Romanian freelancers are fast consolidating their position as the leading force in the global online marketplace for IT projects, beating their better known co-workers from India and the United States into second and third places in this highly competitive market.

Research by PhD student Ulan Radkevitch, published in the Outsourcing Journal, shows Romanian bidders to have won an impressive 18% market share of the online projects posted on e-marketplaces such as Rent A Coder, Elance and eWork. 

The secret of this success is no mystery. In the words of Rent A Coder CEO Ian Ippolito, 'Buyers have told me that they prefer Romanian coders because their experience was that Romanians were harder working, more reliable with deadlines, and didn't pester them with requests for payment before the job was completed'.

The Romanian IT industry employs some 40,000, and Romania's universities turn out an additional 8,000 IT graduates every year, combining a sound work ethic with solid technical and language skills. This has caused the major industry players to take notice, with Siemens, Alcatel and Motorola already setting up software developments centres in the country. 

For Ulan Radkevitch's article in full, follow the link here.
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'Based on a number of highly visible implementations and cases, the central driver of IT-enabled business performance in 2006 will be advanced analytics in an integrated information environment. We expect to see many more companies migrate to an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), which demonstrably provides uniquely correct and detailed answers to any question, any time, anywhere'.

This is the claim made by Scott Gnau and Ron Swift of Teradata, writing in DMReview. They argue that business intelligence based on advanced analytics will form the basis of competitive strategy for a growing number of companies. Supplying this intelligence will come to form the most important value add from IT. If this turns out to be so, then there are interesting implications for all those involved in ERP.

'The growth that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) world has experienced is over. ERP vendors will buy applications to fill those gaps in their capability roadmaps and look to consolidation. Yet this will only lead to further maturity in ERP'. Underlying this shift is a move towards competing on the basis of superior business processes. In other words, there is a direct link between an insistence on better analytics and BPM, Business Process Management.

For Scott Gnau and Ron Swift's analysis in full, follow the link here .

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Indian software firms have made their mark on the IT industry with their Global Delivery Model, using highly educated but low cost labour in the sub-continent to provide cost-effective services to the developed world. But this model, as Prabhudev Konana explains in the IEEE's Computer magazine, is leading to a convergence in cost structures between Indian and US companies as the latter respond by expanding their operations in India and the former by acquiring new partners in the United States.

This means that in future, Indian firms will have to 'project themselves as knowledge leaders. In association with IT services, knowledge leadership spans three somewhat overlapping categories: technology innovations, concept development, and process leadership'.

This will require a shift in organisational culture away from quality towards innovation, moving beyond a reliance on the 'onshore-offshore model', and partnering closely to develop new business process applications.

For a fuller look at the challenges facing Indian software firms in the future, follow the link here

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The unemployment rate for IT professionals in the US has fallen to just 2.2%, its lowest in 6 years. But the profile of the industry is changing, with more and more IT jobs involving management responsibilities. 

Programmers are being asked to combine their code writing skills with project management and team leadership, working and supervising over both in-house and outsourced colleagues. As Eric Chabrow writes in InformationWeek, 'The ramp-up in management positions reflects an evolution of the IT workforce. As IT becomes ingrained in every aspect of an enterprise, more people are needed to manage the flow and integration of information, especially at companies that outsource.

"As outsourcing relationships continue to evolve, the junior people or nonmanagement people are gobbled up by sourcing relationships or farmed out to other parts of the organization, or they're dismissed," says Scott Holland, a research director at the Hackett Group, an advisory firm. "You don't find too many computer operations jobs anymore. It's more about the folks who are business technologists, people who can obviously code but also have a stronger sense of the business."

For IT contractors there is also another trend to take note of - most openings are now for full time positions rather than for contractors, a reversal of the situation a decade ago.

For Eric Chabrow's discussion of the latest employment statistics in the US, follow the link here

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CertCities.com has released its top 10 of the hottest certifications in IT for 2006. The list is designed to signal future trends in IT and give professionals an idea on where they should focus their training efforts in the coming year.

The Red Hat Certified Engineer ticket comes in at number 1, 'yet another sign that Linux is becoming a real player'. In a confirmation of Get Somebody Now's statement that management skills are becoming an essential part of an IT professional's personal portfolio (see GSN's piece on employment trends in IT), the Project Management Institute's Project Management Professional Certificate makes it to fourth spot.

For the full list, follow the link here  

The celebrations surrounding Infosys' 25th anniversary at the company's engineering centre in Mysore offer a new insight into the surging confidence of the IT sector in India today. This self-confidence was on display in P Chidambaram, the Finance Minister's, provocative statement, 'IBM is legacy, Infosys is the future'.

The Minister went on to state, 'It is difficult to believe we are in India. This could be the Silicon Valley in California, this could be the Rouen region in France, this could be Stuttgart, this could be any town in Australia'.

His comments were echoed by Karnataka's Chief Minsiter, Nayarana Murthy, '25 years ago, if an Indian visited a western country, no matter what his qualification was, the westerners looked at him as a person looking for a job, no matter what kind of job. Today, the perception has undergone a complete change. Today the Indian arriving at any destination is seen mainly as a knowledge sector professional. It is mainly thanks to the contribution of the IT industry in general and companies such as Infosys that this has happened'.

The extent to which this confidence is justified can be debated. Nevertheless IT professionals around the globe are getting used to the presence of India's IT sector as a fact of life, one that is likely to become even larger in years to come.