The hiring climate in IT is gaining momentum, tech staffing agencies report, but its recovery pace is akin to that of a snail going about its business after recovering from a coma.

“It is gaining momentum at a very deliberate pace,” said John Reed, District President of Robert Half Technology in the Central United States. “I would say it’s continuing to improve every month, every quarter.” READ MORE

Vendors are being asked to produce features for civic responsibility like never before, and companies—especially large ones—are willing to collaborate to get them.

If it is not the first question that’s asked of e-procurement vendors after cloud deployment and features, it’s certainly the next one. How green are you going to help us become? READ MORE

Test end-to-end service assurance from your transport network to your applications.

For IT decision-makers supporting their mobile workforce, understanding the benefits and complexities of the technologies used by their chosen service providers or mobile carriers can make all the difference in delivering a robust mobile implementation at reasonable cost to the enterprise. READ MORE

It’s relatively easy to keep track of physical things. When you buy a computer, monitor, or printer, you have an object that can be labeled and counted.

Software, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. It’s just bits on a hard drive, and without strict controls, it can be hard to keep count of how many copies of a given program are actually installed, and which versions are in use. Especially when, as often happens in an enterprise, the installation media has been copied to a network share for easy deployment.

That can lead to under-licensing, and under-licensing can be a very expensive proposition indeed. READ MORE

Gartner predicts data center power, cooling and space problem are worsening. Cloud computing exec Mark Thiele weighed in on the problem—and the solutions.

According to a recent report from Gartner Research, 2009 saw the most significant drop in server deployments ever. Now this trend is in reversal: In the next few years, server deployments will increase, and the results won’t be pretty. Those data center power, cooling, and space problems you’ve been having? Take a deep breath and start strategizing — because they’re about to get worse.

To help you with that task, IT Expert Voice checked in with Mark Thiele, vice president of Data Center Strategy at cloud computing vendor ServiceMesh, president of the nonprofit organization Data Center Pulse, a member of Green Industry Advisory Board at CSU Fullerton, and strategic advisor at sustainability management software vendor at CSRware. We got his thoughts on the Gartner report and its recommendations, and discussed how companies can cut their data center costs. READ MORE

Microsoft has essentially extended Windows XP’s sales life, and many observers expect that Windows XP’s support life will also last longer than expected. So should your enterprise stick with Windows XP or continue on to Windows 7?

It seemed so clear. Like it or lump it, the top brass realized, your company would move its enterprise desktops to Windows 7 as Windows XP came to the end of its sales and service life. Then, Microsoft changed the rules. At the same time that Microsoft announced the beta program for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 SP1s, the company “decided to extend downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional beyond the previously planned end date at Windows 7 SP1.” This means you’ll still be able to “downgrade” PCs from Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows XP Pro until early 2015. READ MORE

One wireless broadband provider is raising the bar for remote telecommuters.

Not all business is conducted within range of major mobile networks. What happens when your mobile workforce does business quite literally in the field, or telecommutes from a town that’s off the beaten path? One wireless broadband start up is building out wireless networks to support the rural American mobile workforce, one small town at a time. READ MORE

HTML5 is transforming enterprise development by bringing together mobile and desktop development, and re-unifying native and Web apps.

HTML5′s greatest contribution in the enterprise will be the way it re-unifies development, bringing together efforts for desktop and mobile applications, as well as “native” and Web apps. That’s one promise, at least, of this already-misunderstood standard. READ MORE

Nearly all companies feel tossed on the waves of change in recent years. NASA is no exception, although the change is exacerbated by powerful political winds. From President Obama’s call for new initiatives to Congress’ steady stream of conflicting bills, it’s difficult for NASA to chart a final course.

Through it all, NASA CIO Linda Cureton must transform IT capabilities to enable NASA’s mission, no matter what that turns out to be. It’s a situation far too many CIOs can identify with. Here is her take on how to manage change when change is clearly managing you. READ MORE

If you can imagine a Linux-based appliance, you can create it with rPath’s rBuilder online tool. But you’ll need to know the exact blueprint for the machine before you build it.

As more and more application workloads are transferred to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly cost-effective to build appliances, both physical and virtual, to serve as platforms for these cloud-bound apps. READ MORE