Professions and Industries

2010 IT Skills & Salary Report

Are you wondering how your salary compares to your colleagues? Or how earning a certification might increase your worth? Wonder no more. Our latest skills and salary report has the answers your need.

The 2010 IT Skills and Salary Report from Global Knowledge and TechRepublic is a compilation of crucial data from over 19,500 IT and business professionals. It contains detailed salary information on 80 popular certifications, salary breakdowns by state and region, comparison data from 2010 vs. 2009, and much more.

Enterprise Applications: The Cost of Keeping Current…Or Not

The cost of keeping current is represented as both time and money. Much of the "money" side of the equation is typically sunk cost in terms of the cost of the software and services combined with maintenance dollars paid to the solution provider. The time and effort to upgrade is an investment necessary to gain value from money already spent on software, implementation, and maintenance. Companies all too often fall into the trap of circular logic. They can't spend the time therefore they don't get the value, but without the value, they can't justify the time.

Kraft Foods Eliminates 500,000 "Empty Miles" in One Year With Routing Tools

Kraft Foods wanted to reduce costs of a large-scale food product distribution operation that, in the United States alone, includes 500 shipping points, more than 6,000 destinations, and approximately 2,500 trucks on the road each day and support the company's aggressive sustainability goals, which include reducing global manufacturing plant energy usage by 25% and plant energy-related Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions by 25% between 2005 and 2011. The challenge was to reduce "empty miles" in and out of Kraft distribution centers within the company's U.S. private fleet and its top 50 carriers. Kraft Foods instituted a new synchronized trip program called Project MOST (Management of Optimized Sustainable Transportation) that leverages Oracle Transportation Management as a foundation.

School in Finland Meets the Future With Online Learning and Collaboration

Looking for Web-based teaching tools to prepare its students for the future, Kello School, located in the municipality of Haukipudas, Finland, deployed Microsoft Live@edu to give students a rich online learning environment that fosters collaboration while providing a safe online environment. Teachers use Live@edu for peer collaboration and to enable students to continue working away from school.

Four Seas Mercantile Completes Financial Accounts 50% Faster

Four Seas Mercantile wanted to maintain accurate predictions of consumer tastes and consumption rates in each region of operation and allow deeper analysis of regional activities based on real-time data. The challenge was to streamline distribution operations, including making and tracking orders and collecting revenue easier and ensure ongoing technical support will be provided. Four Seas Mercantile increased efficiency by streamlining revenue reporting from all business units and completed financial accounts 50% faster.

Prudential Overall Supply Moves to Hosted IT Model, Improving System Availability, Reliability, and Security

Prudential Overall Supply (POS) wanted transition from an unsupported, batch-oriented, data processing-based IT system to an integrated, real-time, Wide Area Network (WAN)-based corporate-wide system and ensure data integrity and availability, while easing application maintenance. The challenge was to minimize paper-based processes for printing and delivering invoices, and manage order changes via handheld PDAs. Prudential Overall Supply (POS) worked with Oracle PartnerRapidigm, Inc. (now Fujitsu) to implement Oracle financial management and purchasing applications, integrating them with a route accounting system and streamlined invoice delivery and processing for 18 plants and eight service centers.

Podcast: The Latest on Governance, Risk and Compliance

Regulatory requirements can be challenging and expensive to manage for any organization. This podcast will address some of the most common challenges and how software and applications can ease this process.

This podcast includes:

• How flexibility is important within the application to deal with changing regulations
• Providing greater transparency when dealing with regulatory compliance throughout the company
• Insight into consolidating, automating and embedding within the platform

World-Leading Provider of Power Systems and Services Achieves Industry Best Processes Through Global SAP

A leader in technological innovation, Rolls-Royce has grown dramatically over the years with each new acquisition bringing its own culture, systems and processes and, as a result, creating a vast, complex business environment. This limited the manufacturer's visibility of inventory and control of operations on a global level. At the same time, the aerospace industry had been experiencing rampant growth, which brought increased competition and the pressure to deliver better service at lower costs. Rolls-Royce decided to take a drastic leap forward to maintain its momentum in the market. Rolls-Royce and HP decided to work from an existing SAP system to both minimize business impact and ensure a speedy implementation.

China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co. Achieves Unified Management of 80 Life and Property Insurance Businesses

China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co. wanted to realize unified financial management of nearly 80 subsidiary companies and more than 400 branch centers and 700 branches and implement a system to help manage budgets and costs and undertake accounting analysis across the group. The challenge was to introduce financial management best practices as a framework for developing its life and property insurance businesses and strengthen internal audit controls to ensure compliance with insurance industry regulations. China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co. achieved real-time financial management of all CPIC subsidiaries by installing an Oracle Financials system and supported multidimensional cost and profit analysis of different insurance products, which gave managers the information they needed to improve group performance management.

Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds

Third-party cloud computing represents the promise of out-sourcing as applied to computation. Services, such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2, allow users to instantiate Virtual Machines (VMs) on demand and thus purchase precisely the capacity they require when they require it. In turn, the use of virtualization allows third-party cloud providers to maximize the utilization of their sunken capital costs by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared physical infrastructure.