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ComputerWorld: 2007 Jobs Report Snapshots
Ever wanted to feel depressed about how much money you're making? Wait no longer! ComputerWorld has published their annual survey of IT salaries.
IT salaries have risen at a slow but steady pace since hitting rock-bottom in 2002. Here are the IT pay raises from 1987 to 2007…
The 2007 median annual base salary is $80,000 (half the salaries are above the median, and half are below). For senior management, the median annual base salary is $115,000; for middle management, it's $88,000; and for staff/technical positions, it's $70,000.
For "blogger" it's… er… less.
NetworkWorld: Reduce IT complexity, costs with consolidation
Diann Daniel makes the case for reducing the amount of stuff in your data centers and increasing the amount of work. That doesn't take a genius to figure out, but it does take a genius to figure out how, and Daniel has some good ideas:
The remedy is IT consolidation, which creates cost savings and organizational benefits. Lead author Alexander Peters and coauthors say there are three basic approaches to IT consolidation: standardizing applications and business processes, centrally locating resources and staff and eliminating redundant hardware systems and software packages.
Now, there are a couple of ways to do this - and the article goes through a few of them. But this is clearly the trend in IT - virtualization to reduce the number of boxes, WAN optimization to reduce the number of branch data centers, lower wattage processors to decrease the number of generators, etc.
NetworkWorld: Gigaspaces targets "the Digg effect"
Gigaspaces is now offering it's "eXtreme Application Platform" for free to start-up firms. Normally, the scaling platform is used in trading firms and costs $20,000 per processor, but if you've got less than $5 million in annual revenue - and you don't mind using a program that sounds like it's a skateboard ramp made out of discarded servers - they'll offer the middleware to you free - without support.
But the Web-driven economy means that even small companies can benefit from such technology, said Geva Perry, Gigaspaces' chief marketing officer. "There's something called the Digg effect," he said, noting the common instance of a Web-based service or application company suddenly getting red-hot, thanks to high-profile postings on aggregator sites like Digg.com and Slashdot.org. "Suddenly you're getting all this incredible traffic volume."
