'Big data' creating big career opportunities for IT pros

New job opportunities are emerging for IT professionals in the field of "big data," the term used to describe how corporations gather vast amounts of real-time data about their customers and analyze that data to drive decision making and increase profitability.

A new job title -- data scientist -- is all the rage. A data scientist typically has a background in computer science or mathematics as well as the analytical skills necessary to find the proverbial needle in a haystack of data gathered by the corporation.

"A data scientist is somebody who is inquisitive, who can stare at data and spot trends," says Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of Big Data Products at IBM. "It's almost like a Renaissance individual who really wants to learn and bring change to an organization."

Unheard of 18 months ago, "data scientist" has exploded in popularity as a Google search term. The number of Google searches of "data scientist" hit peaks 20 times higher than normal in the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. It's a popular search term in high-tech hotspots such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Among the U.S. companies looking to hire data scientists are PayPal, Amazon and HP. Indeed, the term "data scientist" is mentioned in 195 job listings on the Dice.com website for IT professionals.

IT departments also are adding data-centric developers and system administrators who specialize in tools such as the open source Apache Hadoop software. Hadoop is designed for data-intensive, distributed applications and used by such popular websites as Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay.

MORE: Hadoop wins over enterprises, spawns talent crunch

Hadoop is mentioned in 612 of 83,122 job listings on Dice.com. Among the companies looking to hire Hadoop software engineers and developers are AT&T Interactive, Sears, PayPal, AOL and Deloitte.

Hadoop "is an emerging skill," says Alice Hill, managing director of Dice.com. "Companies need to manage large-scale data operations, and the whole idea of Hadoop is that you can do it inexpensively. That works really well with what we're seeing in terms of the movement to the cloud."

Hill sees opportunities related to Hadoop for both entry-level and experienced IT staff, as well as for hardware and software specialists.

"Traditional hardware people need to figure out how to cluster in different environments. It's not just about buying a database and hooking it up to a hard drive. Now you have distributed databases that are hooked up to multiple servers and multiple hard drives," Hill says. Hadoop "is inexpensive, but it require somebody who really knows how to scale hardware."

Hill says Hadoop is also a good skill for IT professionals with relational database management experience to pursue. "If you really understand data structure and queries, there's going to be a lot of job opportunities," she adds.

Job opportunities for data scientists and Hadoop specialists are emerging across industries, from Web companies and e-retailers to financial services, healthcare, energy, utilities and media.

"There are so many directions you can go in with these [data management] skills," Hill says. "It's very fertile ground for experienced IT professionals, but also for people coming out with computer science degrees. It's a great area to specialize in."

Bhambhri says IT departments will be looking to hire new people in the area of big data as well as to retrain some of their existing staff to add data analysis and Hadoop-related programming and administrative skills. For example, IBM retrained 2,400 IT professionals at Big Data Bootcamps that it held for its customers and partners last year.

RELATED: Get Hadoop certified ... fast

"The IT departments really have to expand their data platforms and not be restricted to structured data repositories," Bhambhri says. "They have to bring in new sources of unstructured data in their platforms to answer the questions that C-level executives are asking for their decision-making processes. From an IT perspective, it's very important for the IT folks to not only identify these data sources but to work with their business counterparts to discover what other sources of data need to be seamlessly integrated into their platforms."

IBM has a new initiative called Big Data University aimed at training undergraduate and graduate students in the area of big data and exposing them to Hadoop. Launched last October, Big Data University has already attracted more than 14,000 students to register for its online courses. IBM offers six online courses related to Hadoop and big data.

"We are trying to get the students to really see the potential of big data and what the business outcomes can be from these new sources of data," Bhambhri says. "We're giving them use cases from retail, healthcare and telecommunications companies. We're showing them what was not possible before is possible now because of the work we have done with different customers in these different industries."

Bhambhri is optimistic about the career prospects for IT professionals with data management and Hadoop skills.

"In every industry, there is a lot of data that is getting captured, whether it is sensor data or log data or data coming from social media like Facebook and Twitter," Bhambhri says. "The volumes of the data are huge. So what has been happening is that a lot of our customers are capturing the data, but until now there was no technology that was available that they could use to analyze this data quickly in a cost-effective manner. That was a huge bottleneck. Now we read what Yahoo and Google are doing around Hadoop and MapReduce, and it certainly looks like these open source tools will solve that bottleneck."

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan (Network World), 2012/03/07 

Text extracted from: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/417612/_big_data_creating_big_career_opportunities_it_pros/

Why You Need Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is that part of cloud computing that allows you to lease and manage computing infrastructure for your business needs. Computing infrastructure includes virtual machines (VMs), operating systems, middleware, runtime components, network, storage, data and applications. Cloud computing vendors provide the necessary underlying physical hardware (servers, network, storage) that they own and manage transparently in the background. The two worlds have little crossover. The cloud vendor and customer have a non-intrusive relationship with one another just as you currently do with your web hosting provider. They’re there when you need help but their direct involvement in your business is zero.

The cloud vendor also supplies you with a management interface in which you work with your infrastructure. You’re responsible for license management for your operating systems and software. You pay for compute resources per CPU, per hour, per gigabyte of bandwidth, per gigabyte of storage or a combination.

The Three Faces of IaaS

IaaS isn’t as simple as a single offering but the boundaries between types are well-drawn. First, you have the Private Cloud. Private IaaS is exactly what you think it is—a dedicated, private infrastructure. Think of your own data center setup as a Private Cloud IaaS. Of course, unless you have cloud infrastructure (virtualization, storage, extreme redundancy, etc.), it isn’t officially a cloud but you get the idea.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Public Cloud. A Public Cloud is a 100 percent hosted solution. You own no hardware. It is the Public Cloud that is the focus of this article.
If you combine the two cloud concepts, you have what’s known as a Hybrid Cloud. A Hybrid Cloud can be any percentage mixture of Private and Public infrastructures for your company. Most companies will evolve into this type of cloud from a traditional, private hardware infrastructure to a cloud-based one.

A Hybrid Cloud is the solution that cloud vendors recommend to their customers who’ve grown their own data centers and that are comfortable with that model. Mix your Private Cloud with the Public Cloud for a solid and complete solution for you and your customers. A Hybrid Cloud mixes the security and control of a traditional data center with hosted cloud infrastructure. Typically, companies will transition their disaster recovery efforts to the Public Cloud while retaining production operations in-house in a Private Cloud.

Industry experts view Hybrid Clouds as a transitional step to a full Private Cloud. They see this process as a stepwise migration. As leases and service contracts expire, companies will move their computing workloads from private data center architecture and Private Clouds to virtualized architecture in the Public Cloud.

Analysts predict that by the end of 2012, as many as 20% of businesses will exist completely in the Public Cloud.

Cost Savings But Not Where You Think

Cost tops the advantages of IaaS cloud computing. To purchase the same amount of physical computing power, to manage that computing power and to house that computing power costs many times more than bulk pricing from a cloud vendor. IaaS is basically hardware outsourcing. You don’t own the hardware. You don’t manage the hardware. You use the hardware but its care and feeding are not your problem.

Put whatever moniker on cloud computing’s IaaS that you want but it’s really no different than what you probably do now in your current data center. Unless you own your data center, pay its staff, maintain the facility and physically service your own hardware, then you’re already using hardware (infrastructure) as a service. The primary difference in a standard data center space lease and IaaS is that you don’t have to deal with any hardware.

IaaS frees you from purchasing or leasing hardware, having it shipped to the data center, paying someone to deploy it into a rack, paying for that rack space, managing the hardware throughout its life cycle and taking care of its disposal. That’s why traditional data center infrastructure management is expensive. You have to pay for the hardware, you have to pay for maintenance, you have to pay for management and you have to pay for the business services that required all of this expense in the first place.

On the other side of the argument, cloud opponents state that your TCO is no lower with IaaS than with traditional data center service. This might be true from a pure hardware point-of-view. After all, the IaaS vendor has to pay for the data center infrastructure and pass his costs on to you. However, the savings is in the form of labor costs.

Count the number of full-time employees (FTEs) you have on hand right now to manage your infrastructure. Now, count the number of FTEs you’ll require by not managing any hardware. Is there a significant difference between the two numbers? Add up the total cost of those FTEs who you won’t need anymore and multiply that number by three years (standard hardware lease length). That number is your savings.

Since your new virtual infrastructure comes with online management tools for creating new servers, installing operating systems, presenting storage and configuring network, you’ll need fewer FTEs to handle the job.

Lower Entry Barriers and Rapid Innovation

IaaS also lowers the financial and logistical barriers for startup businesses to enter the market and push their products and services to customers in a fraction of the standard timeframe. The IaaS model allows startups to start small and grow to any size on the pay-as-you-go plan. There’s not a huge outlay of capital on hardware and FTEs that traditionally built businesses have experienced.

Another advantage of IaaS is rapid innovation. For example, if you have an idea for a new service today, you could spin up a virtual test infrastructure for a few hundred dollars, test your service, demo your service and deploy a working business model in a matter of days instead of months. In a time when windows of opportunity are often very small, IaaS makes sense for who need a quick service build-out to show investors or potential customers.

Embrace the Elastic and Mobile Cloud

IaaS also makes your company mobile, elastic and global. You can manage your systems from anywhere, you can shrink and grow your computing infrastructure as needed and you can keep your global customers happy with zero downtime. And, since you’re not tied to a server room or data center, your office location is irrelevant. You can work from home and your employees can be spread across the globe.

Have you ever had to move systems, network and storage from one location to another? If you have, you know about expense, outage and failure. Most cloud vendors maintain geographically disparate data center locations to ensure zero downtime for your infrastructure. Sure, there’s an additional cost for the service but how much is your current disaster recovery solution costing you?

Summary

You need IaaS because you need mobility, agility, stability, availability, elasticity and frugality in your business. You can save money. You can beat the competition to market. And, you can do it with the peace of mind that someone else is minding the hardware foundation under your business.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re considering moving to an IaaS solution or you’re part of a startup, contact a cloud vendor and discuss your needs. Remember that not all cloud vendors can or will give you good advice. Look for experience, longevity, availability, customer service and customer satisfaction in your quest to migrate to the cloud. Remember that your partnership with a cloud vendor is an important one. It’s more than a simple landlord-tenant relationship; it’s a cohabitation. You’re domestic partners and you have to select wisely. So, you need to find a partner who can help you make a smooth transition to your desired level of cloud adoption, since you’re going to be there a very long time.

By Ken Hess, 2012/01/07
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.


Text extracted from: http://frugalnetworker.com/2012/01/07/why-you-need-infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas/

Tech That Should Be on Your Company's Radar for 2012

There are a variety of new technologies advancing in 2012 that you should investigate, if you aren’t already doing so, to give your small business a leg up on the competition. These recent technologies are beginning to be widely adopted and will continue to drive business forward.

Tablets

Tablets are highly visible, and many users want them, if only to read books and consume media. However, from a business perspective, replacing notebook computers with much lower-cost tablets may have a double benefit of reducing capital expenditures as well as increasing user satisfaction. Security can be an issue, both protecting company data and keeping malware and other threats out. Fortunately, both encryption providers and antivirus vendors are busily creating business-focused products that can help ensure security.

Windows 8

Like previous versions of Windows, Windows 8 will probably not be widely adopted in any great hurry. However, the intriguing capabilities of Windows 8, especially in conjunction with Windows Mobile 8 and Windows Server 8 to create an easy-to-use, fully capable unified communications environment could mean rapid adoption for highly-mobile organizations that can benefit from the access-anywhere models.

Big Data

The company that can best serve its customers will be the most likely to succeed--and that entails knowing as much as possible about your customers. Hadoop is a system designed by the Apache Foundation to process large amounts of data. As organizations accumulate terabytes of data about customers, business processes, partners and more, the model of a single database running on a single server becomes less useful. Hadoop runs across multiple systems at once, allowing bigger data sets as well as separate search engines for different purposes.

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization allows for many useful features in storage area network systems. Putting a layer of virtualization between the servers allows for thin provisioning, automatic tiering of storage, instant snapshots, and deduplication. Since there is no direct correlation between the volume a server mounts and the physical storage being used, a volume may actually be spread across multiple systems. This allows for the most-used files to be stored on the fastest drives (auto-tiering), for volumes to be expanded as needed (thin provisioning), for a system to store only one copy of each unique file (deduplication), and for instant copies of volumes to be made for backups, system recovery, and other uses (snapshots).

Network Virtualization

Server virtualization software, such as VMware and Hyper-V, is only the beginning of a truly virtual environment. To create a useful private cloud, you need to be able to create multiple separate networks, each running different virtual applications. This enables networks for customers, internal users, software developers, HR and so forth, without requiring different hardware for each. Combined with server and storage virtualization, network virtualization facilitates a fluid and responsive data center, where you can move resources from one network to another without having to reconfigure hardware. And with network virtualization, each virtual server can have its own gigabit Ethernet connection.

Cloud Backups

Experienced systems administrators may be leery about outsourcing critical applications, but with backups this can make a lot of sense. Since the backups are a secondary or tertiary copy of your data, cloud backups can more affordably fulfill archiving or disaster recovery than with moving tapes around. Since the cloud services are typically disk-based, recovering is speedier than finding, mounting, and reading tapes, and capacity can grow as needed without new equipment.

SSDs

Solid State Disks (SSDs) have been around for years but, two things may move SSDs to a more central role in IT. The first is the capability of a number of systems to use SSDs as cache, effectively giving an entire storage system the performance of SSDs while retaining the low cost of hard-disk based storage. The second factor is the destruction of hard-disk manufacturing facilities from flooding in Thailand in 2011. Hard0disk prices will probably remain high throughout 2012. At the same time, SSD prices are dropping and capabilities are improving.

IPv6

The Internet Protocol version 6 numbering system replaces decades-old IPv4. Address blocks for new domains are no longer available for IPv4. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get an IPv4 address any longer. However, IPv6 is beginning to be adopted more widely, and it can yield substantial advantages--such as unified communications or remote access using Windows 2008r2, where a user can easily access corporate resources from anywhere in the world.

Linux

Linux is nothing new, and has been used for many years in specialized roles such as Web servers and application servers. Now, however, the open source OS is making inroads into production environments, with database servers, file and print servers, and even workstations running on Linux. Its great customizability, capability to run on much less expensive hardware than Windows can, and the availability of mature open-source applications for nearly any enterprise application mean that it can be much less expensive to run than competing operating systems.

Cloud Applications

Cloud services have expanded in the last few years from specialized applications, such as payroll or ERP, to general office suites such as Office 365 or Google Apps for Business, to IT fundamentals such as storage or servers. While service outages and loss of data have been widely publicized, they have in reality affected relatively few customers for relatively short periods of time. The real trick is to use the cloud effectively while retaining data security and availability--no easy task.

By Logan G. Harbaugh, PCWorld.

Text extracted from: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246918/tech_that_should_be_on_your_companys_radar_for_2012.html

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable

When Facebook was founded in 2004, it began with a seemingly innocuous mission: to connect friends. Some seven years and 800 million users later, the social network has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future.

But this new world of ubiquitous connections has a dark side. In my last post, I noted that Facebook and social media are major contributors to career anxiety. After seeing some of the comments and reactions to the post, it's clear that Facebook in particular takes it a step further: It's actually making us miserable.

Facebook's explosive rate of growth and recent product releases, such as the prominent Newsticker, Top Stories on the newsfeed, and larger photos have all been focused on one goal: encouraging more sharing. As it turns out, it's precisely this hyper-sharing that is threatening our sense of happiness.

In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression. Said one interviewee about a Facebook friend, "Although he's my best friend, I kind-of despise his updates." Said another "Now, Facebook IS my work day." As I dug deeper, I discovered disturbing by-products of Facebook's rapid ascension — three new, distressing ways in which the social media giant is fundamentally altering our daily sense of well-being in both our personal and work lives.

First, it's creating a den of comparison. Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, "Hey, I just got promoted!" or "Take a look at my new sports car," trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates an online culture of competition and comparison. One interviewee even remarked, "I'm pretty competitive by nature, so when my close friends post good news, I always try and one-up them."

Comparing ourselves to others is a key driver of unhappiness. Tom DeLong, author of Flying Without a Net, even describes a "Comparing Trap." He writes, "No matter how successful we are and how many goals we achieve, this trap causes us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success."And as we judge the entirety of our own lives against the top 1% of our friends' lives, we're setting impossible standards for ourselves, making us more miserable than ever.

Second, it's fragmenting our time. Not surprisingly, Facebook's "horizontal" strategy encourages users to log in more frequently from different devices. My interviewees regularly accessed Facebook from the office, at home through their iPads, and while out shopping on their smartphones. This means that hundreds of millions of people are less "present" where they are. Sketching out a mind-numbing presentation for the board meeting? Perhaps it's time to reply to your messages. Stuck in traffic? It's time to browse your newsfeed. Recounted one interviewee, "I almost got hit by a car while using Facebook crossing the street."

Leaving the risk of real physical harm aside, the issue with this constant "tabbing" between real-life tasks and Facebook is what economists and psychologists call "switching costs," the loss in productivity associated with changing from one task to another. Famed author Dr. Srikumar Rao attributes mindfulness over multitasking as one of his ten steps to happiness at work. He argues that constant distractions lead to late and poor-quality output, negatively impacting our sense of self-worth.

Last, there's a decline of close relationships. Gone are the days where Facebook merely complemented our real-life relationships. Now, Facebook is actually winning share of our core, off-line interactions. One participant summed it up simply: "We Facebook chat instead of meeting up. It's easier."

As Facebook adds new features such as video chat, it is fast becoming a viable substitute for meetings, relationship building, and even family get-togethers. But each time a Facebook interaction replaces a richer form of communication — such as an in-person meeting, a long phone call, or even a date at a restaurant — people miss opportunities to interact more deeply than Facebook could ever accommodate. As Facebook continues to add new features to help us connect more efficiently online, the battle to maintain off-line relationships will become even more difficult, which will impact their overall quality, especially in the long-run. Facebook is negatively affecting what psychology Professor Jeffrey Parker refers to as "the closeness properties of friendship."

So, what should we do to avoid these three traps? Recognizing that "quitting" Facebook altogether is unrealistic, we can still take measures to alter our usage patterns and strengthen our real-world relationships. Some useful tactics I've seen include blocking out designated time for Facebook, rather than visiting intermittently throughout the day; selectively trimming Facebook friends lists to avoid undesirable ex-partners and gossipy coworkers; and investing more time in building off-line relationships. The particularly courageous choose to delete Facebook from their smartphones and iPads, and log off the platform entirely for long stretches of time.

Is Facebook making you miserable? What other tips can you share?

This post is part of a series of blog posts by and about the new generation of purpose-driven leaders. 

Text extracted from: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/facebook_is_making_us_miserabl.html

The Complete List of All the Phones With Carrier IQ Spyware Installed

Responding to the US Senate request lead by Senator Al Franken, AT&T, Sprint, HTC, and Samsung have sent the list of all the phones with Carrier IQ spyware installed in them.
The carriers have also admitted that Carrier IQ also captured the content of text messages "under certain conditions."
Here's the complete list:

AT&T

AT&T claims about 900,000 users using phones with Carrier IQ. The software is active on eleven AT&T wireless consumer devices:
• Motorola Atrix 2
• Motorola Bravo
• Pantech Pursuit II
• Pantech Breeze 3
• Pantech P5000 (Link 2)
• Pantech Pocket
• Sierra Wireless Shockwave
• LG Thrill
• ZTE Avail
• ZTE Z331
• SEMC Xperia Play
It's also installed but not active "due to the potential for the software agent to interfere with the performance" of the following phones:
• HTC Vivid
• LG Nitro
• Samsung Skyrocket
Carrier IQ is also packaged in the free AT&T Mark the Spot application, available for Android and RIM.

Sprint

26 million active Sprint devices have the Carrier IQ software installed, says Sprint. That's almost half of all their subscribers, 53.4 million customers, so you can assume that they have it installed in all the Android phones of the manufacturers Sprint reported to the US senate:
• Audiovox
• Franklin
• HTC
• Huawei
• Kyocera
• LG
• Motorola
• Novatel
• Palmone
• Samsung
• Sanyo
• Sierra Wireless

Samsung

Samsung claims 25 million phones affected. It has directly installed Carrier IQ at the factory in the following models:
Sprint
• SPH-M800 (Samsung Instinct)
• SPH-M540 (Samsung Rant)
• SPH-M630 (Samsung Highnote)
• SPH-M810 (Samsung Instinct s30)
• SPH-M550 (Samsung Exclaim)
• SPH-M560 (Samsung Reclaim)
• SPH-M850 (Samsung Instinct HD)
• SPH-I350 (Samsung Intrepid)
• SPH-M900 (Samsung Moment)
• SPH-M350 (Samsung Seek)
• SPH-M570 (Samsung Restore)
• SPH-D700 (Samsung Epic 4G)
• SPH-M910 (Samsung Intercept)
• SPH-M920 (Samsung Transform)
• SPH-M260 (Samsung Factor)
• SPH-M380 (Samsung Trender)
• SPH-M820 (Samsung Galaxy Prevail)
• SPH-M580 (Samsung Replenish)
• SPH-D600 (Samsung Conquer 4G)
• SPH-M930 (Samsung Transform Ultra)
• SPH-D710 (Samsung Epic 4G Touch)
• SPH-M220
• SPH-M240
• SPH-M320
• SPH-M330
• SPH-M360
• SPH-P100
• SPH-Z400
T-Mobile
•T989 (Samsung Hercules)
•T679 (Samsung Galaxy W)
Cricket
• SCH-R500 (Samsung Hue)
• SCH-R631 (Samsung Messager Touch)
• SCH-R261 (Samsung Chrono)
• SCH-R380 (Samsung Freeform III)
AT&T
• SGH-i727 (Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket)

HTC

HTC preinstalled Carrier IQ spyware on about 6.3 million Android phones:
Sprint
• Snap
• Touch Pro 2
• Hero
• EVO 4G
• EVO Shift 4G
• EVO Design
T-Mobile
• Amaze 4G
AT&T
• Vivid

What is Carrier IQ?

Carrier IQ logs information about your whereabouts as well as other personal data such as browsing history, application usage and phone numbers.
The Carrier IQ application also captures the content of your text messages, according to AT&T. This happens when you are talking on the phone and you sned or receive a text message: "the CIQ software also captured the content of SMS text messages—when and only when—such messages were sent or received while a voice call was in progress." [US Senator Al Franken's response, AT&T Response (PDF), Sprint Response (PDF), Samsung Response (PDF), HTC Response (PDF), CarrierIQ response (PDF), via Verge and Business Week]

Text extracted from: http://gizmodo.com/5868732/the-complete-list-of-all-the-phones-with-carrier-iq-spyware-installed