Month: July 2009

Shared ICT Services For The Civil Service?

SiliconRepublic reports that the “An Bord Snip” (advisory report on cutting Irish government expenses) has told the government that they should shake up IT services in the civil service.  They want expenses cut by 50%:

  • Less consulting/contractors
  • More in-house skills
  • Shared services

For example.  Each an every department, no matter how small it is, has their own IT organisation, buying power, staff, consulting services, etc.  That’s some massive wastage.  We could probably run our entire government off of a single Exchange 2007 cluster (replicated of course) instead of an Exchange installation in countless departments.  That sounds like a perfect scenario for Exchange 2010 DAG’s.  I know of one major department where their entire “hands-on” staff are a collection of consultants and contractors that costs the tax payer a fortune.

Bord Snip also said the government should have a Steering Committee made up of senior ICT advisors from the private sector.  I’ll volunteer for that one, thank you very much.  I could do with some mileage and hotel expenses as well as a few junkets to somewhere sunny.

Unemployment Hitting IT – What I Did When I Was Unemployed

In Ireland, unemployment is over 12%.  It’s approaching 10% in the USA.  It’s estimated that the real rate (not the propaganda rate) in China is around 24%.  It’s global and it is indiscriminate.  In Ireland, half of those unemployed were probably in the construction industry.  A sizable percentage are office/skilled workers.  IT is being hit hard.  I checked the jobs pages out of curiosity for Windows admins.  Monster and a few of the Irish sites only had around 10-15 recent job adverts.  Over half of those were for the same job (that internet gaming company on the southern part of the M50 I talked about before).  I saw one looking for a senior administrator for €35,000/year – just over half what it should be.  I’m starting to hear from friends and ex colleagues who are losing their jobs.  There were two last week.

I know unemployment.  I was recruited out of college by a hardware/software/consulting company back in 96.  I stayed with them for 4 years. I thought I was doing great.  Promoted every year, pay rises every year, etc.  I got bored and changed to another company that was a consulting firm – when I joined them.  A month after that they decided to become a “dot bomb” and ignored consulting sales for a year.  I spent a year surfing the net.  Then the inevitable happened.  They started laying people off and my team was second to be hit.  I got a nice payoff and went to the USA for a road trip.  This was the end of 2001.  The IT business was in its own little recession and there was zero work.  What little there was required skills and certifications.

During those last 5 years I hadn’t really developed the way I should have.  I knew products from my first employer.  I’d picked up things a long the way but there was no directed effort, no focus.  I had no certifications.  It was only towards the end of my time with the dot bomb that I’d gotten my first MCP with a plan to become and MCSE.  I was now seeing the few job adverts that there were and they all wanted certs.  Ask a veteran IT pro is a cert worth anything… is it?  Only a little.

  • It isn’t everything because it’s book knowledge, not real world knowledge.  Often the materials and questions are out of date, e.g. WSUS 2.0 questions in Windows 2003 exams.  I’ve seen performance related questions where the right answer was the wrong answer.  But I knew to give the answer the pre-programmed test wanted from the out of date book.
  • HR people know nothing about what we do.  They just want certs because they assume it means you’re an expert.
  • There is definitely theoretical knowledge to be gained that helps you with best practice implementations and troubleshooting.

I had my single MCP and wasn’t even getting rejection letters for my applications.  When you register for the dole here in Ireland you have to also register with Fás, a state training organisation.  They told me thy could do nothing for me.  I hit Amazon and ordered my next MCP exam book.  I did it two ways: MS Press official books and Exam Cram books.  The latter was sometimes better than the former for content.  I found their W2K AD design book was concise and superb.  Every 2-4 weeks I did an exam.  I had all the time in the world.  I’d VMware Workstation on my 2 PC’s and worked out every lab.  I studied from when I woke up until I went to bed.  For 6 months I did that and in the end I got my W2K MCSE.  It became an almost OCD thing … I felt guilty on Christmas day for not studying.  I found myself refreshing notes at 2 or 3 in the morning.

Finally in Feb 2002 I started to get some traction on my job applications with my recent MCSE.  I did some interviews and got a job – which I came to hate.  That didn’t work out and one Friday I got the bad news.  My first reaction to being on the dole again was to go to a book store.  I’d been working with XP, Citrix MetaFrame and ISA.  I bought the best books and started studying again.  I added those 3 exams to my CV over the next couple of months.

After that I got my big break in 2003 after 3 months signing on.  I did a 6 month contract where I proved myself and then landed a job designing, deploying and managing a Windows 2003 network for an international bank.  I was able to use everything I’d learned during my unemployment.  From that job I learned loads more about the larger IT Pro picture.  I got great experiences.  I went from asking questions all of the time to answering a lot of them.  It’s because of the hard work I put in while I was unemployed that I am where I am now.

It’s pretty crap that people are finding themselves out of work.  I’ve been there and I remember the emotions of it.  I know we’re all at risk of being there, especially here in Ireland where or economy was mismanaged before the collapse and has made it worse.  My advice is simple.  If I found myself unemployed tomorrow, I’d hit Amazon.com and order in books on the latest exams.  In the morning I’d be running (I actually was running 5K a day a year and a half ago before I got too busy for it).  Exercise is supposed to stimulate the brain and aid memory.  Then I’d come home, shower, make a coffee and hit the books with virtualised labs with a TechNet subscription.  In Ireland, there might even be a way to get Fás to pay for some of this.  It’s worth asking.  I’d use the free TechNet labs on Microsoft’s site.  I’d sit every exam I could and progress up the cert ladder.  You’d learn a lot.  You’d make your CV more likely to get past the HR people.  Importantly you wouldn’t be sitting in the house, getting depressed.  But most important, you’d look self motivated – show in your CV that’s what you’ve been doing.  It will impress – I promise.

If you are in that boat then I wish you the best of luck.  I’ve been there and I’ve felt like s**t.  But you can get out of it.

If you have anything to add, please post a comment.

Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter Adverts

Microsoft has finally found a way to hit back at Apple’s “I’m a Mac” adverts.  We don’t get MS adverts over here so this was new to me when I heard about it on a WPC09 keynote webcast the other day.  Kevin Turner at MS talked about it yesterday: apparently Apple called up MS and begged them to stop running the ads 🙂 

And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, "Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, "Is this a joke? Who are you?" Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them.

Here’s a sample of what they’ve been doing:

 

 

 

 

 

 

That last one does make an important comment … aesthetics.  I’ve often joked that Mac’s were like handbags or shoes, a fashion thing.  This last one isn’t made by Microsoft.

 

Jeremy Moskowitz Live Webinar

Jeremy is a GPO and Active Directory guru, trainer and author.  He’s doing a live webcast on July 21st at 2.30 PM EST.

“You work hard. Too hard. Is there a way to leverage your existing investment in Active Directory and Group Policy to do the hard jobs so you don’t have to? In this free, concise webinar, Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz, founder of GPanswers.com, will show you that it doesn’t have to be hard to do the "tough stuff."

In this webinar, we’ll focus on something you do every day: software deployment and management (and how it doesn’t always have to be a chore). Learn what’s new in Windows 7 to help put even tighter controls on your applications and see how you can put processes around the deployment and management of applications like never before. At the end of the webinar, Jeremy will open up the webinar for questions and answers.

This webinar is sponsored by Specops Software.

It’s gonna be fun; so, hope to see you there”.

You need to register for this online event.

Ballmer At The WPC09 Conference

It sounds like all the Windows RTM rumours are quashed.  MS people are tweeting that this session will focus on MS online services such as Azure.  I suspect some of the newer systems management online services will be talked about.

Bob Muglia came on stage after everyone in the audience was named as partner of the year 😉  He told us all about his holidays … I napped for a while.  Ah, here we go.  He’s talking about the opportunities coming from his branch … server tools and System Center.  He’s going to talk about these and Azure/cloud.

We got a video on Hyper-V 2008 R2.  Pretty truthful talking about skills and costs.  Muglia demo’d VMM 2008 R2.  It’s an evolution rather than a radical reinvention so there’s no great leap in skills.  Distributed applications on OpsMgr 2007 R2 was shown.  He talked about the price difference between VMware and Hyper-V System Centre.  Do the maths; it’s real.  He did a Live Migration using streaming media.  I hate that .. it’s lazy.  Media Player buffers.  Dave Northey in MS Ireland does a ping to the VM or a file copy from an XP VM.  Very real test and always works.

On to the cloud.  He quickly talks about the cost reduction in administration.  He talks about what MS does …. hmm, we do that at work.  Except we don’t have to comply with the Patriot Act … doesn’t matter where MS builds a data centre, they need to comply with the USA Patriot Act and therefore contravene the EU Data Protection Act.  Advantages on hosting:

  • Someone else does it
  • Capacity on demand
  • Potential global reach
  • Expenses now an operating expense rather than a capital expense

Other news:

  • MS evolving Server and System Center based on hosting partners experience and feedback.  To me, only OpsMgr is 100% ready.  VMM is nearly there .. self service relies on the network being too open at the moment, e.g. remote console relies access to the host server and DNS lookup for the hosting infrastructure.  DPM is totally unsuitable for the cloud as it stands.
  • Dynamic Datacenter Alliance for hosters and system integrators was announced.  There’s a Dynamic Data Center toolkit.  The DDC sounds like an evolution of an old toolkit.  It’s a layer above everything else.  It’s based on PowerShell.  To join the alliance you must be a SPLA partner, attained the Hosting competency and deployed a “Dynamic Datacenter”.
  • SPLA Essentials is a new SPLA licensing scheme for hosting companies.  Hopefully it will be a lot simpler.  SPLA is a nightmare.  Essentials is intended for smaller partners. 
  • €150 billion opportunity through 2013 in the hosting/cloud business.  95% of that will be through MS partners.
  • Azure is launched as of now.  Free to use now.  It goes commercial in November.  The pricing scheme is consumption based, i.e. unpredictable.
  • New version of SCE with VMM built in on the way later this year.
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 to RTM in a matter of weeks.

And on comes Steve Ballmer …

Singing Bing.  He’s goes on to talk … about stuff.  He then brought in a guy from Fortune magazine to ask Steve some of the attendee questions:

  • Is Microsoft building a rival to Google Chrome and how will it affect MS products and partners? Steve says he’ll be respectful while giggling.  Why announce it if it doesn’t exist?  MS is not going to have 2 client operating systems.  50% of the time even when online we are working offline.
  • Is it all about the browser or is it all about the OS.  What to develop on?  Stick to Windows, IE and Silverlight.  That will give you best of both worlds.
  • Apples advertising mocks any problems MS has.  Did I’m a PC.  What is MS doing and will they use partners as a differentiator?  Continue to tell the story of the PC, e.g. recent I’m a PC that talks about the cost of the Mac.  He likes the partner inclusion suggestion.
  • Losing deals to LAMP, when will MS make it easy under one agreement with a reasonable price to compete?  He took a note because he doesn’t have an answer and asks the asker to email him – steveb@microsoft.com 🙂
  • What are the characteristics of MS partners that will survive and thrive in this economy?  Deliver compelling value to customers.  Remind them after the delivery.
  • Show how you can save them money and sell on the theme of growth?  Do more with less.  Customers trying to do “with less, do more”, e.g. virtualization and cost cutting.
  • What are the best solutions to stop piracy? The more you do to irradiate it, the more inconvenient your product becomes for the legitimate user.
  • Government relations and antitrust – what is MS doing, e.g. what’s behind the EU IE unbundling from Windows 7?  Anti-trust and government relations are not necessarily related issues.  Lots of successful relationships with governments.  But antitrust laws – he says are quite separate. 
  • Will there be an IT boom after the recession and will Windows 7 spark it? He thinks that if things even stayed as they are for 10 years, there would be some sort of demand growth for IT – unless there was another economic crash.  Windows 7 might be the catalyst but could be the things like BI. 
  • How does MS see B2B social networking contributing to channel revenue?  It’s a big idea.  Talks about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for colleague social networking in companies. 
  • MS Online Services will compete with MS Partners.  How do partners prepare?  Still work there for people.  MS the only company selling directly, through partners and via cloud.  Value add via partners still required.

Final thoughts: he’s excited to Ritalin levels.