Recently in it-footprint Category

We keep coming across companies that are short of staff and too busy to go recruiting.

Mind Candy, for example, is arguably one of the best companies to work for in Britain. This is the games developer that created Moshi Monsters, a kids social networking site with 50 million users. Venture capitalists love them, especially since they moved from south London to Shoreditch. The company has been valued at £200 million and its conquering everything in its path. It is always exciting to work for companies in their ascendancy.

Or so I'm told...

(I hope they don't go all corporate, like Woolwich Arsenal did when they crossed the river. Next thing you know, they'll have celebrity fans like Piers Morgan and Jon Bernstein.)

Anyway, Mind Candy can't get enough programmers and sales people and story boarders to help them satisfy demand so their first priority is a human resources boss.

Two days after meeting Moshi Monsters, we interviewed another furiously growing start up. (Oh, what's their blimming name? It'll come to me in a minute). Like Mind Candy, they need more sales people and developers to help them tap in all the open goals that are being constantly presented to them. Again, the game they're playing is far too frantic for them to stop and allow fresh legs onto the field.

It was a mobile start up based in Oxford Street, with US offices. No hang on, wasn't that the booming cloud computing outfit that was looking for a CTO? Keep coming back to this column, as I'm sure I'll remember in a minute. They're both recruiting, anyway.

But the best opportunity, surely, has to be this one.

Certero, which has been described as Britain's power and software asset management company is embarking on a channel recruitment drive.

Certero's Software Metering automates complex processes and creates a real time Effective Licence Position (ELP). Tidying up your company's software licensing can be every bit as satisfying as wiping out an invasion of alien or passing a Moshi Monster test.

Certero doesn't stop there.

There's also the Windows Self Service Password Manager, which saves you a fortune on support calls. ("Hello support? The post-it note fell off my computer and now I don't know my password.")

Then there's the new PC Power Management system that's selling like Moshi Monsters. It saves companies a fortune by powering down their PCs. So it has the twin benefits of saving on the power bill and keeping global warming at bay. Every time you switch off your PC, the sea goes down another inch.

John Lunt, Certero's MD, promises that new recruits will benefit from fresh thinking and lavish attention as the company helps them exploit the opportunities. "There is significant opportunity in the UK for resellers to grow their business through offering its leading new-age PC Power Management and SAM solutions," he says.

Back of the net!

I'm livid!

Nearly a decade ago, I devised an idea that would make recycling fun. The scheme would boost recycling rates, save money for the councils (possibly even the taxpayer!) and give people the chance to win prizes.

It would turn rubbish from a cost into a form of revenue.

I wrote to every council in the country, so see if they were initially interested in the idea. Not a single council replied to my letters. Well one did, a man from Birmingham City Council wrote to say thanks but no thanks.

I wrote to my MP, Ed Davey. He wrote a polite letter saying it was interesting, but he was not interested. I tried phoning politicians on the radio and even pitched the idea, on air, to the leader of the Greens on LBC.

No interest whatsoever.

Now, I've discovered that green advocacy outfit Recyclebank is getting massive interest in its new idea to 'Gamify' recycling.

Hang on, that's my idea? How come everyone ignored me, but when an American company comes along and gives it a silly name, the councils all roll over?

Their press release doesn't really explain how they do it, but apparently their gamification techniques are massively raising awareness of recycling.

"We've already started implementing some of the lessons we've learned to create the best possible experience for our members and ensure that our future initiatives make the biggest impact on the environment," gloated Javier Flaim, SVP of global marketing at Recyclebank.

Oh well. Good luck with that, mate. I'm not jealous at all.

Photo courtesy Jupiterimages

It's only when you look at an ant under a magnifying glass that you realise how often they spontaneously burst into flames, according to a study by Dr Harry Hill, at St George's teaching hospital in Tooting.

Now new research by Solarwinds aims to make virtualisation an equally simple pleasure.

Solarwinds has launched Virtualization Manager in a bid to make virtualisation less complex. By simplifying the process it aims to environments more scalable and solid. The key to this master the server virtualisation layer and manage it more skillfully.

With the rapid adoption of virtualisation and cloud technologies, IT organisations of every size are facing new IT management and operations challenges related to the higher rate of change and increased scale of these new environments.

As businesses lay the foundations for cloud strategies, they go through three stages of growing pains, which Solarwinds has dubbed 'phases of virtualisation maturity'.

In short, these are known as Assuring, Optimising and Transforming.

The first phase, Assuring Availability, is when the virtualiser has an identity problem. This is very common among the majority of companies that have virtualised up to 30 per cent of their environment. They will start to question themselves as this stage. Typical identifying questions might be: How many VMs do I have? What VMs are using which physical storage resources?

Phase Two finds the fledgling virtualiser in a more confident mood. By this stage they will be thinking of Optimizing Performance, as phase two is known. By this stage we will have typically developed a more experienced set of virtualisation admins and be preoccupied with questions like: What if I add more hosts or VMs? When will I run out of physical storage?

By the third and final stage - Transforming the Environment - maturity is setting in. We are more confident about ourselves, and don't move so quickly. We don't need to. This phase finds 80 per cent (and more) virtual. They will have a solid foundation to implement and manage a cloud strategy.

There will still be questions, only this time it will be: What departments are using what resources? Am I ready for chargeback?

Is there life after chargeback? That's the question none of us dare contemplate.

Photo courtesy oddharmonic via Flickr

A new report from Sourcewire says that technology PRs are failing to use social media to reach journalists.

Well, thank goodness for that, we say.

That's a bit like a report complaining that 'stalkers still not using your work number'. Why do we need to give cold callers new ways to invade our privacy?

Not so, says Daryl Willcox (pictured), chairman of DW Publishing, which owns Sourcewire.

"Many social channels are less invasive than that associated with cold calling, so inappropriate approaches can be comfortably ignored," says Willcox.

"Anyway, since social media is normally public, any pestering by PR professionals would be seen by many, so they'd think twice before potentially damaging their reputation online."

Social media actually polices the time wasters, he argues.

But like all powerful technology, if social media falls into the wrong hands, it's going to damage society, surely? 

"I think the 'wrong hands' are more likely to be wayward governments, criminals and terrorists. Not the PR community," says Willcox.

"PRs generally understand the conversation nature of social media and the need to develop positive relationships with journalists online, that's surely a power for good."

Hmm. Not convinced yet.

Here's the report in full:

Journalists in the U.K. are using social media, but PR pros are failing to reach them in those spaces, according to a recent survey.

Daryl Willcox Publishing contacted 957 journalists this month for its white paper titled, "Journalists and Social Media," and it found that 75 percent of journalists rate social media as an important professional tool, and 90 percent of them are using it more than they did a year ago.

However, 44 percent of journalists said they believed that PR pros did not make enough use of social media.

Of the methods of interaction, emailed news releases and pitches (98 percent and 73 percent, respectively) were the highest, followed by phone contact (56 percent) and traditional face-to-face events (51 percent). These significantly exceeded contact by social media (the highest being via Twitter, at around 25 percent).

"Journalists have been quick to incorporate social media into their processes for gathering and distributing news," said Martin Stabe, author of the report. "But journalists see social media sites primarily as a channel where they can communicate directly with potential sources or engaged members of their audience, without much involvement from PR professionals.

"However, as the report shows, this is only part of the story. Social media also empowers PR professionals to change the way they communicate with journalists or directly to customers."

Well IPv4 users are no different from those wildebeest. Like their four legged herbivorous counter parts, they know their address won't be viable for much longer. Comfortable though it is, for now, they must give up their home and embark on a long and ominous migration.

For the wildebeest, this means dragging themselves on an arduous and dangerous hike across the arid plains of the Serengetti, where they face all kinds of unpleasant predators. For IT managers, it's even worse, as the hyenas of the IP address market seek to pick off the herd's stragglers, the lionesses of the press seek to ambush them and the alligators of the corporate law firm seek to haul them into dangerous waters, gripping them in the teeth of a suffocating writ and dragging them into a pool of angry shareholders.

Needless to say the migration to IPv6 is no easy task, writes Jeff Smith, and it's one that organisations need to plan for carefully. Many enterprises and government agencies are delaying the inevitable by finding ways to stretch the usefulness of their existing networks as new IPv4-lengthening technologies arise. But the end of the road will eventually come, however, so what are the fatal traps you must never fall into?

Do your research when upgrading your equipment. This may sound like a no-brainer, but there are many hardware vendors out there that claim their hardware supports all the feature functionality of IPv6 when, in fact, they don't. Although the hardware works on an IPv6 network, it doesn't necessarily support all of the functionality of some IPv4 applications. If your organisation runs many rich applications and is hoping to run them on IPv6 this is an area that will need to be well researched. Otherwise, you could find yourself wandering around in circles, while the tsetse fly of undocumented network slowly eats nto your nervous system.

Avoid any network provider that doesn't operate a dual stack network. A dual-stack network has the ability to route IPv6 and IPv4 side by side on the network so that your wide area network or Internet connection behaves as an IPv4 and IPv6 path simultaneously. Network operators do this for their customers because it allows the customer to test a fully-functioning IPv6 implementation without turning off any of their old IPv4 setup. This also allows the customer to retain access to the parts of the Internet that have not yet transitioned to IPv6. While many providers offer a solution for tunneling IPv6 inside of IPv4, this convenient solution is best for getting initial experience with IPv6 and is less preferable to a dual-stack configuration for a final implementation of IPv6.

Remember, both of these situations can have business-impacting ramifications for some enterprises that are running applications that must work in the new IPv6 environment. Make sure you plan thoroughly. Or you could end up in the jaws of a dilemma!

We must switch to IPv6 before the last rew addresses of IPv4 are swallowed up by rampant global consumerism, says Jeff Smith, Global Crossing's senior director for infrastructure services

When the internet was built they were on version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4). So you would have thought it would be fairly advanced and forward thinking.

But IP4 was designed to cater for only four billion addresses. Bill Gates has got more Facebook friends than that! But 30 years ago, when IPv4 was first introduced, this seemed more than enough for a store of addresses.

When the Internet metaphorically caught fire, all those addresses were soon burned up. In the early 1990s the Internet Engineering Task Force (the industry standards body) identified the problem.

Recognition blem is only half the battle, of course. Taking action is another story.

With over 70 per cent of available addresses assigned to North America, regional distribution was very poor. The soaring populations and economies of India and China exacerbated the problem as they placed enormous demand for Internet access and IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, the western world wanted more Internet-dependent devices than ever, a trend that was accelerated when everyone began buying smart phones in 2005.  Add in 4G wireless rollouts and it's no wonder that the end of the road for IPv4 is in sight.

Which would be OK, but people haven't migrated to more practical alternatives, such as IP6. Why? Because they're happy with IP4, for now. Some say widespread shift to IPv6 won't happen until the cost of running on IPv4 starts rising.

(This all sounds like global warming, only for IP addresses - Ed).

Governments are taking heed and have started to encourage the transition to IP6. The developing nations are leading the charge. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments have also championed the rollout. The US government forced contractors to government agencies to be IPv6-ready by the summer of 2008. The EU is reviewing methods to encourage adoption.

But with IPv4 addresses near exhausted, a resolution by all countries to require the migration to IPv6 must be reached sooner, rather than later. Are they doing enough?

Are we going to run out of time?

Tomorrow Jeff Smith will discuss the possible strategies to avert disaster and identify the IP-changer deniers who refuse to accept there's a problem.

Here's Kate Craig-Wood, boss of data centre company Memset, who takes issue with our criticism of data centres and their carbon footprint.

"There are two points here," writes Craig-Wood, in response to criticism of the data centre industry's galloping consumption

First data centres only contribute 1.9 per cent of total grid power, thunders the boss of Memset. "Overall the UK IT Industry contributes tenper cent of GDP, so to only generate overall three per cent of total CO2 emissions, the IT industry is delivering bang for its buck in terms of energy efficiency," she says.

Data centres facilitate carbon savings elsewhere though dematerialisation, virtualisation and transport avoidance, says the data centre guru.

"With improvements in data centre technology and Moore's Law we are delivering at least a doubling capacity of work done for every unit of power every eighteen months," says Craig-Wood. "In some cases, like ours we enable customers to move from dedicated servers to highly virtualised environments delivering savings in costs and energy."

That's telling us!

But is Craig-Wood right?

Could the industry do more to cut emissions? We think so.

Do you agree?

Here's a grim looking machine from Emerson. It might even be be too stark for our computers to handle. But look again, it's a thing of beauty because this monster could give you twenty per cent more power for your money, which amounts to a huge saving in a data centre. It might not save the planet, but it's a start.

Chloride at Emerson at Network Power, the UPS maker with a silly name but a huge social conscience, has answered our appeal for energy savings in IT.

Its engineers and researchers have been working on ways to get more usage out of existing electricity supplies. By redesigning its semiconductor technology, it has eliminated the need for transformers, which means you can get 20 per cent more usable (i.e. active) power out of your supply.

The device achieves a significant 98 percent throughput efficiency whilst conforming to all requirements for Tier 4 power protection.

So, twenty per cent off your data centre's electricity bills, then? It's probably not that simple. The device achieves a significant 98 percent throughput efficiency whilst conforming to all requirements for Tier 4 power protection.

Probably needs further investigation.

Energy monitoring expert CurrentCost is offering our readers the chance to win free equipment that will help cut their bills.

Current Cost is offering its energy monitoring technology to reades of this blog, after we pleaded for help in reducing the nation's shameful IT footprint.

Data Centres alone will soon consumer six per cent of the nation's electricity. The situation will get even worse in five years' time, when the government is forced to decommision nuclear power generators, and we all have to huddle around a wind turbine for warmth. the lowering supply of power means that electrcity wholesalers will whack up thier tarffis and electricity bills will soar.

As a response, CurrentCost is offering our readers the chance to win a helpful New Year's gift for the office and their employees in a regional prize draw.

OK, it's not the ultimate solution to our problems, but it's a start.

To enter, log on to the competition site and fill in a few details.

As well as a bundle of energy monitoring devices for employees, six firms will also each win a high tech Current Cost EnviR for the office. The EnviR was recently named a Which? Best Buy in its round-up of energy monitors.