Software industry pushes for IT-driven government

When President-elect Barack Obama appoints a chief technology officer to the White House, he should make the new appointee a part of his senior economic policy team and the chief "evangelist" for innovation-spurring policies, the software and hardware industries say.

The Business Software Alliance, which represents companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and others, sent a letter to Obama last week with suggestions for what role the CTO should play in the administration. The BSA has taken other steps in the past week, such as meeting with the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Wednesday and releasing its 2009 policy agenda on Thursday, in an appeal to the next Congress and administration to integrate information technology solutions into its policy prescriptions, both in the short term and long term.

"When dealing with every major issue, there should be a question of what is the role of IT in providing the solutions," BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said Thursday.

The industry's goals are largely aligned with the president-elect's, Holleyman said, including Obama's proposal to push for increased adoption of health IT. New legislation and a new approach to cybersecurity is needed as well, BSA members said, to improve both the government's cyberinfrastructure and its communication with citizens regarding the security of personal information.

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Software industrialization: not so fast, Henry Ford

There’s been a lot of talk about IT and software “industrialization” lately — the idea that software development can be broken down into standardized, low-level, highly automated tasks that can mass produce applications on demand, at low cost.

At IBM’s Pulse event last week, IBM Tivoli’s Al Zollar said that IT industrialization is the next great phase in information technology. (I’ve been trying to get either a transcript or recording of Zollar’s speech to get more details, but IBM hasn’t been able to produce one up yet — so all I have for now is a press release.)

Nevertheless, there’s been thinking out there for some time that software development is evolving from a craft — painstakingly undertaken one project at a time — to a more of a mass production mode. How far along is that vision, and is it even an appropriate vision?

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Indian software, BPO industry to touch $132bn

The Indian software and BPO segment will grow at a rate of more than 16 per cent to become a $132 billion industry by 2012, global infotech analyst International Data Corporation (IDC) said today.

The Indian domestic IT and ITeS market is expected to cross the Rs 2,00,000-crore ($50 billion ) mark in 2012. This translates into a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.4 per cent in the five-year period. It was Rs 90,014 crore in 2007," IDC said.

Together with IT and ITeS, and exports revenue of Rs 3,20,278 crore, the total IT and ITeS industry would grow to Rs 5,29,976 crore ($132 billion ) by 2012, representing a growth of 16.5 per cent, said IDC.

Exports continue to be the biggest segment at Rs 97,492 crore. In 2008, IDC expects the IT and ITeS industry to grow at 20 per cent, with the domestic market growing at 22.4 per cent.

The overall industry is projected to be of the size of Rs 5,29,976 crore, or $132 billion, by 2012-end, with the share of domestic IT and ITeS revenues being 40 per cent of the total compared to the current 37 per cent.

The IT and ITeS exports market is likely to more than double to Rs 3,20,278 crore in 2012, IDC claimed.

In 2008, IT and ITeS exports segment is expected to clock a growth of 20.4 per cent to touch Rs 1,86,142 crore. "The domestic IT and ITeS industry CAGR of 18.4 per cent (during 2008-12) is expected on the back of a robust growth of the past five years (2003-2007)", IDC India Country Manager Kapil Dev Singh said.

The Indian IT and ITeS industry grew to Rs 2,46,609 crore in 2007 from Rs 2,01,413 crore in 2006, representing a growth of 22.4 percent.

Source : http://www.business-standard.com/

Outsourcing blamed for rising security woes

The world has a new culprit to blame for the rising tide of software vulnerabilities: code outsourcing.

The trend to outsource the coding of applications is now a major contributor to making business software more vulnerable, a survey/report has claimed.

According to analyst group Quocirca, which surveyed 250 IT directors and executives in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany for Fortify Software, 90 percent of the organizations that admitted to having been "hacked' had outsourced more than 40 percent of their applications to third parties.

But the rush to benefit from the speed, convenience, and lower cost of outsourced applications was leaving security as an afterthought in an alarming number of cases. Sixty percent of respondents reported not mandating security from scratch, while 20 percent of those surveyed in the U.K. failed to accommodate security at all in the outsourced applications.

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Software licensing costs set to fall

SaaS and SOA mean more power to the CIO's elbow...

Software licensing costs are set to fall over the next decade as IT industry trends converge to give buyers more bargaining power.

Analyst Gartner predicts vendors will find themselves increasingly challenged as IT departments look to reduce software costs as they have done with hardware and services.

In a research note Gartner VP William Snyder said: "Up until now the unique nature of the software market has meant that buyers had very little negotiating power after the initial purchase of a software licence. We expect those dynamics to change considerably over the next five to 10 years giving CIOs and software procurement officers more bargaining power while potentially reducing software vendor profit margins."

Gartner has identified seven major trends converging to change software delivery models, reduce dependence on the giant application vendors and force prices down.

These include business process outsourcing; software as a service (SaaS); low-cost development environments, such as China and India, combined with modular architectures and service-oriented architectures; the emergence of third-party software maintenance and support; growing interest in open source; the rise of Chinese software companies; and the expansion of the Brazilian, Chinese and Indian markets.

Although Gartner says open source won't topple the likes of IBM and Microsoft the analyst believes it will put pressure on traditional software margin structures, particularly in areas such as servers, operating systems, development tools and database technologies.

Gartner also predicts a quarter of all new business software will be delivered by SaaS by 2011.

Synder said buyers need to realise that the pendulum is beginning to swing in their favour with an increasing number of alternatives in the software market.

He said: "We would advise IT organisations to use BPO and open source alternatives to improve their negotiating power with software suppliers as well as employing the emergence of third-party vendors as a means to reduce higher maintenance fees on older versions of software. Costing out the possibility of using offshore skills to build application functionality as web services will also help negotiations with vendors."

Earlier this week silicon.com's CIO Jury found IT departments are increasingly scrutinising the value for money of Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements because of question marks over tangible benefits.

Source : http://software.silicon.com/