Managed Services & Outsourcing

The Malaysian government is making renewed efforts to combat software piracy, spurred into action by the recent appearance of pirated copies of Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn operating system on sale for under M$10 (US$3) in the south of the country.

Next to the U.S., Japan maybe the biggest IT outsourcing market for the Philippines. But if the country's IT outsourcing capabilities are not properly promoted among Japanese businesses, the Philippines may lose this huge market to outsourcing rivals India and China.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and the netbeans.org tools organization on Thursday released a road map for the open source NetBeans tools technology, outlining advances to extend development for the Web and Web services.

Discussions aimed at merging Sun Microsystems Inc.'s NetBeans Java development framework with the IBM Corp.-backed Eclipse group have broken down, Sun said on Wednesday. The news ends months of speculation about whether Sun, the company that created Java, would join forces with IBM, one of Java's biggest supporters, and unify the two companies' efforts to create a standard open-source development environment for Java.

Sun Microsystems Inc. of Canada is not only officially releasing its Sun Java Systems in Canada this week, but the software company also continued its six-city whirlwind trip across the country in an effort to promote Sun's new family of software systems.

The Indian government went on the offensive last week on the contentious issue of the loss of U.S. and European jobs to India due to outsourcing.

The number of people using the Internet worldwide continued to grow in 2002, though the increase was slower than in 2001, according to figures released by the United Nations (U.N.).

Spending for telecommunication products and services in the Philippines is expected to reach US$2.5 billion by the end of 2003, a 12 per cent rise from the US$2.3 billion registered in 2002, according to IT research and consulting firm IDC Philippines.