IBM’s overcrowded job fair
May 2000 saw thousands of hopefuls literally lining up to take jobs with IBM Canada Ltd.’s Global Services division. After some media coverage indicating that Big Blue needed to hire over 500 new employees, more than 5,000 candidates flocked to IBM’s Markham, Ont., offices to vie for salaries starting at $75,000.
The hot skills that IBM was on the hunt for were Java programming, database knowledge and development skills.
The past few years haven’t seen quite as many lineups. In February of this year, 1,000 employees in the Global Services division of IBM worldwide were given pink slips.
IDC predicts PKI explosion
PKI was seen as the answer to security problems in May 2000, with IDC predicting that total PKI revenues would reach $1.3 billion by 2003. “”The grand vision of public key infrastructure is the technology will become a core component of the computing infrastructure underneath all applications, even as the application travels outside the classic network borders,”” said one IDC Internet security analyst. However, IDC said that security risk management would not be the primary factor in PKI’s growth, but the proliferation of strategic e-business adn e-commerce initiatives would.
In mid-May of this year, the Ontario government said that the number of digital certificates within the public sector is likely to boost to 100,000 within the next few years.
Online retailers: where are they now?
It was the beginning of the end of the dot-com era in 2000, or perhaps the end of the end. Online retailers like CDNow were facing dire financial straits, while larger players like Amazon.com were still figuring out how their colossal operations could be turned into money-makers. Three years later, there are still more theories than solutions, but the dust has settled. CDNow, for example, partnered with Amazon in December 2002 and set up a new online store under the auspices of the online giant. Amazon continues to expand. It set up a Canadian site last year, but left the logistics work of packaging and delivery to its partner Canada Post. The brand’s the most important part, argued executives.
Comment: info@itbusiness.ca