Philip Wen's //

Ready or not, here the world comes...

InformationWeek posted this entry:

The Value Of IT Investments survey, by ISACA, a nonprofit association of IT professionals, found that more than 25% of companies are increasing IT investments in 2009.

What does this tell me?  that 75% of the companies surveyed are not increasing their IT investments.

Maybe it’s because I breathe IT day in and day out, the value that IT adds is quite obvious to me.  My regular customers still all agree with this of course,  as the demand for Tekglo’s services has been increasing, even in this economic climate.

What is not evident though, is the reasons many reporters have cited in the media regarding companies cutting IT budgets in order to “stay competitive”. To stay afloat I can understand, but stay competitive??

As if the trend isn’t evident enough, regardless of the “economic conditions”, the general bearing of every industry, from transportation to fast food services,  is to take more and more business functions and transactions online– whether it is CRM, ERP, sales, marketing, corporate communications, etc.  If the business is to stay competitive, business leaders with any kind of foresight ought to be looking at getting additional value out of every dollar invested into the business (Return on investment, or ROI), and IT is the one arena that businesses CANNOT afford to skimp on.

As the society gears itself for instant, simultaneous communication  and transactions enabled by technological advances, those that do not keep up will eventually fall behind — and we all know what happens to the businesses that fall behind:  they “cut IT budgets to stay competitive”.

The swing of things is rather obvious, no?

Core vs Phenom II virtualization showdown

With the wounds from competitive price cuts still fresh, I decided to make some small deposits into the pockets of both Intel and AMD.  I picked up the Core i7 920 chip as well as the AMD Phenom II 940 CPU/Asus board combo from Fry’s about a week ago, and recently picked up an Asus P6T Deluxe from a friend who works at Newegg.

The consensus online seems to be that the Phenom 940 offers slightly more performance per dollar, while the Bloomfield is capable of providing the higher performance if budget is less of a concern.

Well, I am giving it a tally for the parts of the both systems, and will be butt-benching the both systems using Hyper-V and seeing which system offers better bang for the buck in terms of VM’s performance.

Thus far,

The Core machine’s cost:

Core i7 920 – $219
Asus P6T Deluxe – $220
Patriot 4GB DDR3 – $90 – $25 Rebate = $65
——————————————————-
Intel Total = $504

The Phenom II machine’s cost:

AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition – $203
Asus M3N78 Pro – $96
Corsair DDR2 4GB – $50 – $30 rebate = $20
——————————————————-
AMD Total = $320

The rest of the components will be identical between the two systems, so I’ve left them out of consideration.

Once I am able to get these systems thrown together and get some VMs on, I will report back.

In the meantime, have any of you done this already, and what are your thoughts on either/both systems?

What will the future look like?

No doubt the state of the global economy has many of us contemplating on what the future may be bringing in the near future.  The geek inside me has always been curious on how technology will end up reshaping how business will be conducted.

For the past 20 years or so, the biggest impact of Technology can be summarized into the following two points:

1. Ubiquity of the internet, and
2. Ubiquity of the affordable internet enabled devices.

As the persistently-connected population worldwide reaches Critical Mass, how will the methods of inter-personal idea exchange– (and along the same vein, the exchange of Goods and Services) — evolve?

Like sunflowers, Social Networking sites that endlessly mushroom out on the ‘Net already give us a pretty clear indication of how people prefer to communicate.  Already, many of us are substituting phone calls with emails, and occasionally IM’s for emails, and now, Tweets and Wall Tags for IMs.

How will the business landscape be changed?  Everyone’s got different ideas, and once in a while I run into articles that I am surprised to encounter through that chance RSS sub.  While I largely agree with most of Tim O’Reilly’s thoughts, sometimes I think he is a little too optimistic in assuming that most of his readers are perched in the exact same echelon as himself on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Babbling aside, occasionally I hit upon other blogs that practically “stole the words out of my mouth”.  Which is great, because it means I am not too far out in the left field, and others can see the exact same trend I am seeing.

Take a look here.  Granted, Naseem did not mention anything new here that hasn’t been mentioned before, but it’s a great summation of the general consensus of modern technology thought leaders.

How do you predict things will be going?  Do you agree or disagree with any of this?