Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for users of IT technical services. In this issue:
• Time to be cautiously optimistic?
• Tech View: Beyond monitoring
• Top 10 qualities of a professional IT contractor
• B & M SkillSource - expertise for enterprise systems
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Time to be cautiously optimistic?
A report published earlier this month suggests that private sector jobs are growing, with accelerated growth in the IT and computing sectors
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“…the IT & computing sector saw accelerated growth...”
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The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG Report on Jobs was published on 9th March, offering possibly the most comprehensive guide to the UK labour market, drawing on original survey data provided by recruitment consultancies.
According to the Confederation’s press release, February data signalled “Strong and accelerated rises in both permanent staff placements and temporary staff billings. The former increased at the sharpest rate in ten months, while the latter posted the greatest rise since May 2007”.
Higher staff appointments were underpinned by robust growth in demand for staff in February. The overall level of job vacancies increased at the strongest rate since April 2010. However, the rate of inflation of permanent staff salaries eased to a three-month low in February and remained below the survey’s long-run average. Temporary staff hourly pay increased modestly.
The release quoted Kevin Green, Chief Executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, as saying, “The UK now has a two-speed labour market. The private sector continues to hire in increasing numbers while the public sector is shedding jobs. This is highlighted in the latest Report on Jobs which reports that the nursing, medical and care sectors have significantly declined from a year ago. In comparison, the IT and computing sector saw accelerated growth over the same period.
“We anticipate that unemployment will increase over the spring, summer and autumn before very slowly starting to decline at the very end of this year and into 2012.”
Bernard Brown, Partner and Head of Business Services at KPMG commented, “The encouraging trend which started in January continued last month with permanent placements rising at their fastest rate in 10 months and temp billings showing their strongest increase since May 2007. Employers in the IT & Computing and Engineering & Construction sectors are again those most actively recruiting. This might be an indication that a private sector led recovery is indeed under way”.
At B & M, we concur with this view: a number of our customers have now initiated projects that have been on hold for the past 12-18 months. These are predominantly in the areas of high availability, systems & applications integration and geographic migrations. They have generated an increase in demand for key technical skills and thus a degree of competition between customers. To get ahead of the curve in sourcing valuable skills contact sales@bmeurope.com.
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Tech View: Beyond Monitoring
Enterprise Tooling Consultant Nigel Hadfield considers recent progress in the quest to remove errors from monitoring
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There was a time when monitoring a computer system meant a bunch of operators sitting in front of screens looking at messages, hoping to spot when something had gone wrong. They were backed up by a slightly smaller bunch of systems programmers (or system administrators, depending on your platform), who kept an eye on the more technical aspects of the system, such as CPU utilisation, paging, and disk space.
The advent of products like Tivoli’s Distributed Monitoring, HP’s OpenView, and CA’s Unicenter led to the notion that computer systems could be monitored automatically, and that humans need only be troubled when the automation software had discovered a problem. The idea was an easy sell to IT management, who were finding the increasing complexity of their systems difficult to manage, and were also feeling increased pressure to keep systems running and to adhere to SLAs on availability and response times.
This approach worked pretty well for sites that were running no more than a few hundred servers. But the early software was a long way from perfect. It was difficult to install and configure, the monitors themselves often failed, and the monitoring agents acquired a reputation for being buggy resource hogs. Although these problems are gradually being resolved, the sheer scale of the IT infrastructure deployed by large enterprises means that operational control centres are still overrun by alerts that are difficult to respond to appropriately.
Recently we have seen the emergence of new products and technologies that enable large organisations to take monitoring and alerting to the next level. These products still rely on the traditional low-level system monitors for their basic data, but this data is intelligently filtered and enriched by new software products that analyse the data to pull out just the important events and trends.
To give a real-life example, a large financial institution has recently deployed Netuitive, a product that eliminates error-prone rules and thresholds. It automatically aggregates systems and application data from existing monitoring tools then applies advanced mathematics and statistical analysis to self-learn the environment's normal operating characteristics. When it detects or forecasts anomalies it delivers accurate indicators of impending performance issues or service failures. These indicators are displayed on a service health dashboard, which also allows technical staff to drill down to the underlying data and perform root cause diagnostics.
As you would imagine, this is a significant investment where benefits can be gradual and not always easy to measure. However, better quality alerting leads to fewer people wasting time on false alarms, leading to an operations centre that is less overloaded, with proactive alerting that is more focused on the services that are most important to the organisation.
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Top 10 qualities of a professional IT contractor
The debate on what constitutes a 'professional' IT consultant continues to run in the IT industry. Nonetheless it is clear that - whatever their qualifications - there are certain attributes which define a true professional:
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- The ability to demonstrate a set of highly developed technical skills
- Diligence in their attitude to work
- The possession of valued qualifications, relevant to their skills
- Effective communication skills
- The possession of recognised certifications
- Well-developed diplomatic skills
- A desire to continue to learn
- A willingness to be accountable for their actions
- Total commitment to the project in hand
- Strong business ethics.
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B & M SkillSource
expertise for enterprise systems
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B & M SkillSource is a professional service that delivers experienced specialists for short or long term contract work on projects for large-system enterprise platforms. B & M's skilled specialists bring new or additional skills, knowledge and expertise to enterprises for projects which typically include:
- Communications projects such as network planning, product installation and support, network performance and connectivity
- Data management including database administration, database design and storage management
- Capacity management and systems performance
- Operating systems management including change management, product installation and transaction processing
- Systems and network security including planning, design, implementation and administration.
We apply stringent best practice standards across all our services, which ensure that they are consistently of the highest quality.
For more information, please contact sales@bmeurope.com.
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B & M Europe Limited
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B & M has specialised in delivering skilled ICT specialists to meet the needs of leading organisations throughout Europe since 1992. We focus exclusively on providing technical services, consultancy and support for z/OS, UNIX and Linux enterprise systems, including third-party systems software, open systems and networking connectivity. We add real value for HR and IT professionals by taking the time to understand their needs and applying best practice methods to deliver results. To find out more about our approach to providing the best skills for each business, go to B & M Services.
The views, opinions, positions or strategies expressed by the authors are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, positions or strategies of B & M Europe Limited or any employee thereof.
B & M Europe Limited
Whitehouse Farm, Silchester Road, Tadley, RG26 3PY, United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0) 118 981 1880
Fax +44 (0) 118 981 1881
Registered in England and Wales
Company No. 02696668
VAT No. GB 591718218 Expert Technical Resourcing for Enterprise Systems
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