Recently, the city of San Jose used a serious game, Buy A Feature, to address some tough budgetary challenges. Since serious games have relevance across a wide range of contexts, including application development and delivery, it's worth relating one anecdote from San Jose's exercise that demonstrates the importance of having a shared vision.

I was a "facilitator" for this exercise, which involved more than 100 members of the community, plus a couple dozen city officials, including Mayor Chuck Reed. According to the ground rules of this exercise, organized by Innovation Games, each group of several community members had to decide which municipal projects (libraries, parks, school programs, fire, police, etc.) to fund and which not to. These "wish list" items formed List A. A complementary List B included other projects that the participants could decide to cut and then shift the money into projects from List A.

Every participant had a small amount of money, but not enough to buy anything from List A outright. Funding anyone's favored project, therefore, required investment from more than one person. Money from any List B project was available only if everyone at the table agreed to cut it.

Quest is making aggressive moves to extend into the heterogeneous, non-Microsoft-centric land of identity and access management. After acquiring Voelcker Informatik for provisioning, Quest just announced the acquisition of e-DMZ, an enterprise-class, high-performance PIM appliance vendor. Novell (now Attachmate) acquired host access control specialist Fortefi, Oracle bought Passlogix (vGO-SAM), CA extended Access Control, and IBM integrated Encentuate's eSSO solution with ITIM as a service offering to manage privileged access. The remaining major PIM players like Cyber-Ark, Lieberman, and BeyondTrust will now face added client RFP scrutiny and price pressures from the competition. Forrester expects that new IAM entrants like Symantec/VeriSign,  NetIQ (to compete with arch-rival Quest), or MSSPs will look at acquiring the remaining above vendors.

Since its introduction of its Core 2 architecture, Intel reversed much of the damage done to it by AMD in the server space, with attendant publicity. AMD, however, has been quietly reclaiming some ground with its 12-core 6100 series CPUs, showing strength in  benchmarks that emphasize high throughput in process-rich environments as opposed to maximum performance per core. Several AMD-based system products have also been cited by their manufacturers to us as enjoying very strong customer acceptance due to the throughput of the 12-core CPUs combined with their attractive pricing. As a fillip to this success, AMD this past week announced speed bumps for the 6100-series products to give a slight performance boost as they continue to compete with Intel’s Xeon 5600 and 7500 products (Intel’s Sandy Bridge server products have not yet been announced).

But the real news last week was the quiet subtext that the anticipated 16-core Interlagos products based on the new Bulldozer core appear to be on schedule for Q2 ’11 shipments system partners, who should probably be able to ship systems during Q3, and that AMD is still certifying them as compatible with the current sockets used for the 12-core 6000 CPUs. This implies that system partners will be able to quickly deliver products based on the new parts very rapidly.

Actual performance of these systems will obviously be dependent on the workloads being run, but our gut feeling is that while they will not rival the per-core performance of the Intel Xeon 7500 CPUs, for large throughput-oriented environments with high numbers of processes, a description that fits a large number of web and middleware environments, these CPUs, each with up to a 50% performance advantage per core over the current AMD CPUs, may deliver some impressive benchmarks and keep the competition in the server  space at a boil, which in the end is always helpful to customers.

A couple of weeks ago, I read that one of the largest US car makers was trying to buy out several thousand machinists and welders. While we have grown accustomed to bad news in this economy, what I found significant was that these were skilled workers. Personally, I find it a lot easier to write code than to weld two pieces of steel together, and I have tried both.

For the past 20 years, the job market in industrialized countries has shown a demand increase at the high and low ends of the wage and skill scale, to the detriment of the middle. Although it’s something that we may have intuitively perceived in our day-to-day lives, a 2010 paper by David Autor of MIT confirms the trend:

“. . . the structure of job opportunities in the United States has sharply polarized over the past two decades, with expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low-wage occupations, coupled with contracting opportunities in middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs.”

One of the reasons for this bipolarization of the job market is that most of the tasks in the middle market are based on well-known and well-documented procedures that can be easily automated by software (or simply offshored). This leaves, at the high end, jobs that require analytical and decision-making skills usually based on a solid education, and at the low end, “situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interactions. . . . and little in the way of formal education.”

Can this happen to IT? As we are fast-forwarding to an industrial IT, we tend to replicate what other industries did before us, that is remove the person in the middle through automation and thus polarize the skill and wage opportunities at both ends of the scale.