Before signing at the dotted line, evaluate these contract provisions. First of a two-part series. You’re about to sign a software contract for a core application. You’ve already done your homework at the software itself: Thoroughly reviewed its current and future capabilities, performed due diligence at the depth and data of the seller and its staff, and checked references and assessed the vendor’s financial stability. Now you are prepared to join up the dotted line. Don’t minimize the significance of this step. Your job — or even the longer term profitability of your organization — may be at the line. Even in the event you implicitly trust the seller you’ve chosen, you’ll little question seek legal assistance, preferably from attorneys acquainted with software program contracts. Still, you need to re-read the contract to make sure you already know all of its clauses. Is the contract straightforward and straightforward to realize? Does it include the entire negotiated or agreed upon issues? [Converting critical systems? Follow these... Read More »

Almost $7,000 in pay monthly for interns? Yes, at companies like VMware and Twitter, in line with a Glassdoor survey on 25 best-paid internships. 7 Super Certifications For IT Pros (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) In many industries, interns work without pay, a situation that has prompted a chain of lawsuits and a reconsideration of paid internships by many organizations. Unpaid internships are allowed, so long as organizations conform to six criteria set forth by the dep. of work. However, these rules are difficult to interpret because they’re poorly defined. For example, the dept of work rules state that an internship should benefit the intern and require that the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” Merely fetching coffee for a film star on a movie set is arguably advantageous to the production company, since anything that makes the talent happy keeps the production running and charges down. But within the tech industry, where there’s considerable competition for engineering... Read More »

Swiss cloud service supplier CloudSigma, in partnership with CompatibleOne, lets customers provision and track multiple cloud workloads through a single interface. Top 10 Retail CIO Priorities For 2014 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) CloudSigma, a eu cloud supplier with its foot in North America’s door, has teamed up with open source code company CompatibleOne SAS for a shot at becoming a player alongside Amazon. CompatibleOne’s system allows cloud users to access multiple cloud through a single interface. Through the CompatibleOne interface, a CloudSigma user could deploy workloads to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, HP Cloud, Joyent, GoGrid, OnApp, and Dimension Data. CompatibleOne users provision workloads on OpenStack clouds and VMware’s Hybrid vCloud Service. It also allows access to 2 PaaS providers: VMware/Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s Open Shift. That means an existing CloudSigma user could easily become an Amazon user — or vice versa — without changing provisioning platforms. CompatibleOne is produced by the French open source project CompatibleOne.org... Read More »

Solid state alone can’t solve your problems — in spite of the fact that you could afford it. Think scale-out, virtualization, and cloud. Business users worry about storage growth just like the NSA worries about your privacy. Sure, users might pay lip service to the virtue of restraint, but if it comes all the way down to it, they need their stuff. And their stuff? It’s digital content, and it’s feeding double-digit annual growth inside the amount of information under management, in keeping with our 2014 InformationWeek State of Enterprise Storage Survey. At 27% of businesses, it’s wrangling 25% or more yearly growth. The most culprit: databases or data warehouses. Money’s still tight, with 25% saying they lack the money even to satisfy demand, less optimize performance by loading up on solid state. IT leaders face a troublesome “pick two” conflict among performance, capacity, and price. Data growth is an inescapable trend. In its “The Digital Universe in 2020” report, IDC estimates that the entire... Read More »

Technology group requires “Geneva Convention” to handle complex maze of knowledge laws that affect growth of cloud computing and global trade. As IT leaders get more well-off moving their data operations into the cloud, concerns are growing about conflicting international laws that govern data generated in a single country and stored in another. Policymakers around the globe are fueling those concerns. Anxious to offer protection to data privacy and security, they’re advocating requirements to store particular types of knowledge domestically, says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the data Technology and Innovation Foundation. Those policies, however, aren’t only creating headaches for technology managers moving data around the globe, they’re also bumping up against delicate free trade agreements that involve senior government officials well past the reach of the common CIO’s office. “We’re finding that businesses are being caught within the middle [between conflicting privacy and security laws],” said Castro in an interview with InformationWeek. The commercial stakes have grown so significant that the ITIF recommended... Read More »