A new piece in GlobalSpec’s Quality Control newsletter asks the unthinkable: “Is Outsourcing on the Way Out?”
The report cites a couple of trends — one, major outsourcing service centers such as India are running out of qualified people to handle outsourced engineering demands (see referenced article here). The other impact is coming from higher energy [...]

James McGovern, a renowned and highly outspoken enterprise architect, says it all in a recent blog post headline: “The Mainframe is Not Evil, But COBOL Is.”
So what’s the beef against COBOL? Any language that’s been around for more than four decades has to have some redeeming qualities, right? Esperanto’s been around for just a bit [...]

The technorati has been abuzz lately about the promises of “cloud computing,” in which any and all functions within the stack — from storage to processing to messaging — are handled by third-party services on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The impact on large systems and mainframe shops has been unclear, though it’s a sure bet the cloud [...]