ChannelWeb Insider has been tracking which technology companies have given layoff notices. According to the site, technology firms have eliminated at least 205,000 positions since October 2008.
This does not include small and mid-sized technology firms and the VAR community.
January 2009 has been the most brutal for tech layoffs with at least 124,320 positions eliminated.
October 2008 with 46,281 positions eliminated.
November 2008 saw 21,433 workers sacked by technology companies.
December 2008 The holiday spirit held sway in when most companies except ATT minimized layoffs. ATT eliminated 12,000 of the 13,095 positions eliminated in the last month of 2008.
Layoff rogue’s gallery
Among the firms in the rogue’s gallery of layoffs between October 2008 and January 2009 are:
We can hope that CEOs with their multi-million dollar salaries such as HP’s Mark Hurd who made over $42.5 million in 2008 or Sprint/Nextel’s Gary D. Forsee who made over $40 million or ATT’s Randall Stephenson who made over $21.9 million in 2007 actually understand their actions disrupt the lives of over a quarter of million real families when they eliminate jobs.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
IDC recently released a study, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011“, sponsored by storage vendor EMC. The report updates a similar study conducted in 2007. The report forecasts your digital shadow. Your digital shadow is the amounts and types of digital information in the world. The new IDC 2008 research shows the digital universe is bigger and growing more rapidly than 2007 estimates.
This growth is in part a result of:
Growing Internet access in emerging countries,
Social networks made up of digital content created by many millions users,
Growth in worldwide shipments of digital cameras, digital surveillance cameras, and digital televisions.
According to the study, the digital universe in 2007 was equal to almost 45 gigabytes (GB) of digital information for every person on Earth.
IDC’s research also examines how society and the digital universe interact with each another, how individuals actively contribute to the digital universe – leaving a digital footprint as Internet and social network users, email use, through use of cell phones, digital cameras and credit card transactions. “… we discovered that only about half of your digital footprint is related to your individual actions – taking pictures, sending emails, or making digital voice calls,” said John Gantz, Chief Research Officer and Senior Vice President, IDC.
What is your digital shadow
Enterprise IT organizations that gather the information which makes up digital shadows have a tremendous responsibility – in many cases mandated by law – for the security, privacy protection, reliability and legal compliance of this information According to Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO. “As people’s digital footprints continue growing, so too will the responsibility of organizations for the privacy, protection, availability and reliability of that information. The burden is on IT departments within organizations to address the risks and compliance rules around information misuse, data leakage and safeguarding against security breaches.”
The responsibility for governance of digital information remains primarily on the enterprise. Approximately 70% of the digital universe is created by individuals, yet enterprises are responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of 85% of the digital universe.
Additional IDC findings
At 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes), the digital universe in 2007 was 10% bigger than originally estimated,
With a compound annual growth rate of almost 60%, the digital universe is projected to be nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes) in 2011, a 10-fold increase over the next five years,
The information explosion, in raw gigabytes, is predominately visual: images, camcorder clips, digital TV signals, and surveillance streams.
Digital Diversity – Because of the growth of VoIP, sensors, and RFID, the number of electronic information “containers” – files, images, packets, tag contents – is growing 50% faster than the number of gigabytes. The information created in 2011 will be contained in more than 20 quadrillion – 20 million billion – of such containers, a tremendous management challenge for both businesses and consumers.
Digital Cameras – In 2007 fewer than 10% of all still images were captured on film.
Digital Surveillance – Shipments of networked digital surveillance cameras are doubling every year.
A single email with a 1Mb attachment can create over 50 Mb of digital footprint,
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
ComputerWorld reports that an Indian national Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, in an outsourced contract job as a Unix engineer is accused of planting malicious code on his employer’s network. Makwana was employed by the Federal National Mortgage Association, better known as Fannie Mae. He has been accused of planting malicious code on the corporation’s network that was to “destroy and alter” all the data on the company’s servers on 01-31-09, court documents show.
Makwana, 35, was indicted on 01-27-2009 by a federal court on a single charge of computer intrusion, according to documents released yesterday. Reports are unclear about the attacker’s employer or his employment status. According to the AP, Makwana has lived in the United States since at least 2001.
According to the complaint sworn by FBI Special Agent Jessica Nye, Makwana was let go from his outsourced contract position at Fannie Mae’s Urbana, Md., datacenter on Oct. 24, 2008. He was fired after he had “erroneously created a computer script that changed the settings on the Unix servers without the proper authority of his supervisor,” Makwana had created that settings-changing script on Oct. 10 or Oct. 11, as much as two weeks before he was fired, Nye said.
Within 90 minutes of being told he was terminated on Oct. 24, and several hours before his access to the Fannie Mae network was disabled later that evening, Makwana embedded a malicious script in a legitimate script that ran on Fannie Mae’s network every morning, Nye said in her affidavit.
The logic bomb would have “caused millions of dollars in damage and reduced if not shutdown [sic] operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week” if it had not been found before Saturday’s trigger date, the complaint said. “this script would power off all servers, disabling the ability to remotely turn on a server,” said the government’s complaint. “Subsequently, the only way to turn the servers back on was physically getting to a data center.”
rb-
I agree with Dvorak’s piece on MarketWatch which asks the rhetorical question, why was Makwana working at Fannie Mae in the first place? Are you telling me no American citizen could have done his job?
It has long been believed that in most cases H-1B visas in technology have been exploited by companies such as Fannie Mae only because programmers coming from India work cheaper. Over the years, companies like Fannie Mae have been begging for more and more H-1B visas to outsource more jobs.. That means more people working cheaper than the going rate. You get what you pay for.
This episode also is further evidence that Fannie Mae is still a poorly run company. Is it really so hard to turn off someone’s network access when you take their ID card?. A good place to start is that when a person is meeting with their boss and HR, to be terminated, their access to all systems is to be suspended. There is no reason to allow access to remote systems. In this case, based on the papers filed, Just more of my tax dollars at waste work.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
A January 26, 2009, ScienceDailyarticle describes a new CMOS chip capable of transmitting 60 GHz digital RF signals. The new chip enables rapid wireless transfer of a high-definition movie from a PC to a cell phone. It was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology‘s Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC).
There are many potential 60 GHz applications. Some applications are virtually wireless desktop computers, data centers, and wireless home DVD systems. The 60 GHz application would allow in-store kiosks that transfer movies to handheld devices in seconds. It also has the potential to move gigabytes of photos or video from a camera to a PC almost instantly.
Experts believe that this technology could yield high-speed, short-range wireless applications by 2012. According to Joy Laskar, director of the GEDC, “Consumers could see products capable of ultra-fast short-range data transfer within two or three years.” Ann Revell-Pechar, chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta Chapter says “Multi-gigabit wireless technology is widely perceived to bring important new wireless applications to both consumer and IT markets.” Darko Kirovski, senior researcher at Microsoft Research says “Multi-gigabit technology definitely has major promise for new consumer and IT applications.”
Unprecedented short-range wireless speeds
Researchers have already achieved very high data transfer rates that promise unprecedented short-range wireless speeds-15 Gbps at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters, and 5 Gbps at 5 meters.
The GEDC-developed chip is the first 60GHz embedded chip for multimedia multi-gigabit wireless use. According to Ms. Laskar, this new technology “represents the highest level of integration for 60GHz wireless single-chip solutions. It offers the lowest energy per bit transmitted wirelessly at multi-gigabit data rates reported to date.”
Industry group Ecma International recently announced a worldwide standard for radio frequency (RF) technology that makes 60 GHz “multi-gigabit” data transfer possible. The specifications for this technology are expected to be published as an ISO standard in 2009.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
According to the article, the hackers used seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the chief executive. The suspected Chinese hackers penetrated Nortel’s computers at least as far back as 2000 and over the years downloaded technical papers, research-and-development reports, business plans, employee emails, and other documents.
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Updated 03-12-09WirelessWeekis citing The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Nortel is in talks to sell its core wireless equipment business as well as a separate unit that builds telecom systems for offices, according to anonymous sources in the WSJ.
The WSJ reported that Nortel is talking to Nokia Siemens Networks, to sell its wireless business. Avaya and Siemens Enterprise Communications, a joint venture of Siemens and technology private equity firm Gores Group, are interested in the company’s enterprise unit. Cisco Systems reportedly looked at the enterprise unit but wasn’t expected to bid. Nortel declined to comment.
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113-year-old Canadian technology firm Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. Nortel’s losses in the third quarter ballooned to $3.41 billion and 1,300 people had to be let go. CEO and President Mike Zafirovski wrote on the company’s Website. “Most importantly, Nortel is still very much in business.”
Next steps for the former Northern Telecom may include selling various business units or receiving a capital investment as a way to go private, According to Avi Cohen, managing partner at analyst firm Avian Securities, on TheStreet.com, “The most likely bidders for Nortel’s assets are Ericsson, Huawei (002502), Nokia Siemens, and Cisco (CSCO). We believe Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and Motorola are less likely bidders because they are struggling with their own challenges and would have a hard time financing such a purchase.”
UBS analyst Maynard Um speculated onCED that the acquisition of Nortel by Huawei would be a possible outcome giving the Chinese firm a significant increase in market access in North America. However, this scenario may run into trouble with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) regulations.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
ChannelWeb Insider has been tracking which technology companies have given layoff notices. According to the site, technology firms have eliminated at least 205,000 positions since October 2008.
Makwana, 35, was indicted on 01-27-2009 by a federal court on a single charge of computer intrusion, according to documents released yesterday. Reports are unclear about the attacker’s employer or his employment status. According to the AP, Makwana has lived in the 
