Mar
2

Texas hospitals that are IT savvy save more lives, study shows

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Ruben Amarasingham, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, conducted a study that queried 41 Texas hospitals about their use of technology. The study looked at physicians’ interaction with IT systems and followed 167,233 patients with statistics about in-hospital deaths, complications, costs, and length of stay.

According to a report at ModernMedicine.com, the patients whose doctors made use of database records were more likely not to die in the hospital, and less likely to suffer from complications. In addition, the more involved doctors were with information technology overalls, the lower the hospitals’ costs were. Read more at ModernMedicine.com.

Feb
28

Egypt is poised to become the next IT outsourcing Mecca

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Dr. Tarek El-Sadany, Senior Advisor to the Minister of Communications & Information Technology of Egypt for Technology Policies, wants to expand Egypt’s IT industry. He says that Egypt is a great choice for both European countries and the United States: Egypt is GMT +2, so it’s convenient for Europe, and Egypt is closer than India to the United States.  And did you know that Egypt doesn’t observe the traditional “weekend” that Americans do? Instead, Egyptian workers stay home on Thursday and Friday, which means finding people to staff call centers on the weekend is not a problem.

For a long time, Egypt wasn’t even on the radar for IT outsourcing. But recently, it made Gartner’s top 30 list of countries best suited to providing outsourcing services.  Egypt is marketing itself aggressively, and big US companies are starting to sit up and take notice: Intel has announced it will open offices in Egypt.

Feb
28

VMworld keynote sings praises of virtualization

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At this year’s VMworld Europe keynote address, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod says that one day, thousands of virtual machines will be manageable through one management console. Herrod hopes that day won’t be too far off, what with virtual machines these days being tapped with four virtual CPUs, up to 64 GB of RAM, and 9 Gbps of bandwidth.

Harrod says that machines using up to 8 CPUs should be commonplace in the near future. Still, if you’re not convinced yet that virtualization is the norm for coming years, perhaps nothing will move you.

Feb
25

VMware talks about vSphere operating system

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Cloud computing

Cloud computing

VMworld Europe is in full swing, and VMware is taking the opportunity to talk to its captive audience about vSphere, the virtualization operating system that’s making competitors out of companies like Microsoft and Red Hat.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz said “Our customers want the plumbing to disappear – in the datacenter, on the desktop and in the cloud – so they can focus their staff time and IT budget on delivering business value. They want cloud-like services so they can act as hosting providers to their internal customers….. The VMware vSphere generation of products, which are currently in development, will be a new class of software that delivers on this strategy. And, as customers become cloud-enabled, they will have the flexibility to securely and efficiently expand their internal clouds to tap the resources offered by external service providers through our VMware vCloud Initiative.”

If everything goes as it should, vSphere will stop being vaporware by the end of the year.

Feb
23

Satyam fires its auditor, Price-Waterhouse

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In a brow-furrowing turn of events, troubled outsourcer Satyam has asked the government to allow it to dismiss its auditor Price-Waterhouse and the government has given permission.  Price-Waterhouse had been checking on Satyam for over eight years, but stepped aside recently when asked to do so by the new government appointed board of Satyam, which got into trouble for book-cooking and false profit inflation. The problem is that because the fraud went on for so long without detection, PW is now coming under scrutiny on the chance that it had some kind of role in the fraud. In fact, to date, two Price-Waterhouse staffers have been arrested, according to information published in the International Business Times.  Meanwhile, according to the report, life goes on for Satyam. “Satyam’s government-appointed board said it had bagged fresh purchase orders and work extensions to the tune of $250 million since January 7, including a single order of $50 million,” the report states.