IT Week Insider, Volume 10, Number 21

The Insider offers a round up of key stories from IT Week

For some reason the monkeys got it into their heads this week that doing an international version of the IT Week Insider was a good idea.

We disagreed, and with good reason. The monkeys simply took the Insider and ran it through one of the free online translation tools. To them it made sense, to the sole Spanish-speaking member of the IT Week team it was, apparently, the worst insult you could have levelled at his mother. Is it accurate, for example, to translate “virtual machine” as “burro boda”? We don’t know.

Regardless of all the "hands across the ocean" fun, the monkeys have produced more than a handful of rather good stories. The best of which were randomly selected with a foot and some chewing gum.

You can read them here

News:

Analysts bet on Google/Salesforce merger
As everyone knows, Google is a happy, smiling company that does no evil - much like our popular departing prime minister. Tony Blair has a happy, smiling face too, and talks a lot about doing good. Seeing what a success Blair has made of his time at the top, Salesforce now appears intent on playing Brown to Google’s Blair, in an effort to stamp out the axis of installed software. Why is there this nagging feeling that it will all end in back-stabbing?

More news:

Taleo smartens on-demand staff recruitment service
On-demand recruitment management firm Taleo has done what it does best – released some kind of on-demand recruitment management stuff. The new version of its internet-based service that uses Web 2.0 bells and whistles to attract and retain the interest of job-seeking candidates. We would prefer a good health plan and more than three hours holiday a year, but hey, you can't have everything.

And the news goes on...

Half of firms to upgrade to new version of Itil
Itil is set to release version 3 of its popular service management guidelines next week, documents that are likely to be as well received among businesses as pictures of poorly-clothed ladies on submarines. According to a survey almost half of all IT managers are likely to adopt the guidelines, and soon. The rest walked past the clipboard-clutchers quickly, mumbling that they were late for a meeting.

Analysis:
CA shows its hand in Las Vegas
All aces? Five-card flush? What do you mean we aren't talking about playing at the tables? They were in Vegas weren't they? Well, so long as someone married a stripper we are fine with this. Madeline Bennett braved the talent in the land of the one-armed bandit to fill us in on what CA has been up to. Good work Madeline.

Comment:
Ponder sending work across the Pond
Offshore outsourcing often means sending work to parts of the world where they are happy to work long hours for a handful of the local dinero each day. It’s easy to fall into stereotypical ideas about where such places might be, but as Lem Bingley argues, low-wage economies are cropping up in unlikely places. Like California.

IT Week Podcast
Audio analysis of the week's events, this week Martin Veitch and David Neal chat about Dell's new tablet PC and IBM's new Power6 processor.

IT Week Labs blog
Ricoh's new GelSprinter range makes use of a gel-based print technology, designed to offer the benefits of colour printing but at a speed and cost closer to a traditional office laser printer. Hilarious stuff.

Green Business News
The government has released a 343-page energy whitepaper and 207-page nuclear strategy consultation. All well and good, but printing off those bad boys probably used enough energy to light up Las Vegas for at least three seconds. Surely, that would have been a better use of the money.

IT Sneak blog

Can you believe that Sneak went to college? We did not. After all, this is a man who thinks that sandwiches should go in the recycling bins cos, "someone might find a use for them". Anyhoo. Here he talks about a psycho-social malady, which sounds like something the Thunderbirds chauffer might use as an excuse for 'going postal'.

Phil Muncaster blog
Phil on SAS, innovation and driving around Stockholm looking for action. Er, Sassy!

David Neal blog
David Neal takes the Mickey out of a bloke who just climbed Everest. And this from someone who just spent three weeks in bed! The cheek of it.