Monday, March 21, 2011

JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD FOR IT PROFESSIONALS

THE REALITY OF THE CLOUD
Technology is constantly on the move. IT professionals have always done well, being proactive about keeping their skills sets current and staying ahead of the game. Today, the biggest technology transformation is Cloud Computing which is delivering new capabilities to the IT industry. The time is NOW for the IT pros and upskill themselves to stay current in the cloud environment.

Many research findings indicate that Cloud Computing awareness has increased dramatically among organizations in India over the last 12 months.  Also, a majority of organizations across India consider Cloud Computing relevant to their IT environment. Therefore, even though India currently has the lowest user base of Cloud offerings across APEJ, this is expected to change over the next 12 to 18 months.

GROWTH OFFERINGS FROM CLOUD COMPUTING
Microsoft believes that India has the potential to emerge as the global competency centre for cloud services. Here are some statistics

·         The global cloud computing market is estimated to cross $ 70 million by 2015

·         India , with its powerful ecosystems of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISV’s) , 1.4 million developers and more than 11,000 system integrators ( SI’s and Custom software development organization ), is ideally poised to address this growing opportunity

·         As a result, an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5 years.

As a thought leader in the Cloud Services space, Microsoft , is very close to the needs of its IT professionals , developers and consumers and has not only begun thinking holistically of the new tomorrow , but also started delivering against the vision today.

The future is upon and that future is the cloud. Let’s be proactive in shaping our future and sharpening our skills sets to move to cloud.

Monday, February 28, 2011

What if an asteroid crashes near you?

What if a giant asteroid crashed into the area near your home? Scientists have come up with an 'impact effects calculator' that lets you work out what would happen if an asteroid hits our planet.

Users can type in the size of their hypothetical asteroid, its speed, what it will hit, its angle of entry and even how far they are from the blast, the Daily Mail reported.
For those who cannot visualise how big their asteroid could be, there is even a helpful drop-down menu of pre-set sizes which include 'school bus', 'humpback whale', 'Empire State Building', all the way up to the ominous-sounding 'small planet'.

The website's algorithms then calculate what the effects of the asteroid's impact would be on the earth's axis, whether there would be a fireball - and what chance of surviving any bystanders would have. It even tells you how far you should be from the impact to avoid being buried in the material thrown up from any crater that is left behind.

The website, called Impact Earth!, is the brainchild of scientists from Purdue University in the US and Imperial College London.It is an update of a calculator which was originally devised in 2004 and based on scientifically-sound calculations.

The new version includes extra elements such as the height of resulting tsunami waves and it comes with an entertaining animation that shows the asteroid hurtling from space towards the earth.The asteroid is identical to the Hartley 2 comet that NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft flew by last week.

Imperial College's Gareth Collins told the BBC: 'One of the major new additions is the estimates for tsunami wave height at a given distance away from an ocean impact.'
On average, an object about the size of a car will enter the earth's atmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky.

An asteroid collision with the earth is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs