Technology Industry

As technology plays a larger role inside companies, the lines between what is an IT call and what is a business call is getting blurred. That has made the business analyst - whose role in bridging IT and business operations makes it equal parts geek and diplomat - more central to corporate decisions - and more difficult.

Forrester researchers Casey Schwaber and Rob Karel surveyed 338 current and former business analysts and reviewed more than 29,000 job descriptions, distilling their conclusions in a report

Although distinguishing among breeds of business analyst makes sense in theory, in practice, trends in both business and IT are forcing business analysts to assume responsibilities outside of their siloed comfort areas.

In making the business case for IT projects, business analysts may move from obscurity. But according to CIO magazine, that higher profile will first require a distinct definition of what a business analyst is:

Not many people, including business analysts themselves, are able to figure out a standard definition (complete with typical skill sets, proper training methods and set career paths) for the business analyst position.

A year ago, Google announced to much fanfare it would buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. A month ago, Google said it would lay off workers in the target company who overlapped with its own staff. True to its word, Google reported Thursday it had laid off 10 percent of DoubleClick’s headcount in the March quarter, and another 15 percent would come as they wore out their relevance to their new Google masters. But that’s not the real news.

Google CFO George Reyes also said that overall headcount at Google had grown by 800 in the first quarter excluding DoubleClick, thanks to new hiring in engineering and sales/marketing jobs. Last summer, analysts and investors were concerned that Google was hiring too fast - faster, at least, than its revenue was growing. No one has said it yet, but that is exactly what is happening this year.

Let’s do the math. According to CNN, Google added 1500 jobs once the DoubleClick deal cleared, so a 10 percent cut means a loss of 150 jobs. At the end of 2007, Google employed 16,805 employees, which means the company brought in $309,000 per employee. Add 650 net hires in the first quarter, as Reyes said, and you get 17,455 employees, or revenue of $276,000 per employee.

So Google is touting more layoffs with the end result of 11 percent less revenue per employee. And that’s just one quarter.

The announcement came from Reyes, who eight months after he announced he’s leaving Google is still toiling away as Google sifts through candidates. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, the company still hasn’t made any offers. Reyes made the announcement on Thursday’s earnings conference call.

It’s clear that Google is hiring with plans to generate more revenue and profit in the long term. And it beat Wall Street’s numbers this time. But if business should slow down at Google even as its hiring holds its pace, Google could start to face renewed pressure to lay off more staff, and not only DoubleClick workers.

Once upon a time there were two friends who made a music-sharing program called KaZaA. It was very popular, and the two friends followed it up with another program called Skype, which let everyone make phone calls pretty much for free over the Internet.

They became subversive heroes. Then a big company called eBay knocked on their door and said, We want to buy you. Name your price!

And they looked at each other and said, $2.6 billion! And eBay said, We’ll give you $4.1 billion, but if you fail to fulfill our wildest dreams we’ll only give you that $2.6 billion!

And the two friends looked at each other and rolled their eyes. They couldn’t believe their luck.

They didn’t think their program that let people make phone calls for free over the Internet would ever make much money. So they cashed out as soon as they could without inciting lawsuits. Meanwhile, they planned an online video company that would really make money - only not for eBay, but for them alone.

Poor eBay. It soon learned what it was stuck with. But it couldn’t sell it without severe financial penalties until April 2008. So it waited. And it waited. And there were rumors it would sell Skype to Google, which was just maybe better at making money from it.

And when April 2008 came, eBay spoke its piece loud and proud. We love our dog, eBay said. And we’ll stand by it!

And they all lived happily ever after. Sort of.

If Infosys is any kind of guide, companies haven’t responded to the economic slowdown by slashing away at their IT budgets but by switching to providers who can do the job for less.

Infosys posted its first ever billion-dollar profit in the year that ended March 31, 2008. The number of active clients rose to 538 from 500 in the previous year. Clients in the financial industry made up 36 percent of revenue, down only slightly from 37 percent. But telecom and retail clients made up a larger share of its revenue: 22 percent and 12 percent, respectively, up from 19 percent and 10 percent.

The core businesses of application development and maintenance made up a smaller share of Infosys’ business last year. Those operations are still growing, but newer areas are growing faster. Consulting services, infrastructure management and system integration all made up a larger share of overall revenue in the most recent year.

A fund manager told Bloomberg that companies are relying more on outsourcing rather than eliminating IT projects.

“The primary reason why work was outsourced to India was because the same quality or better quality could be done cheaper,” said Sanjay Sinha, the chief investment officer at SBI Mutual Fund who oversees $6.5 billion including 1.13 million Infosys shares. “That is precisely the reason why you would continue to outsource to India when you are faced with a scenario where your business needs to cut costs.”

But the IT spending isn’t limited to India. Infosys’ encouraging numbers come a few weeks after IT consulting firm Accenture had a strong quarter and expressed optimism about the year ahead.

Several years ago, Samsung Electronics made a name for itself in television by creating sets with sharp, colorful displays and thin but large screens. Although its brand has dimmed in recent years, the company is gunning to make a comeback, again in television but relying on different technologies.

The Korean publication Digital Chosunilbo is reporting that Samsung is close to announcing a couple of new innovations that could help change the way we watch video.

Working with popular video-sharing website YouTube, Samsung is planning a feature that allows people to watch videos posted on YouTube on their televisions. Samsung Electronics plans to make this product available to consumers by the end of this month…

Also, last week the company released new cell phones that can send data up to a speed of 2 megabits per second, five times faster than most phones on the market. This new gadget will help the company strengthen its position in the mobile market as more and more people use cell phones for Internet surfing and younger generations enjoy uploading videos instantly on the Web.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Samsung is showing off what it hopes will become the industry standard for mobile TV, a technology that will allow broadcasters to expand their channels to mobile devices. This could well be the next high-stakes standards battle, with the E.U. embracing one standard and the U.S. showing a preference for another from Qualcomm.

Samsung faces an uphill battle in the standards battle. But a win would help return its brand name to the forefront of innovation in the fast-evolving world of television.

During the past week when the tech headlines seemed to be dominated by an increasingly hostile attempted takeover by Microsoft of Yahoo, someone at Tech Confidential did something clever - sat in and listened while Oracle executives talked at a conference about how to do smart takeovers.

Oracle pretty much wrote the book on hostile tech takeovers. Its efforts to swallow PeopleSoft is studied in business schools. Companies like Microsoft have shied away from them - they can cause valued talent to bolt, and integration issues can be sticky and long-lasting.

But Oracle is hardly shy. It has bought 41 companies in the past 45 months. Doug Kehring, an Oracle SVP in charge of corporate development, offers some lessons learned. For one, it doesn’t work with bankers - it has a bank in house.

But Oracle, as we’ve noted, doesn’t use bankers, not even for the contentious, $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems Inc. in January. Instead it relies on co-presidents Chuck Phillips and Safra Katz, backed up by Kehring and a 16-person strategy and corp dev team. Chairman Larry Ellison has also been known to weigh in from time to time.

Oracle is similarly self-reliant on integration, trying a big consulting firm on the 2005 PeopleSoft integration but deciding to do things itself instead. Kehring says speed is paramount in Oracle’s integrations, and that targets immediately adopt Oracle’s back-office policies. “We’re buying the go-to-market part of the business,” he said.

Kehring also talked about the importance of communicating about deals in the media, a lesson that Microsoft is learning now. He noted that Microsoft has had different executives saying different things.

In other words, Oracle is relentlessly focused - on strategy, on integration, on message. Microsoft wants to make a hostile bid without looking like a bully. In the M&A game, it can’t have it both ways.

The World Economic Forum isn’t usually thought of as a source biased toward a particular nationality. Working with Insead, a respected business school in Europe that draws students from all over the world, it has produced its Global Information Technology Report - a report card on the Internet connection technology.

This year, the report shows Switzerland and the United States inching up the global rankings. Switzerland rose to No. 3 from No. 5 while the U.S. gained to fourth place from seventh. Locked secure in the top two slots were Denmark and Sweden as the most wired.

The report studied 127 countries using the same criteria it has over several years:

“…how prepared countries are to use ICT effectively on three dimensions: the general business, regulatory and infrastructure environment for ICT; the readiness of the three key stakeholder groups — individuals, businesses and governments — to use and benefit from ICT; and their actual usage of the latest information and communication technologies available.”

Meanwhile, Finland,Singapore and the Netherlands slipped out of the top six and the U.K. dropped out of the top ten altogether.

There has been a lot of talk in the past week about Google App Engine, how Google is opening up its brawny and massive infrastructure for developers to run their applications on. It’s an interesting move, taken from Amazon’s Web services playbook. The basic idea is to turn one of Google’s strengths into something like a utility — just tap into its infrastructure as you would turn on a faucet.

Much more quiet is the discussion of another move that Google made to offer a utility-like service. It’s called Google Solutions Marketplace, and in this case it’s following a playbook strategy that was pioneered by Salesforce.com, which launched its AppExchange a few years back.

A year ago, Google saw that there were a lot of companies and developers creating programs, so it set up a “gallery” for customers to find them. It must have worked well, because Google is beefing it up now. The move could strengthen the company’s hand in the enterprise-software market.

It doesn’t seem like Google is gunning for Salesforce’s market though. Its Solutions Marketplace focused for now on programs for Google customers. And Techcrunch recently suggested that not only are Salesforce and Google willing to work together, they may even combine.

While Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might be happy to sell Salesforce to Oracle for $75 a share, he might be even happier to sell it to Google. Buying Salesforce would certainly turbocharge Google’s efforts to sell into enterprise accounts.

In that case, Solutions Marketplace might simply be a welcome mat for Salesforce.

As corporations start adopting open-source applications, it’s creating some new niches for companies to mine. One such company is Spikesource, a Redwood City, Calif., startup with backing from Kleiner Perkins VCs and strong alliances with established giants like Intel and Microsoft.

Spikesource’s niche is automated platforms for assembling, testing, packaging and updating software. Open-source applications are patchy by nature, and need a lot of testing by customers and developers to evolve and work out bugs, version mismatches etc. On O’Reilly Network, Spikesource co-founder Murugan Pal outlined the company’s approach in detail.

The company’s management team is led by Kim Polese, founder of Marimba software back in the 90s, which was sold to BMC Software. Its chairman and co-founder is Ray Lane, former Oracle president and current Kleiner partner. Also on the board is Kleiner heavyweight Bill Joy.

On Friday, Intel said it invested $10 million in Spikesource, leading a round of venture investment. Intel, like Microsoft, is using the company to certify applications for production quality. The Microsoft alliance caught the interest of a blogger on SeekingAlpha, who explained its significance.

Despite growing Linux deployments, Windows Server remains quite popular for running open source applications. SugarCRM, the fast-growing open source application provider, is quick to note that many of its business developments occur on Windows Server. And Microsoft itself has sponsored SugarCRM’s conferences, in order to stay in front of open source crowds.

But Microsoft isn’t stopping there. The company is working with SpikeSource to ensure open source applications work with Windows Server 2008. SpikeSource has so far certified five PHP applications for Microsoft’s new server operating system, according to SpikeSource’s Web site

In these days where tales of dire financial straits are a dime a dozen, we can all take heart from those who keep finding a way to wring a few extra bucks at the expense of people who just want to have a good time.

Take RealNetworks, which originally made a name for itself by sucking blood from Napster’s corpse, offering a theft-proof way to put music on the Web at a time when clueless music labels needed just that. That lucrative sell-out led to Rhapsody, which is actually one of the rare consumer-friendly music sites for sampling music, even if iTunes offers a much better venue for buying songs.

Now RealNetworks is injecting itself into the great Scrabulous debate. Scrabulous is an online version of Scrabble that is so wildly popular that it’s become one of the defining Facebook applications, with nearly 700,000 Facebook users. That’s not surprising. Scrabble has weaved its way into our culture. In a Seinfeld episode, Kramer playes the word “Quone” and when Jerry calls him on it, Kramer says it’s a medical term: “If a patient gets difficult, you quone him.”

Scrabulous works for gamers, but it’s gotten difficult for Hasbro and Mattel. Mattel, of course, made its fortune from literally (and figuratively) poisoning kids with toys like Barbie. So RealNetworks is stepping forward, not to defend Scrabulous but to quone it. And much like Kramer’s neologism, it makes less sense the more you look into it.

In 1938 Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect, created scrabble. A lot of lawyering and financial dealing put it in the hands of Hasbro, and eventually Mattel. Which is another way of saying Hasbro and Mattel did zero innovation on Scrabble, but get all the money anyway. Now some clever folk have added innovation to Scrabble by making it irresistible online.

Instead of rewarding that innovation, Hasbro/Mattel is copying it. And RealNetworks is helping. This is anti-innovation, and poison in the technology industry. Why would RealNetworks cross 700,000 of the Internet’s savviest users?