluctant to move off of them.

Why work for them: If you want to get experience with an international company and find out how to support legacy products, these guys are the places to be. If you want lots of exposure to mergers and acquisitions, they have the cash. If you want your own office and peace and quiet while you code, this is the place for you.

Internet Chameleon. This is the type of online software vendor that we are used to these days, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. They move quickly and tend to break things as they add code on the fly. They get the cloud or are wholly based on it. They are using agile coding techniques and everyone is sitting in bullpens often at close quarters. Releases happen daily, if not more frequently, and get pushed out to real users, often to their dismay and frustration when they find something that is broken. There is a development culture where any engineer can add code anywhere: silos are gone and forgotten about. Features get added, morphed, or cannibalized whenever and wherever. These companies are controlled chaos sometimes. Gone also is the whole QA department: if you want to test something, roll it out to a small subset of the active population or try your code out on some internal staffers. Of course, it helps to have a level of trust with your end users so that you don't lose them in the process of making these enhancements.

Why work for them: Obviously, most of you are probably focused on this type of company right now, or want to start one yourself. But you have to have the fortitude to roll with the punches and be able to adapt to the constant flux of changes.

Source..

Indian salaries to rise 12% ; fastest in Asia

Indian salaries are set to rise by 12 per cent this year, the largest jump among Asian nations for the 10th year in a row, according to a survey released Tuesday by human resource consultancy Aon Hewitt.


Rising salaries broadly reflect India's economic growth and its resilience in the face of global economic headwinds, which Aon Hewitt says will likely shave just 0.3 to 2 percentage points off last year's pace of wage growth.


The rise also points to a troubling paradox of plenty in this nation of 1.2 billion.


India is teeming with young jobseekers, yet salaries continue to spiral upward because so few Indians are actually employable, said Sandeep Chaudhary, practice leader for compensation consulting at Aon Hewitt.


He said just 15 per cent of the working age population is employable in the private sector- a skills deficit that the government is trying to address through programs like the National Skill Development Corporation, a public-private partnership focused on worker training.


"If they were to come into the private sector, you'll see salary increases become more muted,'' he said.


In the meantime, skilled workers have plenty of opportunity. Staff turnover in India is nearly 20 per cent, with the highest attrition rates in finance, information technology and retail, according to Aon Hewitt.


Despite their rise, Indian salaries are still among the lowest in the region, he said. "We've always operated at a lower cost base,'' Chaudhary said. "The quantum of compensation in India its far less than what gets paid in Southeast Asia, Singapore and China.''


Chaudhary said Indian manufacturers have been able to handle rising salaries because they largely serve a domestic market, unlike China's export-driven companies.


"In manufacturing, 80 per cent in India is for domestic consumption,'' he said. "These kind of increasing wage costs are going to be difficult for organizations to justify if they convert that to export, where the entire focus is on cost arbitrage.''


So far, Indian growth has been fast enough to support double digit salary increases, which have managed to outpace India's high inflation, according to the survey.


India's projected wage increases outpace China's 9.5 per cent rise and the Philippines' 6.9 per cent increase.


Salaries are anticipated to grow fastest, at 13.3 per cent, in the pharmaceutical sector, as India's generics manufacturers take advantage of patent expirations. Telecoms and financial companies have projected the slowest salary increases, at 11 per cent and 10 per cent, due to regulatory hurdles, policy issues and the global slowdown, Aon Hewitt found.


Aon Hewitt, the human resource consulting and outsourcing division of Aon Corporation, surveyed 550 organizations across 19 industries to come up with its forecasts.

Cisco Systems to increase India staff by 60%

Cisco Systems will increase its workforce in India by about 60% over the next four years as part of its strategy for emerging markets, a senior executive of the network equipment maker told ET. 

This will be the first big-scale recruitment by Cisco in India after it announced a 15% cut in global workforce in mid 2011. Most of the hiring will be for the company's research and development centre in Bangalore, which is its largest outside the US. The IT giant is increasingly using the Bangalore centre for innovating products for emerging markets such as India, China and Brazil. 

"By 2015, we will be ramping up from 7,500 people to about 12,000 people, increasing workforce out of Bangalore," senior vice-president Sanjay Rohatgi said, adding, "We want to innovate faster and at the right price point for emerging countries because the growth will happen in this part of the world now." 

Rohatgi looks after the California-based company's service provider business in India and the SAARC region. Cisco's service provider vertical contributes about 36% to the company's total revenues from India. 

Rohatgi said Cisco is working with service providers on leveraging 3G by offering services such as e-education with the aim to take video and data services to consumers and enterprises. The telcos have direct access to Cisco's Bangalore engineering team, which enables them to get customised products. 

In India, the $43-billion (revenue) Cisco will focus on growth areas such as mobile packet core, cable digitisation, cloud services and collaboration with the government. 

The company is hopeful of closing one or two major long-term evolution (LTE) contracts by the middle of 2012, as broadband wireless access (BWA) services are expected to begin by the year-end. Over the next three years, a third of the total revenue of Cisco's service provider vertical will come from these contracts. 

A large number of IT vendors, such as Juniper Networks, ZTE and Huawei, have been pushing tailor-made products in the telecoms sector. However, experts say they have been conservative in bringing more people on board. For instance, Huawei and ZTE introduced enterprise units and hired a few hundred people while targeting $400 million in revenues. 

Over the past year, Cisco has adapted to the demands of mobile service providers by shifting to an alternative business model: from offering capex purchase to a pay-as-you-go model.

20+ Online Networking Opportunities for Job Seekers

Social networking for career enrichment is on the rise. With online networking, you have access to more professionals — and will inevitably make faster connections — as your connections expand throughout your industry.

Online networking also gives you the opportunity to put your personal brand on display — a type of communication that may feel like bragging in face-to-face meetings. We’ve all heard of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and how to use these platforms to find a job, but it’s time to look beyond “the usual suspects.”

What other networking websites might be beneficial for your professional life? Here’s a roundup of 20 unsung Internet resources that could help you land your dream job. Some are general and others pertain to certain industries, but all are valuable options to boost your social networking (and your career prospects).

Niche Social Websites with Networking Potential

1. Elixio

Elixio is a private online community for professionals. This site is invite-only, but you can be sure if you get an invite, you will have the chance to make awesome connections. Because it’s a community of less than 14,000 (mostly business) professionals, Elixio hosts networking opportunities for the cream of the crop.

2. Stroome

Stroome is the foremost online video collaboration hub. Launched in April 2010, the site connects journalists, filmmakers, travelers and anyone else with a video camera — allowing them to upload their films to the Internet and then collaborate with other users to create new video, audio, and photo mashups from all corners of the world.

3. Ryze

Ryze is an online business network founded in 2001 and now operating with 80,000 members. You can make a free networking-oriented homepage and connect with professionals (or re-connect with old contacts). The site, which initially focused on the high-tech community, now appeals to CEOs, entrepreneurs and home-based businesses.

4. Ning

Ning’s industry connections span many categories, including politics, entertainment, consumer brands, small business, non-profits, education and more. It connects more than 74 million people around the globe with the topics they are passionate about, making it a great foundation for professional networking. You can use Ning to create and design your own free social network. For instance, there’s a social community for the band Linkin Park, the Peace Corps and Classroom 2.0.

5. Quora

Quora connects you to everything you want to know about, and gives you leverage to interact with high influencers in any industry. You can create your own profile, share content and ask questions. Also, the site itself is organized by people and their interests, so you can easily find like-minded individuals. One way you can think of it is as a cache for research: When you see a link to a question page on Quora, you can feel good that it will have information you need.

6. Ecademy

Ecademy is a membership organization aimed at business professionals.The site boasts an online network, blog and boardrooms for collaboration over the Internet. It’s for entrepreneurs and business owners who want to belong to a community that connects, supports and collaborates with each other to produce new ideas. Those who want to take a more passive approach to networking, however, may find less use for it.

7. Ziggs

Ziggs is a site that will allow you to create and manage your personal brand. You can also join groups and make contacts on the network. Ziggs is for the Internet user who proactively wants to market himself on the web — to be discovered by recruiters, to find a better job or just to be found. The platform is also for folks who want to develop or participate in private online communities with colleagues, friends, club members or charity teams.

8. Tweako

According to its website, Tweako is a “user-powered community website and social network, specializing in all aspects of computing, technology and the Internet.” Tweako.com is a place to learn and share information and knowledge about computer and technology topics. For those interested in keeping a pulse on cutting-edge technology and IT concepts, Tweako also keeps tabs on startups and company business to see who’s hot in the field — a great resource for those looking to get job leads.

9. Your Personal Blog

While a personal blog will be a networking opportunity on its own, you can use the blog to get your name out there. Post your blog’s URL when you comment on industry articles and share it with people on your networking profiles. You never know — someone might like what they see on your blog and start up a conversation that could be beneficial to your career or job search. There are many options available for creating a blog, but you can create a free one easily on WordPress.

10. Tumblr

Tumblr has several advantages over other blogging options for building your brand. If you are a recent graduate or in the younger job-seeking demographic, you’ll benefit from Tumblr’s youthful user base. Plus, you’ll find a breadth of business blogs that are hosted on the platform that can easily be followed, helping you stay knowledgeable about brands you might want to work for. However, while Tumblr will allow you to quickly and easily share your personal brand, the site doesn’t offer as many features or formatting options as other blogging platforms.

11. Brazen Careerist

This site was created for college students and young professionals to “meet new people, find a job and build relevant relationships” to advance their careers. A smart option for those entering the market for the first time, Brazen Careerist also offers a connection to Facebook — an easy way to see who in your current circle of friends is also using the service.

Communities Categorized by Industry and Interest

If you’re interested in a particular industry, you can find a hub in which you can meet like-minded individuals. Here are some examples:

• Academics: Academia.edu
• Activism and Environmentalism: Care2
• Art: deviantArt
• Human Resources: HR.com
• IT/Computers: Talentopoly
• Law: Legal OnRamp
• Music: ReverbNation.com

'Google, Facebook wouldn’t have been possible without open source'

Red Hat is one of the leading companies operating on what is called the open source business model, where the source codes of software are open, enabling more programmers to make adaptations and improvements. 

So, unlike proprietary software companies that do not open up the source codes and make money by selling expensive software licenses, Red Hat makes money by selling subscriptions for the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using open-source software. 

Open source software has had significant success in many areas, and Red Hat itself has almost touched $1-billion in revenue. The company's CEO Jim Whitehurst was recently in Bangalore and spoke to TOI. 

What excites you right now in the open source world?
User-driven innovation. The Googles, the Yahoos, the Facebooks, who have significant IT challenges, are not looking to pay a vendor for intellectual property, they hire thousands of engineers to do it themselves, and they do it all on open source. They had 'big data' problems to solve, but did not have the dollars to solve them when they started off. That is why all the big data innovations, such as Hadoop and Cassandra (frameworks for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware), have happened on open source. 

And now IBM, EMC, Oracle have all announced support around those open source projects. Why didn't these things come out of the labs at IBM or Oracle? The simple reason is innovation is starting to move to user-driven innovation. It's the explosion of Web 2.0 companies that's driving open source. 

Also, the pace of innovation at Web 2.0 companies is very rapid. The CEO of one of the big Web 2.0 companies I was talking to said he needed to launch a product in two weeks, so he had engineers working round the clock to ensure he met the deadline. Because it's happening on open source, it opens up this huge, huge opportunity for Red Hat. 

How cost effective is it?
One of the major banks in the US takes every single interaction they have with their customer and analyses it all in real time to take decisions. When they originally priced that system, it was going to be over a $100 million. 

But eventually they built it with Hadoop, using Red Hat and commodity X86 servers for less than $2 million. So you are not talking about 20% savings, you are talking about radical savings.

The cost of building even the beginnings of Google, if you were doing that in the traditional IT stack way, would have been prohibitive. Our estimate is that if they had paid traditional license fees, even discounted, they would have paid $10 billion every year in such fees. 

How is the cloud impacting you?
All major clouds are built on open source, other than (Microsoft) Azure. They either use ours (Red Hat) or free open source, and they use it right from the hypervisor to the operating system. 

To build something on the scale of Amazon on a proprietary platform would be extremely expensive. So it does represent a huge opportunity. But the dollars are still in applications. Cloud as a multi-tenanted, off-premise set up is still a tiny, tiny part of IT infrastructure. 

Software-as-a-service vendors are also building on our stack. Salesforce.com is built on Red Hat software. So we are in the cloud through that way too. 

Do you believe everything will eventually move to open source?
This might be provocative for some people in open source, but no, not everything is moving to open source. Open source works well where there are broad communities of users, where there aren't clear standards, or there is value in developing clear standards. 

I'm willing to bet that IBM has profited a lot more from Linux than Red Hat has -- by embracing it early on, offering it across their platforms. Sun Microsystems went the other way, and they almost died before they were acquired by Oracle. Open source is a very powerful developer model, very powerful economic model, but you have to figure out where to work with it. 

Microsoft Windows still has the dominant share of server operating systems. 

They are still about 60%. That's because a lot of the applications still used are older ones. If you want to run Microsoft Exchange, you would use Windows. For customers to migrate applications is expensive. 

But if it is a new application, we have a disproportionately high share. If you are doing only Web apps, or Java development or any new development, that is disproportionately Linux. In countries like India, where it's significant new IT infrastructure, we have great opportunity. 

You recently acquired Gluster (it has almost its entire engineering team in Bangalore). Where does it fit in?
There's today an explosion of data, especially of unstructured data. How do you store and manage it? The people working on this problem are primarily the storage companies like EMC, NetApp. These are hardware companies, so for them the solution is a box that sits on the floor in a data centre. The thing that's great about Gluster is that it's a software solution to the problem. 

You can plug up commodity disk drives to this thing, and you are ready for the application. It looks like one big disk drive. More importantly, because it's software, you can spool it right up into the cloud. Pandora, the music streaming service, is a customer. 

If a million kids show up to listen to a song, they can't all hit one disk drive, so what this file system does is auto-replicate that song may be 50,000 times so that each one is hit by only 20 people. It can also spool right up on Amazon. When a song goes viral, it can spool up, and when the demand goes down, it can spool down. You can't do that with a hardware solution. 

It's an open source solution, it's low cost and modular. Red Hat started with the operating system, then middleware, virtualisation, and now we also have storage. Gluster has 50-60 people, we'll likely double that this year.