IT job market evolves

If the doomsayers prove right, throngs of laid-off tech workers will soon be competing for only a handful of available jobs, reports Infoworld.

So, what are the hottest tech certifications in today's cool job market? According to Foote Partners' fall survey of more than 22 000 IT professionals, covering 170 certifications, the most valuable certificates today settle mainly into two camps: architecture and security. Microsoft and Cisco certifications also got good grades.

As the economic crisis has deepened, good enterprise architects have become treasured assets. In fact, over the last six months, seven of the eight fastest-growing certificates are for enterprise architecture, which barely registered a blip a year ago, says David Foote, president of Foote Partners.

Alcatel-Lucent unleashed a host of enhancements to its product line aimed at the large enterprise, that it says will ultimately help end-customers "save money and make money", according to Channel Web.

Hema Ganapathy, director of large enterprise solutions marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, says the new and enhanced portfolio, called Corporate Communications Solutions for Large Enterprises, targets a number of network transitions such as globalisation, virtualisation and centralisation.

It offers a way to converge the networks to integrate applications with business processes to fulfil Alcatel-Lucent's "dynamic enterprise" vision by aligning networks, people, process and knowledge.

The US Defence and Veterans Affairs (VA) departments will migrate their respective electronic health record systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to enhance the interoperability of outpatient clinical data, reports GovhealthIT.

SOA means the systems will rely on Web services that connect loosely coupled, reusable components.

A study by Booz Allen Hamilton recommended the use of SOA, and officials accepted that recommendation, said Stephen Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defence for health affairs.