Patrick Thibodeau

In an eyebrow-raising forecast that was met with a mix of skepticism and nonchalance by some IT managers, Gartner Inc. analysts predicted as many as 50 per cent of the IT operations jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data centre management technologies.

At his inauguration next Thursday, President Bush is expected to outline his goals for the next term. But his IT staff is already at work on one of them: improving IT job skills within the government. Karen Evans, U.S. administrator for e-government and information technology, said in a report last month that she wants to eliminate what she described as a "skills gap" at half of all federal agencies by the end of the fiscal year in September. That covers a range of IT functions, including information security, application support, systems analysis and project management.

Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said telecommuting via thin clients is a niche that could grow as part of an overall increase in corporate use of the devices.

In an eyebrow-raising forecast that was met with a mix of skepticism and nonchalance by some IT managers, Gartner Inc. analysts last week predicted that as many as 50 per cent of the IT operations jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data centre management technologies.

In quarterly reports released this week, three big India-based offshore outsourcing companies detailed sharp increases in employee head count, clear evidence of growing demand for offshore services. Analysts say this demand is increasing wages in India by double digits and raising the potential of rate increases for U.S. customers. For now, at least, competition in India is keeping billing rates stable. But analysts say that won't continue indefinitely as competition for experienced employees increases.

IBM Corp. Thursday laid out a new road map for its mainframe computing platform, which over the next year will include adoption of the Common Information Model (CIM) standard allowing different systems to exchange information.

In a development that threatens the continued existence of independent HP user groups, Hewlett-Packard Co. intends to "coalesce" three user conferences into one "technical solutions conference" beginning next year.

Intel Corp. will release a server version of its 64-bit extensions technology for its x86 platform in 60 days, and as users refresh their servers over the next two years, they will get 64-bit computing capability