Companies From Texas to Missouri Rethink Tactics to Attract Talent as Competition Grows; Employing the Personal Pitch

The pickup in tech hiring is spreading beyond Silicon Valley, forcing companies outside the big tech center to rethink their recruiting tactics.

Companies in second-tier tech locations such as Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, N.C., had an easier time recruiting talented employees during the slump. But now that Silicon Valley firms have started aggressively hirig, and the general economy is improving, competition is stiffe"We've always had a bit of a competition for talent with Silicon Valley," says Julie Huls, president of the Austin Technology Council, a trade group of Austin-area technology executives. "As firms over there start to recover, we have to make sure we stay in the game."

Convio Inc., a 370-employee Austin-based maker of fundraising software, continued adding employees during the recession, hiring about 35 people last year. "We were able to recruit incredible people that we couldn't have gotten before the recession," says Angie McDermott, vice president of human resources.

That has gotten harder this year. Convio is planning to increase hiring and is looking for six engineers now. Employee referrals are a big source of new hires, so earlier this year, the firm started a program where employees can easily send Convio job openings to connections on their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. On Facebook, employees can install an application that lists a company's job openings.

We use easily counterfeited identification, Social Security numbers that are written on the sides of buses and we rely on the anonymity of the phone, fax, internet and snail mail as a means of application. In other countries they solve problems. They have priorities and don’t deal with the rhetoric.  They put security first, convenience second...

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/3935--Why-Americans-Identities-Are-Easily-Stolen.html

The mechanical wonders that once used kerosene and chain drive squeegee rollers to mass produce wet-paper copies are long gone. It’s a digital copier these days that falls into a gray area between Classification of Documents and Enterprise Cyber Security.  As technology in the copy machine industry has evolved many of these systems now contain large hard drives which retain full and complete images of each and every copy made on the system...

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/3927-DATA-LEAKAGE-a-la-Digital-Copy-Machine-.html

Securing an organization's assets requires work, and there are many different ways to classify controls. This white paper examines three common types of controls are administrative, technical, and physical.

Regardless of how these controls are grouped or what list you use to classify, security is all about how you apply these controls. If they are not applied and enforced, effective security cannot be achieved...

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/3925-Three-Steps-To-Securing-Your-Network.html

This weekend, BusinessWeek.com will feature our own Anthony M. Freed, Editor and Business Development Director for the Infosec Island Network.

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/3371-Infosec-Island-Editor-Featured-at-BusinessWeekcom.html
Anthony is being honored for his active participation as a member of BusinessWeek's Business Exchange, with over 3000 contributions.  This is the sixth time Anthony has been selected as a featured user by their editorial staff.

Infosec Island is committed to serving the risk mitigation needs of SMBs and mid-market enterprises across numerous industries, government agencies, legal, financial, healthcare, educational, nonprofit organizations, and the information security community at large.

A few weeks back there was a NY Times article on South Korea's concept of the Ubiquitous City, where an area called New Songdo would arguably become the most networked place in the world.  Following the crash of the Asian markets a few years back, Seoul made a concerted effort to move from an industrial economy to that of one based on IT.  In this vein, they've created the concept for the Ubiquitous City.  For example, recycling bins could use RFID to credit you with recycling a glass bottle, if you need a birth certificate you could get one printed from a city government kiosk on the sidewalk, there's even talk of pressure sensitive floors to detect a fall in an elderly persons home...  Naturally, storing and processing all this data would be ideally suited for the Cloud and it seems that Korean government feels the same.

To develop their Cloud infrastructure, the government just announced that they will be devoting $172 million dollars over the next year to help the private sector promote, develop and deploy Cloud based systems.   While that might not be considered a lot of money in some circles (especially when it comes to government funding) the fact that the Seoul is putting any money towards this nascent industry is a sign of forward thinking and can only bode well for SaaS vendors worldwide.  Kudos to South Korea for putting its money where its mouth is...

 Read more:

A new report from Gartner, “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2008-2013, Update,” estimates that global software-as-a-service revenue will reach $7.5 billion this year, a 17.7 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion.

Gartner predicts the SaaS market will show consistent growth through 2013 when worldwide SaaS revenue will total more than $14 billion for the enterprise application markets.

Gartner is updating it's may report, where it had predicted that the global SaaS market would reach $8 billion in 2009, a 21.9 percent increase from 2008 revenue, which it had then pegged at $6.6 billion.

According to the report, the content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market and the customer relationship management (CRM) market had the largest share of SaaS revenue, with the CCC market generating $2.6 billion in 2009, up from $2.14 billion in 2008, and the CRM segment generating $2.3 billion in 2009, up from $1.9 billion in 2008.

The report revealed that CRM and ERP solutions make up the bulk of SaaS revenues – however, also contributing to the growth in the SaaS market are today’s SaaS-based call center solutions. A recent report from market research firm DMG Consulting arrives at similar findings and predicts that the SaaS-based call center software market will grow 30 percent in 2009, 35 percent in 2010 and 20 percent in 2011.

DMG’s findings reveal that the worldwide economic recession is actually driving many types of organizations in all verticals to consider hosted call center infrastructure solutions over expensive on-premises based systems.

How does the change in economic direction impact your sales force and incentive programs? Finding the balance for your company and sales people is like evaluating the age-old "glass half full/empty" question.

The economy has been like a roller coaster ride for the past year and, as expected, the down slope is truly scary for most organizations. So what does the upswing have in store for us so we can find a balanced incentive program?

For many companies this will include fewer resources, increased work loads, and high expectations due to layoffs that have occurred. On a positive note, sales people, however will have a greater opportunity to perform with increased territories and account prospects. It is imperative that companies align their incentive program properly to capitalize on these changes.

Companies need to position the compensation program to be a win-win for both the organization and the sales associate. From a company perspective, effectively designing and monitoring your program is critical to the success of your sales results. With fewer resources, companies have had the opportunity to keep their top performers and eliminate the bottom feeders. The organization needs to design an appropriate incentive plan that drives the desired behaviors from these top tier sales people and rewards them properly for their performance.

Gartner conducted a study that looked at three European countries, the UK, Germany and France and looked at different applications running SaaS, including CRM and ERP which, appears to have made little headway in the field.

The study found that companies in France and the UK "are significantly ahead of those in Germany in terms of SaaS adoption", Gartner said in a statement. However, Gartner also said that the responses from German organisations suggested "that the difference in adoption levels will shrink if users follow through on their plans for SaaS adoption in 2009".

In terms of the number of companies using SaaS, 71 percent of those surveyed said that their organizations were currently using SaaS applications. The level in the UK was only slight below at 68 percent.
Only 45 percent in Germany said they were using software.

The survey also looked at actual levels of SaaS use compared with the number of employees an organization could have using SaaS. The results showed that higher levels of usage and adoption were in France.

The survey findings on the length of time that SaaS applications have been in use across the three countries showed that France has a slight lead in terms of adoption. Only 4 per cent of French respondents said that they had used SaaS applications for less than a year, compared with 17 per cent in the UK and 21 per cent in Germany.

Gartner said that it has been "a traditional assumption" that the UK is more advanced in the adoption of SaaS than France and Germany and so it was revealing that this metric showed that the opposite was true, said Gartner.

“We believe that North American vendors have enjoyed greater success in the UK because less effort is required to localise products and sales and marketing strategies,” said Chris Pang, research analyst at Gartner.

The companies that have been most successful in driving through adoption of SaaS are Salesforce.com and RightNow Technology, Pang said. "They typify the reason why companies are able to success in SaaS," said Pang. "The most successful applications are easy to deploy and to deploy many times with more or less the same software."

For the same reason, ERP vendors have struggled to be successful in SaaS, said Pang. "They run very complex applications with lots of different parts of the software that need a lot of changes and adapting before you will get the software to run in quantity," Pang told ZDNet UK.

 Story covered by: Colin Barker