User-Generated Content (UGC), such as that found on YouTube and MySpace, will continue to grow significantly in popularity and generate increasing revenue over the next several years, a market research report says. By 2010, the volume of downloads/views on these sites will surpass 65 billion, and revenues tied to UGC video are expected to exceed $850 million by 2010, according to the report by In-Stat.

"Democratisation of media affords users the opportunity to express their opinions, rate content, and vote for their favorite videos," In-Stat says. "In addition, what may currently seem like ‘the Wild West’ is actually an industry that has started to see idiosyncratic ‘judiciary bodies’ and ‘rules of law’ imposed by each player within this market."

The new research found that the size of downloads/views are estimated to eclipse 1.1 exabytes of data by 2010, with uploads growing to more than 9.1 petabytes. It says that 23 per cent of the dozens of UCG sites studied currently support mobile access, with others making announcements for this support in the near future.

Network security

Meanwhile, on a different plane, the Asia-Pacific network security market registered a decline in revenues of 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2006 compared to the final quarter of 2005. Spending decreased across all security technologies, except for SSL VPN (secure sockets layer virtual private network), says new analysis from Frost & Sullivan, a consulting firm. F&S says that the market — covering 14 major Asia-Pac economies, including India — earned revenues of $290.8 million in Q1 2006. "Despite the lacklustre performance, the market expanded by 13.7 per cent compared to the same quarter last year," the firm says.

Most enterprises and governments were involved with budget evaluation and planning at the beginning of the fiscal year. Therefore, spending on network security is typically slower than other quarters. "Enterprises in mature markets such as South Korea and Taiwan are also slowing down spending on intrusion detection or prevention solutions," it says. This can be attributed to the perceived low returns on heavy investments in intrusio detection and prevention (IDP) solutions in the last two years. "Nevertheless, healthy growth in expenditure can be expected in the subsequent quarters," forecasts Tan. "Deployments of integrated security appliances are already giving impetus to the network security market." Competition is further intensifying in the Asia-Pacific region. Major vendors are placing increasing emphasis on marketing and lead generation.

Offshoring of BPO services isn’t happening from the United States alone, but I guess you knew that already. The European Union, too, offshores a substantial portion of its work, to India and other countries, and this only set to grow in the next five years, according to a new "Trends" report by Forrester Research, Inc. Who would have thought this possible in "old" Europe?

The report by Somoko Takahashi says Forrester expects a CAGR of 11.5 per cent in BPO offshoring from the 25-member EU, plus Norway and Switzerland in the next five years. The forecast by Forrester Research, an independent market and technology research firm, tracks six service categories: human resources BPO, financial services back-offices BPO, procurement BPO, finance and accounting BPO, customer care BPO, and "other" BPO.

"Total spending will rise from euro 11 billion in 2006 to euro 18.9 billion in 2011. Relative to their size, firms in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands will spend the most," Ms. Takahashi says.

A third of the total European BPO spending in 2006 will go to BPO. "This service type has the biggest spending share both now and up to 2011. U.K. firms lead, spending euro 1.4 billion in 2006, followed by

German and French firms at euro 587 million, respectively. Demand for HR BPO has a visible impact on service providers. Arinso, for example, reported seeing a doubling of the number of client employees that it serves in one year—much earlier than expected," she says.

The Forrester report says spending on finance and accounting BPO has the highest CAGR of all BPO services, at 16.4 per cent.

"From 2006 to 2007, nearly all countries will raise their expenditures on F&A BPO—with growth rates ranging from eight per cent to 10 per cent. In the most outsourcing-experienced countries like The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, F&A BPO spending will seize about 13 per cent of the

total BPO spending in 2011. But other European countries will not match this growth in share of spending," the report says.

Similarly, spending on financial services back-office BPO will increase at a CAGR of 10.4 per cent from 2006-2011.

"Ongoing automation and standardisation within the financial services industry means firms here are likely to outsource the processing and administration that underpins financial services and insurance products.

Although use of external services is quite common across Europe, uptake is biased towards Western Europe - with the most IT-advanced countries like The Netherlands, the Nordics, and the U.K. all expected to have a steeper increase in spending than the others," Ms Takahashi says.

When Microsoft gets into a new area of technology, you can be sure that the entire world will be told by the company that the software giant is ready to do battle, and that competitors had better watch their backs. One such area which Microsoft has now turned its focus on is high-performance computing, long the preserve of the open-source bolshies.

What is HPC? While there is no clear definition of HPC, experts say it is a branch of computer science that concentrates on developing supercomputers and software to run on supercomputers. A main area of this discipline is developing parallel processing algorithms and software: programs that can be divided into little pieces so that each piece can be executed simultaneously by separate processors, according to Webopidia.

To find out what Microsoft was doing in the HPC space, I recently spoke to Vaibhav Phadnis, director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India. I started by asking him why Microsoft was entering the HPC segment now, given that Linux and Unix appear to have a lock on it. Mr Phadnis said that Microsoft, with its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, expects to make HPC more "mainstream".

Mr Phadnis says that with Microsoft Windows platform, developers and users would have cost advantages, ease-of-use and partner ecosystem of the Windows Server platform to departments and divisions in commercial industry and the public sector.

High-performance computing technology holds potential for expanding R&D within engineering, medical research, exploration and other sectors, he says.

"The introduction of 64-bit symmetric multiprocessing has given us a lot of room in evolving HPC capabilities," he says. The 64-bit is the processing of programmes by multiple processors that share a common operating system and memory. In symmetric (or

"tightly coupled" multiprocessing, the processors share memory and the I/O bus or data path. A single copy of the operating system is in charge of all the processors.

The global high performance computing segment is growing faster than the x86 market, according to a recent report by IDC, which says that while HPC is demonstrating a 15-20 per cent growth rate, the x86 market has been averaging a growth of 11.4 per cent, IDC reported that worldwide x86 HPC cluster revenue grew 70 per cent year-over year (2004 to 2005).

Mr Phadnis said that the Windows Computer Cluster 2003 Serve helps in using Web services integration to accept input from and deliver finance results to business processes.