Patrick Thibodeau

San Diego officials are expected to vote Tuesday on a US$667 million IT outsourcing contract with Northrop Grumman Information Technology, a move more and more local and state governments may soon make if Reston, Va., consultancy Input is right about its IT outsourcing market forecast.

Compliance burdens posed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are proving to be costly for many IT departments, according to Gartner Inc. But companies may be better equipped to meet any new federal regulations thanks to the processes they have developed for complying with the law, IT executives said in Orlando last week.

All it takes to understand China

IBM Tuesday announced a new mainframe, the z9 -- which it says is twice as powerful as the model it replaces -- as well as improvements to its enterprisewide virtualization systems. At one time, a new mainframe announcement by IBM would have focused primarily on performance gains. But citing a rash of data thefts and losses over the past year at a number of companies, IBM emphasized new data security capabilities on the z9.

What San Diego-based startup SeaCode Inc. plans to do is nothing if not novel: anchor a cruise ship three miles off the coast of Los Angeles, fill it with up to 600 programmers from around the world, eliminate visa restrictions and make it easy for customers to visit the site via water taxi.

Hewlett-Packard Co. this month said it will continue to support its existing MIPS-based NonStop servers through 2013, despite a plan to begin shipping Itanium-based models next month. But some users of the fault-tolerant systems think HP may have to extend the support even beyond that far-off date.

Major IT vendors are encouraging employees to start blogs to reach out to users in new ways and help make the companies seem less impersonal. But so far, the blogging conversation is mostly one-sided.

Some governments and not-for-profit organizations such as hospitals are beginning to look at data grid technology as a means to improve services, lower operating costs and spur economic development. Separate data grid plans involving hospitals, schools and municipal agencies in Cleveland and within Singapore's government were announced this month. Such efforts will likely take years to reach fruition.