An Ignoble Experiment

2. Obamacare spurs hiring of call center staffers

The Google search results say it all:

… Nirvanix is Closing--Call the Pros at Savvis Today

… Nirvanix Out of Business? Try Egnyte Enterprise Cloud Storage

… CloudBerry Explorer Allows Moving Data Off of Nirvanix

… Nirvanix cloud collapse seen as a canary in the coal mine for IaaS

… After Nirvanix: How to assess the right cloud provider for you

Clearly, the smell of blood is in the water. With the sudden word that Nirvanix is closing up shop, a host of other cloud service providers are hoping to cash in and grab Nirvanix's retreating customers.

Last week, San Jose, Calif.-based Nirvanix caught the industry by surprise when it announced it was shutting down its cloud services. It told customers to immediately seek a new cloud service provider to host their data and to put no more data on its servers in the meantime.

Nirvanix has been tight-lipped since, but according to the company website, it was started in 2007 and has received $70 million in investments since then. Hard times have apparently befallen the company for some time, however, as a series of top executive departures have been reported.

"Nirvanix has told customers they must stop replicating data to its cloud service and download any data they wish to save by Oct. 15, although it still hasn't made a public statement or changed any of the marketing or other information on its website," Charles Babcock noted in Information Week.

Babcock quoted TechCrunch's IT Knowledge Exchange (an online forum) as saying all Nirvanix customers received notice last Tuesday that "We are notifying you as soon as possible after making this decision so that you can make alternate plans for storage service. Nirvanix will have resources available to continue to provide service between now and Oct. 15 for you to download your data free of charge."

Reaction to the Nirvanix situation immediately caused a flurry of tech media buzz last week. But as indicated above, it also caused strong movement among market players, who immediately set about changing their marketing messages. From adversity comes opportunity, as the saying goes.

The other result of the Nirvanix demise is a pulling back in the past few days of otherwise rampant enthusiasm for the cloud.

As Beth Pariseau noted on TechTarget's SearchCloudComputing, "This scenario gives IT pros that rely on services within the evolving cloud market reason for concern. In an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market, where Gartner estimates Amazon Web Services (AWS) has more than five times the compute capacity in use than the next 14 providers combined, it's easy to surmise that some of the smaller IaaS players won't make it long term."

Read more:
- check out Information Week's article
- see the SearchCloudComputing article

Read more about: cloud computing
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By David Weldon

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3. Blue Jeans Networks gets $50M funding boost

In one week's time an estimated 27 million Americans will newly qualify to sign up for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.

Oct. 1 is the deadline upon which currently uninsured American workers can designate a health plan under their current employer, or sign up with one of the health insurance exchanges that have been established in each state. The Affordable Care Act will actually go into effect on Jan. 1, 2014, but the uninsured are being given 90 days in which to select the plan that will serve them come that date.

The Oct. 1 deadline is also significant for the number of call center jobs it is estimated will be filled as of that date. While there has been much political debate over how many jobs the Affordable Care Act will ultimately create in healthcare, there is no denying the number of immediate temporary jobs it has produced.

"About 7,000 to 9,000 new customer service agents will be needed to man phones and Web chats for the marketplace, called an exchange, the federal government will run for more than half of the states, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said," Meeri Kim noted in the Washington Post recently. "Additional agents will be needed for exchanges run by the states themselves."

Oftentimes referred to as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act requires that nearly all Americans be insured for healthcare coverage. Employers are required to provide health insurance plans for their workers or help fund the healthcare exchanges that have been created in all 50 states to provide alternative coverage.

Those healthcare exchanges have been created and largely staffed already, and workers have been getting trained in preparation for the Oct. 1 date.

A prime example is the call centers that have been set up in 34 states by Alexandria, Va.-based Vangent Inc., a division of General Dynamics. Vangent was awarded a $530 million one-year contract by the federal government to set up call centers where trained staff could answer consumer questions about the new law.

But some states are running their own healthcare exchanges and call-in centers. A typical example is Illinois. Over 600 workers have been hired already to help explain the new regulations under the Affordable Care Act, Mike Claffey, chief-of-staff to Gov. Pat Quinn, said in a telephone interview. That number is expected to reach 1,200 by the end of next week.

"In President Obama's home state, we are taking full advantage of this historic opportunity to increase access to healthcare and create thousands of good-paying jobs," Gov. Quinn recently announced in a press release. "The ACA will help bring affordable health coverage to hundreds of thousands of people in Illinois. We want to make sure our veterans, students and everyone who is looking for new career opportunities will be able to take advantage of the new healthcare jobs available."

As part of the effort, Gov. Quinn directed the Illinois Department of Public Health to create a Health Care Workforce Workgroup. The group's mission was to access and plan for the jobs needed to achieve the goals of healthcare reform and help best meet the healthcare needs of what is a growing, and increasingly diverse and aging, population in the state.

The federal government and the State of Illinois jointly put up the money to staff the healthcare exchange system needed. In total, the state has received more than $250 million in federal funds to prepare for full implementation of the ACA in 2014.

Much of the funding goes to the hiring of workers to explain the new Affordable Care Act provisions to the public. Claffey said the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is providing the training facilities. Training consists of two days of classroom instruction and one day of online instruction.

Many of the newly-created jobs are for "in-person counselors," which range from $9-an-hour part-time jobs to $45,000 per year project coordinators. But there are other, more skilled jobs as well.

Claffey said the State of Illinois has a website with jobs positions available related to the exchanges and the call centers. Each person hired must complete state and federal training and a fingerprint-based background check in order to become certified by the Illinois Department of Insurance to work in the program. Claffey said the state is being very stringent on the screening and hiring of the in-person counselors, due to privacy concerns with public inquiries.

It's a similar story in California, where the Los Angeles Times recently reported on the thousands of call center jobs being created in that state.

"Before it rolls out its health insurance marketplace, called Covered California, the state is hiring hundreds of people at three call centers to open this fall when enrollment begins Oct. 1," wrote Ricardo Lopez. "The state also needs an additional 20,000 enrollers across the state to inform consumers about their new health insurance options and the new penalties under federal law if they don't get coverage starting in January. Those enrollers, who will earn $58 for each sign-up, will primarily work for nonprofit and community groups assisting the state."

While the exchanges and call centers formally open for business on Oct. 1, many are already fielding consumer questions. The call centers will aid those consumers with information about employer-sponsored healthcare plans, state-provided plans, Medicare, Medicare Advantage and other relevant information. The centers will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Read more:
- read the Washington Post article
- check out the Los Angeles Times article

Read more about healthcare
Obamacare spurs growth in data analytics [FierceBigData]
Cures, treatments for healthcare big data ailments [FierceBigData]

Read more about: Call Centers, Obamacare
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By David Weldon

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4. PayScale report reveals salaries for top IT degrees

Blue Jeans Network, a leading player in the interoperable video collaboration services space, has just received $50 million in new venture capital funding. The funds will be used to help the company expand its cloud-based videoconferencing network both domestically and globally.

The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., is expanding its sales force operations in San Francisco, just launched in Australia and will soon be announcing service in Europe.

The primary funding source is Battery Ventures, with previous investors Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners also participating. The latest round brings the total of venture capital funds that have been put into the firm at nearly $100 million, Blue Jeans revealed.

"The new funding arrives as the company is experiencing record growth across all facets of its business, including customers, users, usage, bookings, and revenues, largely at the expense of industry incumbents like Cisco and Polycom," Blue Jeans noted in its release announcing the funding.

The company also announced that its customer base has now surpassed 2,000 businesses and 3 million participants, all of whom consume more than 100 million minutes of videoconferencing time annually.

Roger Lee, general partner of Battery Ventures and the leading investor in this latest round of funding, spoke last week on why his company was so interested in being a part of this investment round.

"Blue Jeans Network is the new face of business collaboration," Lee was quoted as saying in the Blue Jeans release. "The company's cloud-based, interoperable solution was a shock to the system of the traditional video and web conferencing markets and quickly made Blue Jeans a leader in the space. Along the way, Blue Jeans set a new standard for SaaS business models with exceptional revenue growth and retention rates that rivals companies like Salesforce and Workday at similar stages. Now Blue Jeans is redefining the video conferencing business and collaboration markets, expanding the parameters with an eye toward replacing every phone call with a face-to-face Blue Jeans meeting."

Blue Jeans will use its latest funding round to "set the world on fire," company CEO Krish Ramakrishnan was quoted as saying by VentureBeat last week.

Ramakrishnan noted that Blue Jeans had captured between a third to a half of the videoconferencing market in just two years. "And it comes at the expense of old-school videoconferencing companies who have lost approximately $250 million in business in the past 12 months," VentureBeat reported.

Read more:
- check out the Blue Jeans Network release
- read the VentureBeat article

Read more about: Videoconferencing, Blue Jeans Network
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By David Weldon

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5. Cloud-enabling technologies market will reach $23B by 2016

Despite some well-publicized layoffs in the past two weeks and predictions that hiring for information technology workers is cooling a bit this quarter, the IT field remains a well-paying one, new research reveals.

PayScale, a research firm that studies salary data, recently conducted a study on the top colleges and universities for computer science majors based on entry level and mid-career level salary earnings.

In its study, The PayScale College Salary Report 2013-2014, the firm found that computer-related degrees accounted for eight of the top 30 majors for salary potential. This included computer engineer, which ranked sixth in the study, and computer science, which ranked eighth.

The rankings are based on a survey of 1.4 million workers working full time in the United States and are based on hiring trends for workers with a Bachelor's degree. The firm looked at salaries for workers with at least 10 years of experience in their field.

According to PayScale, the top IT-related degrees by earnings potential are:

6. Computer engineering: starting salary of $65,300; mid-career salary of $106,000.

8. Computer science: starting salary of $59,800; mid-career salary of $102,000.

12. Software engineering: starting salary of $60,500; mid-career salary of $99,300.

18. Management information systems: starting salary of $53,800; mid-career salary of $92,200.

24. Electrical engineering technology: starting salary of $57,900; mid-career salary of $87,600.

25. Computer information systems: starting salary of $50,800; mid-career salary of $87,400.

26. Information systems: starting salary of $51,900; mid-career salary of $87,200.

30. Information technology: starting salary of $49,900; mid-career salary of $84,100.

Meanwhile, the same study also ranked the top colleges and universities in the United States based on the earnings potentials of their graduates, broken down by area of study.

According to the study, California leads the way for IT professionals, with five of the schools in the top 10 ranking. They include the University of California at Berkeley (ranked No. 1); California Polytechnic Institute State University in San Luis Obispo (ranked No. 2); the University of California at Santa Barbara (ranked No. 3); the University of California at Irvine (ranked No. 4); and the University of California at San Diego (ranked No. 9).

Rear more:
- check out the PayScale survey report

Read more about: computer engineering
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By David Weldon

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