A Strategic View of Virtualization
Dana Gardner of TechNewsWorld interviewed HP’s Bob Meyer on virtualization’s potential to save money for businesses. “Right now, everybody is reacting to an economic climate. Those CIOs who are acting with foresight, looking ahead and saying, “Where will this take me?” are the ones who are going to be successful as opposed to the people who are just reacting to the current environment and looking to cut and slash. Virtualization has a couple of benefits that allow you to save and optimize, but also sets you up for that — to boomerang you whenever the economic recovery comes.”

World Wildlife Fund Looks at Telecommuting as Carbon Emissions Solution
If you ever wanted proof, WWF now presents hard numbers for virtual conferencing and telecommuting’s benefits to the environment, as Jaymi Heimbuch reports on Treehugger. “The difference in emission savings between the carbon world (lowest savings overall) and the smart world (highest savings overall) is significant – e.g., for teleworking about 1 billion tons of CO2 emissions differentiate the two scenarios in year 2030 (approximately equivalent to the total current CO2 emissions from UK and Italy combined) and almost 3.5 billion tons in year 2050 (almost as much as the EU’s total CO2 emissions or more than half of the US’s current CO2 emissions).”

The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory
In a guest post on O’Reilly Radar, John Geraci shares stories of how technology is being used to involve citizens in decison-making. “Back in January, the city of Los Angeles announced a gap of $433 million for their 2009 budget. Instead of just cutting services however, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the unusual step of posting a survey online for residents of the city to fill out. For each category of city service, the survey asked residents, “what program would you reduce to help balance the budget?”, followed by an itemized list of services they could choose from.”

Head in the Clouds or Head in the Sand? SaaS Faces the Facts
IT Jungle’s Dan Burger talked to top consultant Amy Wohl on the history of SaaS, obstacles to its success, its value as a money saver, interoperability issues and much more. “Conversations leading up to the difficult decisions between SaaS and traditional off-the-shelf software used on in-house machines are occurring much more frequently. The interoperability issue is a big one, and executives are continually griping about information silos cramping their decision-making abilities. Also, the current economic situation is SaaS-friendly. It may push things in the direction of IT outsourcing.”

IT Pros: Private Clouds a Good First Step to Cloud Computing
If industry experts had their way, businesses should first try building a private cloud as a test case before engaging the services of cloud computing providers, says PC World reporter Elizabeth Montalbano. “‘If you can’t do it internally, it’s tough to take it externally,’ said Jeff Birnbaum, [cq] the managing director of Merrill Lynch, who along with several other IT professionals discussed the issue at the 2009 High Performance Linux on Wall Street conference. He said before companies decide whether to deploy applications on an AWS or Microsoft’s Windows Azure, they should build a cloud network internally and see if they can make that work, then decide what assets they could run on a public cloud.”

Web 2.0: The End of the Beginning
Bob Thompson of CustomerThink looks at the state of Web 2.0, where it’s going, and what it means to a customer-centric business. “What’s most exciting to me is the potential for social media technologies to enable Customer Collaboration Management (CCM), which is all about joining the conversation with customers. CCM is the third major wave of customer-centric thinking, following CRM—which is mostly about managing customer information and maximizing revenue, and CEM—which is about creating and delivering great experiences to drive loyalty.”

Take control of what you have – you
Dr. Judith Krings offers up some tips on the right attitude for reducing stress. “The more you take care of yourself, the more you will have to give to others. Neglect you, and you, ironically, will neglect others. Today is all you have. Yes, I know this is easier said than done, but harness your optimism, tenacity and wisdom personality strengths. Focus on them to help you float over the waves of overwhelm.”