News Roundup: IT Hiring, Virtualization Services, and Intel

Does this sound a little weird to anyone else?

“Chief Information Officers expect to hire more IT staff in the third quarter with optimism at the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2001.” (Between the Lines)

Q401? You mean, the months immediately following the largest terror attack in American history, when the airline industry got a $15 billion bailout and venture capital investing was headed into an extended multi-year period of decline? That’s our benchmark for optimism about IT hiring? Yoiks.

###

Virtual desktop services? According to Byte and Switch, we aren’t there yet. Virtual server services (say it five times fast)? You bet, says Dan Farber:

“With VMware Infrastructure, multiple virtual machines are hosted and managed on the same server, but each VM is isolated so that a software failure doesn’t take down the entire server. Hosting providers get the benefit of higher server utilization rates and more scalable infrastructure, and presumably can pass cost savings on to customers.”

###

And last, some good news for our partner Intel: the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency has given the nod to Intel’s claim that their Core 2 Duo processors are, in fact, the world’s best. Tony Smith reports in The Register that

“The chip giant also said the ads would be viewed by consumers who would assess the claim in terms of products relevant to them, and not servers, super computers or other more advanced systems. On the basis of which, the ASA decided not to uphold the complaints, ruling that ‘the claim “Intel Core 2 Duo, the world’s best processors” had been substantiated and was unlikely to mislead’.”