IBM said on Sunday it will offer an open desktop software system for businesses that puts the cost of managing Apple or Linux computers on a more equal footing with Microsoft's Windows software, improving the economics of Windows alternatives.

The product -- which the company calls its "Open Client Offering" -- pulls together software IBM has developed in-house and with partners Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc. to answer questions over the cost-effectiveness of managing Linux or Apple desktop PCs alongside Windows PCs.

International Business Machines Corp. said the new software makes it feasible for big businesses to offer their employees a choice of running Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code. This cuts the costs of managing Linux or Apple relative to Windows.

IBM's Open Client software chips away at long-time rival Microsoft's Windows franchise by making it unnecessary for companies to pay Microsoft for licenses for operations that no longer rely on Windows-based software. The move comes as corporate decision-makers have begun to mull when it makes sense to upgrade to Microsoft's Windows Vista.

"We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source.

As an alternative to Microsoft, IBM will offer its own Open Document Format (ODF) software for tasks like word processing, spreadsheets or presentations, along with Lotus collaboration, instant messaging and blog tools, and the Firefox Web browser, which is the biggest rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

IBM believes that using its software can cut the cost of managing applications, maintenance and customer support costs on company networks that need to run not just Windows but other software, Handy said. Technology market researchers Gartner and IDC estimate that it costs $4,000 to $6,000 to manage the average desktop PC of any office worker, he noted.

"In big organizations, a large, double-digit percentage of users don't require Windows Office suite licenses, meaning they can save a lot of money," Handy said, pointing to roles like customer call center operators or Web software programmers.

IBM plans to use its "Open Client" software initially to run some 5 percent of desktop computers across its own organization, which employs around 320,000 staff worldwide.

Customer call centres and software development groups in Brazil, India, Europe and other IBM offices will take part. Pockets of Apple Inc. computer users within IBM also will be supported for the first time by Open Client.

"Now it is a level playing-field where Linux is a very viable option and can get the same kind of maintenance and support as Windows," Handy said.

Europe's second-largest automaker, PSA Peugeot Citroen, last month said it had agreed to a multiyear deal with Linux software provider Novell to run Linux on 20,000 desktop PCs plus 2,500 server computers. Underpinning this deal is IBM's Open Client Offering software, Handy said.

A piece of IBM software called Expeditor enables an organization to manage different systems as if they were on a unified underlying system, IBM said. Apple software support will be ready later this year.

One Linux analyst said that the use of Linux to run desktop computers as an alternative to Microsoft Windows has occurred at a "glacial pace," in spite of frequent predictions by pundits in recent years such a transition is inevitable.

"There is a growing appetite not so much to displace Windows wholesale as to offer alternatives," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with research firm RedMonk. "No one is going to dramatically unseat Microsoft's desktop dominance."

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

Amidst the outcry in the US over outsourcing, a new report released on Monday said service offshoring would have a modest impact on its job market, although Silicon Valley, the country's technology hub, will be among the hardest hit.

Researchers expect employers to ship out about 3.4 million US service jobs to lower wage countries between 2000 and 2015, out of a civilian labour force of 153 million in January 2007, said the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group.

Metropolitan areas with large concentrations of information technology service jobs or backoffice jobs are generally more vulnerable to service offshoring than other metropolitan areas.

Of the 246 US metropolitan areas, 28 areas, with 13.5 per cent of the nation's population, are likely to lose between 2.6 and 4.3 per cent of their jobs to service offshoring between 2004 and 2015, which is higher than the average loss of no more than 2 per cent among the metropolitan areas studied.

According to the report, service offshoring is likely to cause the loss of 2.6 per cent of jobs in metropolitan areas that specialize in information technology services and 2.4 per cent of jobs in metropolitan areas that specialize in back-office services but only 1.9 per cent of jobs in other metropolitan areas.

San Jose and San Francisco (California); Boulder (Colorado); Lowell (Massachusetts) and Stamford (Connecticut) stand to lose the most, with 3.1 to 4.3 per cent of their jobs expected to move offshore between 2004-2015, the report said.

At least 17 per cent of computer programming, software engineering, and data entry jobs are likely to be offshored in particular metropolitan areas.

Employment of computer programmers, data entry keyers, and software engineers (applications) is projected to fall by at least 17 per cent between 2004 and 2015 San Jose, San Francisco and the Orange County in California.

Among other cities experiencing similar decline are Bergen-Passaic and Newark (New Jersey); Boston, (Massachusetts); Boulder and Denver (Colarado); and Danbury and Harford (Connecticut).

In Bergen-Passaic, 14 to 17 per cent of customer service representatives' and insurance underwriters' jobs are projected to move abroad.

Job losses from service offshoring between 2004 and 2015 are projected at 2.4 per cent for metropolitan areas with populations of one million or more but only 1.7 per cent for metropolitan areas with populations below 250,000.

About 2.3 per cent of jobs in Northeastern and Western metropolitan areas are likely to be offshored, compared to 2.2 per cent in Midwestern metropolitan areas and 2.1 per cent in Southern ones, the report added.

There has been growing protest against outsourcing of jobs, most of which have moved to India and China, especially from labour unions in the US.

The report recommends that to reduce vulnerability to service offshoring, federal, state, and local leaders should work in concert to pursue policies that boost productivity and innovation, assist workers who are harmed by offshoring, and modernize approaches to economic and workforce development.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

The World Bank on Monday said its lending in India is estimated to increase from its current annual average of 2.5 billion dollars to an average of 4 billion dollars over the next two-three years, with special focus on strengthening infrastructure, supporting lagging states and scaling up service delivery.

Announcing the appointment of Isabel Guerrero as the World Bank's new country director of India, its regional vice president for South Asia, Praful C Patel said: "an expanded portfolio will also mean wider challenges in improving implementation performance, quality of expenditure and monitoring and evaluation among others."

World Banks' lending stood at 2.9 billion dollars during 2004-05, 1.4 billion dollars next year, and is estimated to touch 3 billion dollars this fiscal, he said.

World Bank is currently engaged in 63 projects worth about 12.7 billion dollars in India.

India is the largest beneficiary of World Bank's cross lending arm IBA and the fourth-largest borrower of IBRD.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com