The latest large employer looking for mobile developers is SAP, one of the leading providers of business software.  Their model of how they meet market demands involves their Global Business Incubator, which essentially is a venture developer that creates nearly autonomous teams of people to act like a start-up company.  These teams are tasked with fulfilling a specific need in the market.

One such new team is the Consumer Mobile Initiative focused on “leveraging consumer’s adoption of smartphones and SAP technology to redefine consumer shopping experience in and around the store” (per many of the current SAP job postings for developers).  The new team has already developed market pilots with a handful of leading retailers and consumer product concerns in the American and European markets.

Specific areas of growth in SAP will be mobile development, cloud computing and security as they continue to pursue development using their Global Business Incubator model.

Those interested in meeting the need of SAP and other enterprise software providers in these growing areas can make use of IT training courses from GogoTraining, such as:

• Android Development Training Program.
• Cloud Computing training courses.
• Security training courses.
• Oracle training courses.
• Java training courses.

If there was ever a time to do an awareness check on your situation and make sure your career – and employment – is in the “safe and moving forward” zone, it is now. 

“In this economy” has become the preamble to all sorts of reminders of good advice on how to survive and thrive.  Let this be another one!  With that said, here’s four ways to keep your job and maybe even do a little advancing this year:

Dust off your communication skills.  It’s time to start speaking up in those horrifying status meetings.  A sure sign of being overlooked by management is to glaze over like a donut in the back of the room while they drone on about what features are being pushed to phase two.  Ask questions, make suggestions, and bring new ideas.  It matters less what you say and more that you try.  Trying gets noticed, and the noticed get remembered.

Improve your visibility.  Meet and converse regularly with the key decision makers in your department.  Ask your boss how else you can help.  Keep your ears out for opportunities to pitch in on other projects.  Keep the project manager updated on your status.  Be positive in all interactions while you’re at it.

Ask for feedback – and use it.  Ask your project manager and/or boss how you’re doing.  Ask what can be improved or what skill sets your department needs to sharpen or gain.  If you’re not sure how to obtain those skills, ask for training.  Even if you are sure, ask for training.  If you get feedback of a personal nature, do your best to make the changes suggested (or implied).  Overall, it is important to show that you are acting on feedback instead of just soliciting it.

Continually educate yourself.  Start by making sure you are staying current in you field.  It could be as simple as attending the right conference and taking a few online courses each year to stay up on trends and keep sharp on new industry developments.

Next, look to add to your skills.  A great way to add texture to your skill set is by obtaining project management skills.  The new protocol in IT as of 2011 is to diminish costs and increase efficiency, and producers who are trained in project management are sure bets on how to do that.  Why?  Because chances are high that a project could be taken on by as little as one to three people and there aren’t enough project managers to be had for such small teams.  If you’re a hardware or development geek who was just handed a two-week or two-month project to work on you need to be your own project manager – and you better know how to do it well.

GogoTraining can help with a catalog of over 140 outstanding IT training courses and a free library of podcasts regarding IT topics (with over 500 entries).  Some particularly hot areas include:

• Our brand-new Android Development Training Program.
• ITIL training courses.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam prep courses.
• Oracle training courses including Data Guard, Grid Control and Application Express.
• Our list of IT certification paths and included courses.

Sometimes it seems like the IT industry was the inventor of the acronym, with a new one getting created every two minutes.  Enter Cloud Computing and a host of new and fun abbreviations that can get confused or switched around.

Adron Hall offers a simple run-down (and introduction for some) on three important acronyms in Cloud Computing that are used to represent three general areas in the Cloud:

Software as a Service (SaaS): Perhaps the most commonly heard and understood of the three, SaaS is a service that is provided by any sort of entity – from a small group up to a government – that provides software to the client.  That software could be delivered in any way; internally or from a provider/vendor entity to a user/contracting entity.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): Somewhat less heard-of is the concept of delivering a platform wherein clients can develop software and re-deploy it either internally, over the Internet or via other Cloud environments.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This entails an entity providing networking fundamentals such as load balancing, routing, virtualized OS hosting, content delivery networks, computer networking, backup, etc.

Interested in the Cloud?  Check out what GogoTraining offers for training in Cloud Computing, ITIL training, and project management training.

Ok, time for another Geek Trivia.  This time we’ll make it easier on you!

Which enterprise hardware and software company was founded in 1977 under a different name than we know it today?

Know the answer? Post it here as a comment.

The first right answer gets a free T-Shirt of YOUR CHOICE from ThinkGeek.com. We’ll post the answer and winner soon, so subscribe to the blog!

CIOs stated increasing enterprise growth, cost reduction and new customer development as three focal areas for 2011, according to recent research from Gartner.

A priority on improving business intelligence (BI) was expressed in Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda survey.  “Business intelligence is appearing fairly rapidly, and it’s been number one for several years,” said John Roberts, an analyst with Gartner. 

CIOs are turning to BI as one of the critical tools for obtaining goals.  The stakes are higher with companies increasingly tying CIO compensation to things like customer satisfaction and systems reliability.  Business intelligence helps ensure the risks CIOs and businesses will need to take are made in a more informed manner with the right information at the right time.

GogoTraining offers the following Business Intelligence (BI) training courses:

• WebIntelligence™ Basic Reporting
• WebIntelligence™ Intermediate Reporting
• WebIntelligence™ Advanced Reporting
• BusinessObjects® Report Writing
• Mastering Crystal Reports 2008
  

We found this Google Knol about setting up a private cloud computing environment using Eucalyptus and Xen.  Has anyone done anything like this?  What was your experience with it?

Also, check out GogoTraining cloud computing technology training!

The United States Air Force has turned to Northrop Grumman to conduct technological experiments on how various service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations spread across command and control domains might be integrated, according to a Northrop Grumman press release on January 31.

“This research will enable coordination and synchronization of information and application services to meet the demands of warfighting missions,” says Mike Twyman, vice president of integrated command, control, communications, and intelligence systems for Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems sector. “By partnering with Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome Research Site, we will jointly recommend and demonstrate novel strategies to manage and orchestrate data flow and content delivery across the realms of air and space command and control.”

Northrop Grumman will also analyze emerging information technology as applied to air and space warfighting domains. The goal of the engage with the USAF is to explore standardization in order to provide better enterprise-wide accessability.

GogoTraining offers the service-oriented architecture (SOA) courses as part of a suite of Cloud Computing training opportunities:

• Introduction to SOA Using Oracle 10g Service Bus
• Service Oriented Architecture in a Cloud Computing World

In recent years, Java was on the potential down slope as advancement on the language was lacking and developers started investigating languages that would run atop Java environments.  Despite the OpenJDK continuing to be attended to and Java tools continuing to grow, Java seemed to be shuffling about with uncertain direction.  Now, thanks to a new generation of big developments, the venerable language is proving its mettle as a backbone for innovation.

Take cloud computing for instance.  Amazon and others have launched major hiring sprees for 2011 to bring in software engineers in order to support development of their cloud computing services.  In particular, Amazon’s Elastic Complete Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Web Services divisions are looking to swell by at least several hundred software engineers alone.  What skill is in demand? Java.

Next up: operating system development.  What platform has erupted as the next big deal for smartphones? Android, Google’s operating system that took top spot for smartphone market share in the fourth quarter of 2011 (with 32.9% of global market).  Android’s software stack is made up of Java apps running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework.

Being integral to next-generation operating systems easily demonstrates Java’s continued fitness as a powerful and reliable foundation.  On top of it, application development continues to benefit from Java with mobile app development for Android being done primarily in that language.

Devices like Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Ericsson’s line of web-enabled media phones, and the Blu-ray Disc format all benefit from Java.  Software such as Alice, Carnegie Mellon’s free programming environment to Google Maps (who hasn’t used that?) to Nuesoft, the leading web-based medical management software (and one of the pioneers in SaaS) all found their foundations in Java.

If considering a programming language that will sustain years of productivity and innovation and can demonstrate a history of doing the same, programming professionals should look to Java.

GogoTraining provides the following Java training courses taught by industry experts:

Java Programming
Introduction to Groovy
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 1
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 2
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 1
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 2

Java EE Training
Developing Java Server Pages (JSPs) using Eclipse and Tomcat
Developing Servlets Using Eclipse & Tomcat
 
Java Frameworks and Platforms Courses
Introduction to Hibernate
Introduction to Struts
Java Development with JBoss Application Server

The healthcare industry recently started clamoring to meet requirements for data handling to avoid financial penalties.  Those who aren’t EHR/EMR (Electronic Health/Medical Records) compliant by 2015 will still have to do it AND pay fines.

According to Dice.com, the recent expansion of specialized datacenters to facilitate a move away from low-density server and storage to Tier IV is expanding the job market.  IT staff including virtualization engineers, SANS experts and system architects are being sought after to fill out the expanding field.

Join the emerging Healthcare IT field with networking, programming and management training from GogoTraining.  Start today to take advantage of special offers.

Attention fellow star gazers! The Hubble Telescope program is celebrating their 20th anniversary and is putting together an intriguing project.

Share the way that Hubble has touched your life or tell us what the telescope means to you, and we’ll store your message in the Hubble archive alongside the full collection of the telescope’s science data. Generations from now, researchers looking for Hubble’s impact on society may read your message and better understand how one telescope changed the face of astronomy.

Go now to share your message and be included in the Hubble archive.