Tag Archive for Recession

| March 1, 2010
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Republican Blocks Unemployment Benefits

Republican Blocks Unemployment BenefitsJim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month. As Democratic senators asked again and again for unanimous consent for a vote on a 30-day extension Thursday night, Bunning refused to go along.

According to the Huffington Post, when Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) begged him to drop his objection, Politico reports, Bunning replied: “Tough shit.” And at one point during the debate, which dragged on till nearly midnight, Bunning complained of missing a basketball game.

“I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00,” he said,  “and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beaten Kentucky this year.” Daily Kos produced a video of Bunning’s obstruction.

The Huffington Post says the stakes are enormous: provisions of last year’s stimulus bill that allow extra weeks of unemployment benefits and COBRA health coverage are set to expire on Feb. 28. State workforce agencies have already sent out letters informing recipients that they’ll be ineligible for extra “tiers” of benefits starting next month. The National Employment Law Project estimates that 1.2 million people will prematurely lose benefits in March.

Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the NELP, said that even when Bunning is eventually thwarted and the extension is passed, state governments will still have to deal with the extra administrative costs of shutting down and restarting the extended benefits programs.

GOP Blocks Unemployment BenefitsMs. Conti said, “Once the program is retroactively reauthorized, the federal government is going to send the same amount of money, but his own state government is going to have to spend even more money.” She continued, “What happened last night was an absolute disgrace. There is a time and a place a purpose for debate on deficit reduction, but you don’t make your stand on the back of the unemployed. It is ill-informed, counterproductive, and just cruel.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) took the floor to stick up for Bunning and stated, “I admire the courage of the junior senator from Kentucky.” And with that, the Senate adjourned for the weekend.

 

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.

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| February 24, 2010
Comments Off on Recession Over??

Recession Over??

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told us in September 2009 that the recession was “very likely over.” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told CBS News on 01-30-2010  “The Great Recession is over.“ UPS CEO Scott Davis told the Atlanta Constitution Journal on 02-03-2010 that the recession is over. So to celebrate UPS is going to cut 1,800 positions.

Andrew Bartels, a Forrester vice president, and principal analyst declared the tech recession over on 01-12-10. Despite these prognostications by pundits and politicians, global tech layoffs have soared to over 613,00 since the bottom fell out of the world economy in October 2008. Layoffs in January 2010 reached nearly 37,000, a monthly magnitude total not seen since May 2009. The telecom firms lead the layoff count in January 2010 with Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S), and AT&T (T) accounting for nearly 65% of this month’s announced layoffs.

Tech Layoffs

The overall trend for the last 8 months has been upwards, hardly an indicator that the recession is over.

 

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.

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| November 7, 2009
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IPv6 Growing Despite Economy

IPv6 Growing Despite EconomyThe American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) reports that demands for IPv6 address space is growing. According to the 10/19/2009 article, Next-generation Internet defies recession on NetworkWorld, during the first nine months of 2009, ARIN  received 300 requests from carriers for blocks of IPv6 address space. This compares to 250 requests received in all of 2008 and 2007.

“We’re seeing an uptick in IPv6 address space requests; it’s a very significant growth rate,” says John Curran, president, and CEO of ARIN. “We’ve seen a slight slowdown in IPv4 address space requests…It’s probably dropped off 10% or 20% year over year.”

Curran says ARIN is beginning to see ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon Wireless put a great deal of effort into migrating from IPv4-based networks to those built using IPv6. “ISPs are asking for IPv6 addresses so they can make their networks IPv6-enabled so they are ready [for the future],” Curran says. “We give each ISP enough IPv6 addresses to support 4 billion networks, and each network can contain trillions and trillions of hosts.”

ARIN’s Curran says the recession is not hampering carriers’ interest in IPv6. “IPv6 solves a problem that hasn’t happened yet. So seeing any demand is surprising, and it means that organizations are planning ahead,” he says. “The current weakness in the economy…is not dampening down IPv6 demand significantly because IPv6 is right around the corner for ISPs. We may be two years away from the IPv4 free pool of addresses running out, but two years, if you’re an ISP, is enough time to get one network deployed. Two years is within everyone’s planning horizon.”

ARIN plans several policy changes to push carriers towards IPv6 adoption. These include:

  • Allowing ARIN to reduce the size of IPv4 address space allocations to carriers as the industry gets closer to IPv4 address depletion.
  • Increasing access to IPv6 address space by removing the requirement for carriers to first demonstrate that they have hundreds of customers.
  • Allowing carriers to run multiple, discrete IPv6 networks that don’t have to be connected to each other, such as community networks.
  • Reconsideration of a current policy that requires the regional registries including ARIN to evenly divide up any IPv4 space they are able to recover.

This gadget has been developed by Takashi Arano, Intec NetCore

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.

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| October 30, 2009
Comments Off on 2010 Not Any Better – Maybe

2010 Not Any Better – Maybe

2010 Not Any Better - Maybe it spendingGartner says that IT spending experienced its worst year ever in 2009. The Stamford, CT research firm says the enterprise space saw a spending decline of 6.9%. ChannelInsider reports that the industry won’t reach 2008’s spending levels again until 2012. In the meantime, there will be some growth in 2010. Gartner sees a 3.3% increase over 2009 levels to $3.3 trillion.

IT spending prediction

“2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth,” says Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, in a prepared statement. “For more than 50% of CIOs the IT budget will be 0% or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.” On the other hand, Forrester has a rosier picture. In their report released 10-08-09 “US and Global IT Outlook: Q3 2009,” Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, says the global IT market will see an upturn, starting Q3 2009 in an article on Campus Technology.

Hardware is hard hit

According to Gartner, things have been toughest on the hardware side of the computer market. Gartner says that worldwide computer hardware spending will total just $317 billion this year, a 16.5% decline, and in 2010 hardware spending will remain flat. Forrester says computer equipment sales will increase by 8.3% in 2010. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4% this year and is forecast to grow by 3.2% in 2010 according to Gartner. Forrester claims communications equipment sales will show a bump at 3.6%.

Professional services is up

Additionally, Gartner forecasts IT services spending to total $781 billion in 2009 and to grow 4.5% in 2010.  In their report, Forrester predicts IT consulting services will increase by 11.7% in 2010 Software spending will decline 2.1% in 2009 but is expected to grow by 4.8% in 2010. Forrester says software purchases will be up by 9.3% in 2010.

Three big trends will shape the IT spending and operational infrastructure in 2010, according to Gartner—a shift in IT budgets to more opex from capex, the ramifications of an older infrastructure made up of older IT hardware, and the need for IT to create business cases for spending.

Spending trends

Gartner says the shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure in IT budgets will be accelerated by emerging cloud services and will make IT costs more scalable and elastic. The second trend comes from delays in computer hardware upgrades. As the business has delayed buying servers, PCs, and printers, and is expected to continue to keep wallets closed in 2010, they need to look at the impact of increased equipment failure rates. “Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3% of the global installed base. In 2010 it will be at least 2 million,” Gartner says.

“If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement by 2011,” Sondergaard says. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”

Third, Gartner says that IT needs to build compelling business cases, “2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate a true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.”

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From where I stand, the Gartner predictions seem more rational than Forrester’s. Forrester seems to base their optimism on two fleeting factors, Obama-money and Microsoft. The only real beneficiaries of Obama-money has been Wall Street, not the rest of America, so stimulus spending is irrelevant to most American business. Forrester seems to believe that Windows 7 will save IT spending, another large leap of faith that businesses are going to jump on the bandwagon, but none of my clients seem ready to leap yet.

 

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.

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| August 11, 2009
Comments Off on No Job Growth for 10 Years

No Job Growth for 10 Years

The New York Times is reporting that for the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no job growth in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.

The NYT charts show the job performance from July 1999, through July of this year. For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private-sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.

According to the NYT, until the current downturn, the long-term annual growth rate for private-sector jobs had not dipped below 1 percent since the early 1960s. Most often, the rate was well above that.

NYT chart

Fortunately for me, the NYT says the field of management and technical consulting leaped at an annual rate of 5 percent. But while designing computers and related equipment was a growth field, building them was a very different story, as the manufacturing shifted largely to Asia. The number of jobs making computer and electronic equipment in the United States fell at an annual rate of 4.4 percent, substantially more than the overall decline in manufacturing jobs, of 3.7 percent.

That was a better showing than that of the automakers, which shed jobs at a rate of 6.7 percent a year. By contrast, auto dealers cut jobs at a much slower rate of 1.3 percent a year, although that rate may accelerate later this year as General Motors and Chrysler dealerships are closed.

The total picture is of an economy that has changed in substantial ways over the decade. After the recession ends, job growth is likely to resume. But there is no indication that the secular trend toward a more service-oriented economy will reverse. and few expect that manufacturing will reverse its long decline as a major employer in the United States.

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Enough said –

 

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.

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