The direct impetus for this column is IBM’s internal plan to grow earnings-per-share (EPS) to $20 by 2015. The primary method for accomplishing this feat, according to the plan, will be by reducing US employee head count by 78 percent in that time frame.

Reducing employees by more than three quarters in three years is a bold and difficult task. What will it leave behind?  Who, under this plan, will still be a US IBM employee in 2015? Top management will remain, the sales organization will endure, as will employees working on US government contracts that require workers to be US citizens. Everyone else will be gone. Everyone.

Global Services is a mature business that has been around for about 20 years.  In IBM’s 2015 business plan big income is expected from newer businesses like Business Analytics, Cloud and Smarter Computing, and Smarter Planet.  Can these businesses be grown in three to five years to the multi-billion dollar level of gross profit coming from Global Services?  Most of these businesses are tiny.  A few of them are not even well conceived as businesses.  It takes special skills and commitment to grow a business from nothing to the $1 billion range.  Does IBM have what it takes?

Probably not.

Do you remember eBusiness?  Do you remember On-Demand?  These are recent examples of businesses IBM planned to grow to billions in sales, businesses that no longer exist today.  Some claim that Blue Gene is shortly to be shuttered, too.

Here’s a simple thought experiment. When it comes to these new software and Internet services, IBM’s competition comes from a variety of companies including Amazon, Apple, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard, Oracle and others. Does IBM have an inherent advantage at this point against any of those companies? No. Is IBM in any way superior to all of them and thence in a position to claim dominance? No.

If IBM is planning a 78 percent staff reduction, then that will of necessity involve all USA operations, not just Global Services.  Hardware, systems, software, storage, consulting, etc. will all see serious staff cuts.  This means IBM could be moving a lot of its manufacturing and product support offshore.  Raleigh, Lexington, Rochester, and several other IBM communities are about to lose a lot of jobs.

IBM’s goal appears to be to have as few employees in the US as possible, maximizing profit.  But doing so clearly hurts customer satisfaction. Major IBM customers such as Amgen, The State of Texas, and most recently the Walt Disney Company have cut ties with IBM in favor of other providers. Many other customers are scaling back the services they’re buying from IBM as the perceived value continues to drop. Customers are starting to realize that they can directly hire offshore companies such as TCS, Wipro, HCL and Satayam and book the savings directly instead of paying IBM top dollar for support and then seeing that support fulfilled from BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries. When IBM first started its big push to offshore technical work, the account teams were asked to make a list of reasons why customers’ work couldn’t be offshored, but were not allowed to use skills as a reason. That makes no sense in a rational organization but it makes perfect sense to IBM.

• Clean install -- Remove the existing Notes installation, and clean the registry, to prepare for a clean install.
• Failed install -- Detect the install version from the registry and clean up registry settings and files on the system to prepare for a clean install of the same release.
• Failed upgrade -- Detect the install version from the registry and clean up registry settings and files on the system to prepare for a clean install or the upgrade release.
• Failed uninstall -- Detect the version from the registry and clean up registry settings and files on the system to prepare for a clean install.

• If a Notes version is not detected in the registry but files exist in the default location , you are prompted to remove those files from disk. For example, if there is no entry for Notes in the Add/Remove Programs dialog, NICE detects whether there is a key in registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Notes, gets the PROGDIR and DATADIR information from the registry, and does the deletion. If there is no key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Notes, NICE does nothing.
• If there is no Add/Remove Programs entry for Notes, but there are registry keys in either HKCU\Software\Lotus\Notes\Installer or HKLM\Software\Lotus\Notes, you can remove those registry settings. For example, if there is no Add/Remove Programs entry for Notes, NICE gets the PROGDIR and DATADIR information from HKLM\Software\Lotus\Notes and continues to remove program files, remove shortcuts, and clean the registry.

You can use the supplied single user to multi user tool to migrate a Notes single user install to a Notes multi-user install for an existing Notes release prior to upgrading to a new release. This enables you to convert an existing Notes single user install to a multi-user install for both Notes basic and Notes standard configuration deployments. It also enables you to convert a simulated multi-user install (where the user's data directory is on a mapped drive) to a true multi-user install. This tool is available for Lotus Notes 6.5.x, 7.x, and 8.x installations on supported Windows platforms only.

A deployed service member's situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit, said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE.

"Today, in pretty much every single smartphone, there is built-in GPS," Warren said. "For every picture you take with that phone, it will automatically embed the latitude and longitude within the photograph."

Warren cited a real-world example from 2007. When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some Soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.

"Some of those individuals have hundreds of 'friends' they may never have actually met in person, he explained. "By looking at someone's map tab on Facebook, you can see everywhere they've tagged a location. You can see the restaurants they frequent, the gym they go to everyday, even the street they live on if they're tagging photos of their home. Honestly, it's pretty scary how much an acquaintance that becomes a Facebook 'friend' can find out about your routines and habits if you're always tagging location to your posts."

Question
Does IBM Lotus Notes Traveler support the BlackBerry PlayBook?

Answer
At this time, IBM does not support the use of Lotus Notes Traveler on a BlackBerry PlayBook. PlayBook support is offered by RIM:
1) For Administrators, RIM has posted details about its support for the configuration in the BlackBerry Device Service Guide.
2) For end users, please reference the PlayBook Users Guide.

IBM and RIM continue to collaborate closely to enhance the PlayBook experience for IBM and RIM mutual customers.

“The cloud is really outsourcing,” says Chet Wisniewski, security analyst for Sophos, which was one of the security companies that drew that connection. “Having somebody else take some burden of infrastructure, services that you could provide in-house and instead choosing to have someone else do it. Yes, you could call the lunch I had at the hotel ‘cloud catering,’ because a company that wasn’t owned by the hotel came in and prepared the food. But if I was poisoned by that food, I’d still hold the hotel liable.”
The indeterminacy around who’s responsible for cloud security breaches could, in itself, be considered a security vulnerability.

“If you have sensitive customer information and you put it out in the cloud,” Sophos’ Wisniewski points out, “the only person who has legal responsibility for that data is you. So if your cloud provider screws up and that data is released, you’re on the hook. You’re responsible for protecting your customer information, and doing due diligence to ensure it’s protected.”

Doesn’t that make it not only more important, but more difficult, for cloud customers to take charge of their own deployments? “Absolutely,” responds Wisniewski. “And the problem is that it’s damn near impossible to do. It gets really sticky when you start looking at regulatory situations. If I outsource something to Rackspace’s cloud service, for example, it could be running for one minute on a server in China, the next minute in Russia, and the next minute in London — or all at the same time if I’m representing three different customers. If they access their servers from one region, they may each be located in another region.”

As if the rubble weren’t fine-grained enough, there’s yet one more layer of diffusion, which Webroot’s Ian Moyse perceives as being generated by the cloud market. Customers are being misinformed by various competitors, he says, using language that’s cloudier than their own services. As a result, it becomes impossible for customers to determine legally who’s responsible for technology they don’t understand practically.

The problem, simply put, is fear. It’s where this whole exercise begins; it’s what brought us to this point. There’s a fear of not knowing what’s going on inside your systems. It’s the same fear if you’re 14 or you’re 41, if it’s your PC or your data center. But beneath that, there’s a deeper fear of finding out. Because then comes the real test of whether you’re responsible for the consequences. Do you know what you are meaning?