According to ISG’s inaugural Automation Index, the first data-driven research to quantify the impact of automation on IT outsourcing (ITO) and business processing outsourcing (BPO), automation may cause future-mode costs to decrease as much as 66 percent and cause productivity to increase 30 percent, depending on the IT tower in scope.

If that is the case, why are incumbent ITO and BPO providers showing resistance to these new technologies?

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With the general election creeping ever closer here in the United States, now seemed like a good time to get an official stance from the four presidential candidates who will be on the ballot about critical issues around technology and privacy.

I narrowed my list of questions for them down to just four (my original list was around 12) in order to make this easy for each campaign to answer. And each campaign was asked the exact same questions—with no variation whatsoever.

Even so, the only campaign to respond to me in any real way was Jill Stein’s. The Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson and Donald Trump campaigns declined to provide concrete stances or clarifications—though I did get some helpful links from a Johnson surrogate.

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Microsoft has secured some big allies in a fight against the federal government, including three of its chief rivals, plus a hometown airline. 

Microsoft is fighting the government over its right to tell customers when federal agents request their data and emails. The company filed a lawsuit in April against the federal government, charging such gag orders violate the Constitution and threaten the future of cloud computing. 

+ Also on Network World: Microsoft says tech companies ‘whipsawed’ by conflicting laws on global data transfer +

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A small open source firm behind the erasure of Hillary Clinton's personal email server is enjoying a lot of free publicity thanks to the investigation into the server's contents. BleachBit, an open source system erasure tool, has been around for a few years and won some accolades, and now it's the center of attention on the Clinton email scandal.

It started with Trey Gowdy, the Republican congressman from South Carolina leading the investigation into the private email server. He mentioned BleachBit in an interview, saying Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails have been "deleted where even God can't read them."

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There is a bit of a standing joke in the technology industry that revolves around enterprise software, the software that the largest organizations in the world use to run their core processes. While these solutions are robust and secure, the joke tends to be it's at the expense of the users, who often complain about poor user experience, inflexibility and essentially having to change the way they work within the business to suit the software. While user-centric design might be a huge buzzword in management circles, for those poor users of enterprise software, it seems to be a foreign concept.

+ Also on Network World: Where do mobile apps fit in the world of enterprise software? +

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In the dog days of summer, tech news seems to slow down, as many companies hold off on big announcements until the world returns from their vacations. That means mid-August is the perfect time for Sunil Rajaraman’s brilliant, scathing and terrifyingly familiar satire of life in the trenches of Silicon Valley.

By turns hilarious and discomfiting, This is Your Life in Silicon Valley is the tale of one man’s stupifyingly superficial day in the Valley. It will ring true for anyone who toils in the middle levels of the tech industry here in the Bay Area—and beyond.

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The outsourcing of business processes—save call centers and payroll processing—began in earnest in the mid-1990s. Business process outsourcing (BPO) walked pretty nicely in the footsteps of the IT services industry, garnering attention as a potential growth engine for both pure-play BPO providers and IT providers offering BPO services.

But despite early predictions, this service segment did not grow as fast as expected and in recent years has slowed. What happened to this shiny new toy?

+ Also on Network World: Top 5 factors driving domestic IT outsourcing growth +

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Large parts of the internet may need to quickly adopt alternative revenue methods to thwart a massive surge in ad blocking.

Ad blocking is not going away, says eMarketer, a research firm that has just published startling projections. In fact, the digital marketing expert says more than a quarter of U.S. internet users will use ad blockers to perform ad-free web browsing in 2016. 

A double digit (34 percent) increase will lead to 69 million ad blocker users this year, eMarketer predicts.

And it’s going to get worse. The researcher says that number will be closer to 86 million ad blocking internet users in 2017. That’s growth of another 24 percent and will mean that almost a third (32 percent) of all internet users will use the barriers next year.

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Over the past year, questions about how emerging technologies will impact employment have taken on a new tenor. Will robots take over our jobs? One thing is indisputable: automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will displace workers in the IT and business process outsourcing services industry.

But this is not a new trend.

+ Also on Network World: The 6 hottest new jobs in IT +

Such tectonic shifts have occurred every few decades over the last two centuries. With each wave of new technology and each accompanying paradigm shift, jobs have disappeared. During the Industrial Revolution, people feared the loss of farm jobs. When industrial jobs went away, people flocked to the service sector. Then computers, telecom networks, ATMs and the internet made their way into the world, and people feared massive job loss in this sector. Manufacturing work moved to low-cost countries, such as China and Taiwan, and service-sector jobs soon moved to India and the Philippines.

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Over the past two decades, the personal communications habits of Americans have profoundly changed. CTIA – The Wireless Association reported that the penetration of cellular devices surpassed 100 percent in 2012, and as of the latest 2014 report, penetration is now at 110 percent.

With so many mobile devices deployed, it isn't surprising that the majority of calls to our nation’s 911 emergency public safety answering points (PSAP) originate from those devices. In fact, most U.S. dispatch agencies will tell you that wireless callers are responsible for at least 80 percent of their emergency call volume. Likewise, in the European Union, that number is well into the 90 percent range in many locations. 

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Poor neighborhoods in the U.S. get 15 percent less cell phone coverage than their richer counterparts, a new study has found.

This confirms the “existence of a mobile-divide in the U.S.,” say the researchers from Imperial College Business School in an abstract of their paper published in Telecommunications Policy via ScienceDirect.

“Operators install two fewer mobile antennas per tract in lower income areas for equal distributions of subscribers,” the London business school says. That’s across the board, and it includes both urban and rural areas. So, it isn’t just a rural-divide issue, the researchers say.

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Nearly 200 countries signed the fossil fuel ramp-down agreement in Paris at the end of last year. New goals are now in place to end the use of fossil fuels worldwide. No more global warming could be in the cards.

Sounds good, right? Well it probably is, but there’s a slight problem: Just how are we going to power our smartphones, homes, factories, and Internets without coal and gas? That’s a lot of solar panels and windfarms needed—and needed quickly.

One high school kid reckons he’s got the answer, reported Popular Science magazine a few weeks ago: Just stick a bunch of solar panels on the moon and beam the power back down to Earth by microwave.

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As a mainframer, I belong to a number of organizations and groups that focus on this technology. And when I read message boards, Web sites, magazines, and blogs about big iron one theme always comes through loud and clear: my peers are overwhelmingly negative about their jobs.

In fact, some recent polls highlighting employee job dissatisfaction paint a fairly grim picture. A recent Gallup Poll is here. The Washington Post poll is here. And a Forbes poll is here.

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I’ve always found the tendency of  Facebook users to over-share a little strange. You see people exposing their lives in ways that are occasionally charming, often inexplicable, and frequently downright ridiculous or ill-advised (or often both of the latter at the same time).

Gregg O'Connell / Flickr

In the latter category are the posts of people who are obviously in advanced states of inebriation doing things that don’t require a caption to reveal that they are being idiots. These kind of posts are the sort of thing that, once sober, will be regretted and will never, ever disappear becoming fodder for the poster’s mother’s disapproval and unwanted attention from employers both current and future. 

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My good friend Chuck Papageorgiou recently wrote a post on his blog he titled Net Neutrality – Policies or Politics in which he argued:

… as a capitalist and free-marketer, I have a hard time reconciling the notion that the Government should just take over privately deployed and owned assets without fairly compensating the TelCo’s and their shareholders for the investment they have made, and continue to make, in internet infrastructure.

Despite the fact that yesterday was Chuck’s birthday I’m going to disagree strongly with my friend.

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Experts are in agreement that Software Defined Networking/Network Virtualization will make the network world more efficient and more agile, but opinions vary on the best path forward. We reached out to two of the most prominent players to ask them to spell out why they think their approach is best.

The Experts

Chris King

vice president of product marketing in VMware’s Networking & Security Business Unit, argues that network virtualization – embodied in the company’s NSX product -- is the way to go because it abstracts network control from network hardware while replicating everything the application expects to see, vastly simplifying the task of building and managing complex network environments. View debate

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One of the critical decisions facing companies embarking on big data projects is which database to use, and often that decision swings between SQL and NoSQL. SQL has the impressive track record, the large installed base, but NoSQL is making impressive gains and has many proponents.  We put the question to experts in both camps.

The Experts

Ryan Betts

CTO, of VoltDB says SQL has already earned its stripes in large organizations and big data is just one more job that this stalwart can shoulder. View debate

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