IBM, Manpower accused of employee poaching

By Paul McDougall
2 November 2007 03:21PM

A lawsuit accuses Manpower of recruiting AcctKnowledge temps who were on their way in to work at an IBM office in Tulsa.

While some tech pros maintain that all the good IT jobs have gone overseas, that's apparently not the case for accountants.

The labour market for finance professionals is evidently so tight that some companies have resorted to dot-com era recruiting tactics -- like poaching employees right outside their workplace, according to a lawsuit filed last week.

AcctKnowledge, a temp firm that had been providing finance workers to IBM's Tulsa office for the past three years, has filed a lawsuit against the computer maker and rival temporary HR firm Manpower. The suit alleges that IBM yanked the staffing services contract without proper notice and handed it to Manpower, and it charges the company with using threats and other unseemly tactics to steal AcctKnowledge workers so it could fulfill the deal.

According to the suit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma, IBM "unlawfully terminated its contract with AcctKnowledge" and replaced it with Manpower. Upon receiving the contract, Manpower managers showed up outside the IBM Tulsa office to recruit AcctKnowledge temps who were on their way in to work.

"On Oct. 23, "Manpower representatives positioned themselves at the entrances to IBM's building, where they solicited AcctKnowledge's employees and distributed invitations to 'informational sessions,' " the lawsuit states.

The invitations informed AcctKnowledge employees for the first time that IBM had terminated its relationship with AcctKnowledge. Manpower representatives also told the employees that, if they wanted to keep their positions at IBM, they would need to join Manpower," the suit maintains.

AcctKnowledge charges that the 10-day notice it received from IBM terminating the staffing contract, which had been in effect since mid-2004, was "insufficient under well-known and clearly established industry standards."

The small, Tulsa-based temp firm says the 88 workers it had been providing to IBM represent more than half of its employees. The firm also claims that it went to the trouble of becoming certified as a women-owned business so that IBM could get tax breaks from the relationship.

IBM paid AcctKnowledge rates for workers ranging from US$17.40 per hour to US$42.60 per hour, with AcctKnowledge assuming all costs for benefits like health insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. "AcctKnowledge has suffered irreparable harm" from IBM's decision to pull the contract and give it to Manpower, the firm claims.

AcctKnowledge is asking the court to reinstate the contract and to block any attempts by Manpower to contact its employees. It's also seeking unspecified damages.

A spokesman for IBM would say only that the company is "consolidating certain work performed at our Tulsa center, but the work will continue to be done in Tulsa." He declined to comment on AcctKnowledge's charges. A spokeswoman for Manpower declined to comment.

Copyright (c) 2007 CMP Media LLC, All rights reserved.

Top managers quit at SAP's TomorrowNow, sale possible

By Stacy Cowley
21 November 2007 06:30AM

In the midst of an acrimonious lawsuit with Oracle over the activities of its TomorrowNow subsidiary, SAP announced Monday that TomorrowNow's top management, including its CEO, is leaving the company. SAP also said that it is considering selling off the TomorrowNow business.

TomorrowNow CEO Andrew Nelson and several other members of his senior management team have chosen to resign, SAP said in a terse release that did not offer details on the reasons for the resignations. Beyond Nelson, SAP did not disclose which executives are leaving; a company representative said SAP is not releasing other names.

SAP said it is considering several options for TomorrowNow's future, including a possible sale of the contentious unit.

"Our primary focus is TomorrowNow's existing customers, who will be supported through this management transition," said Mark White, an SAP executive who assumed oversight of TomorrowNow earlier this year. "Over the next days, we will be communicating with TomorrowNow customers about these changes and our plans to support them going forward."

TomorrowNow offers outside maintenance and support services for Oracle's PeopleSoft, Siebel and J.D. Edwards product lines. SAP acquired the business in 2005 as a direct strike at Oracle, aiming to undercut Oracle's lucrative maintenance and support revenue stream.

The acquisition turned problematic in March, when Oracle hit SAP with a sweeping lawsuit charging that TomorrowNow employees conducted "corporate theft on a grand scale" by improperly accessing Oracle materials. SAP subsequently admitted that "certain downloads took place that, in violation of TomorrowNow policies, may have erroneously exceeded the customer's right of access."

The two companies are preparing to take their dispute to trial, although SAP is pushing for settlement negotiations.

The legal wrangling has broader implications for the third-party maintenance market, which includes TomorrowNow rivals like Rimini Street and NetCustomer as well as Oracle itself, which offers outside maintenance services for Red Hat Linux. While Oracle's legal fusillade is so far confined to archrival SAP and focuses on specific improprieties, other solutions providers are staying tuned for details on how the violations came about: did SAP's TomorrowNow employees go fishing for Oracle data, or did they accidentally access materials left exposed?

"If it's ambiguous about what customers are given the opportunity to download and what they have rights to download, that just gives everyone the willies," Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin said in an interview earlier this year. "I don't think most customers want decisions about what's legally appropriate to access being left to their consultants."

Copyright (c) 2007 CMP Media LLC, All rights reserved.

10 reasons why HP revenues hit $100B

By Craig Zarley
21 November 2007 06:31AM

Hewlett-Packard's 2007 annual revenues shot past the US$100 billion mark for the first time with sales reaching US$104.3 billion for the year ending 31 October. Here are 10 factors that helped make HP US$100 billion baby.

1. Hired Carly Fiorina as CEO. What's this you say? One of the most controversial industry CEOs in recent memory, Fiorina never figured out the HP Way and her tenure was marked by internal struggles. But she did engineer the takeover of Compaq. Only Fiorina, the consummate corporate politician, could have fought the Hewlett family and widespread shareholder and employee dissent to garner enough votes to swing the US$87 billion merger. That merger transformed HP into the industry standard server powerhouse and wrestled the lead in the PC industry away from Dell.

2. Fired Carly Fiorina. She honchoed the deal through, but she couldn't get the Compaq and HP people on the same page. The two cultures classed between the volume Compaq mentality and the value HP mindset. Nowhere was that more evident than on the channel side of the business. HP value players couldn't stomach the pump up the volume music foisted upon them by former Compaq folks thrust into key channel positions. Thankfully, the HP board finally said enough to this infighting and gave Fiorina the golden parachute.

3. Refused to break up the company. Many shareholders, analysts and industry pundits felt that the HP crown jewel was its printing and imaging business. Spinning that out into a separate company, they reasoned, offered the best hope to recoup the value on what they maintained was an ill plunge into the low-margin PC business via the Compaq merger. As it turns out, HP now has the most complete product portfolio with which to go after the coveted SMB market.

4. Enlisted the channel as a strategic ally. What good is the best SMB product portfolio without an army of solution providers to attack the market? Dell's newfound channel religion shows the limitations of a direct strategy. And IBM's sale of its PC business shows the danger of getting out of what it deemed to be a low-margin market segment. Sure the margins are low. But IBM lost contact with SMB solution providers as a result of the PC sale and HP was more than happy to fill the void.

5. Hired Mark Hurd. HP needed an outsider with operational experience and no agenda. He eliminated many redundancies and quelled much of the infighting. Hurd too takes the time and effort to meet with and listen to solution providers. Most high-profile CEOs view the channel as a faceless, amorphous beast. Hurd's taken the time to learn that the channel is human—good, bad and ugly. Under his guidance, HP's tried to embrace the good, and it's paid off. As one solution provider said Monday after hearing HP cracked the US$100 billion barrier, "Hurd's the man."

6. Focused on reducing direct versus indirect conflicts. You can have rules of engagement, well-crafted channel programs and named direct accounts, but it's all a charade unless compensation plans back them up. Hurd's given his sales people quotas that are impossible to meet without strong collaboration from solution providers that add sales coverage and expertise not available inside HP.

7. Made HP products profitable for solution providers to sell. Of course product margins aren't anything to shout about, but at least HP is trying. They've come up with the Attach Plus program that allows solution providers to gain more margin by bundling more HP products into a solution. Competitors simply don't have the product portfolio to offer anything comparable. In an informal online CMP poll this week, for example, 45 percent of the respondents said they make the most money partnering with HP compared to 15 percent for IBM and 13 percent for Dell.

8. Makes products that don't burst into flames. HP by and large dodged the burning laptop adventures earlier this year. The company actually spends money on R & D with the intent of building better products and solutions. In 2007, HP's research budget topped $3.6 billion. Dell's R & D budget, by contrast, seems to consist of gaining technical expertise by buying up hot companies.

9. Buying hot companies. Okay, so HP does it too. Mercury Interactive was the big one this year, which gave HP a much needed boost in its software business. HP in fact closed 10 acquisitions during its last fiscal year. The key here is that HP has a balance between R & D and acquisition that many of competitors seem to lack.

10. Markets the channel to enduser customers. IBM, for example, too often treats business partners as the crazy uncle no one wants to talk about. Rarely if ever do they mention business partners on analyst or earnings calls, despite the channel contributing more than a third of IBM's product sales. Not so with HP. Hurd, for one, often tells midmarket CIOs that the channel is HP's face to the SMB. If you've got a weapon as powerful as the channel, why not shout it to the world, as Hurd did Monday after the vendor passed the $100 billion revenue mark. "This is as much their [the channel's] victory as it is HP's," he said.

Copyright (c) 2007 CMP Media LLC, All rights reserved.

Could Europe's new 'Blue Card' cause global tech talent to shun U.S.?

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
26 October 2007 07:19AM

The European Union hopes that its proposed blue-card program will provide a more attractive alternative to the U.S. green-card program, which critics say is plagued by backlogs, cumbersome processes, and insufficient quotas..
While the United States continues to argue about whether to raise the H-1B visa cap and reform green-card processes to allow more foreign tech workers into the country, the European Union wants to make it much easier for highly skilled workers from abroad to land jobs in the EU's 27 member countries.

The EU, which is predicting a severe workforce crisis over the next several decades as its Baby Boomer generation retires, aims to attract 20 million workers from the outside in the years to come.

The EU hopes that a new proposed "blue card" will help fill that void, providing a more attractive alternative to the U.S. green-card program, which critics say is plagued by backlogs, cumbersome processes, and insufficient quotas.

The blue card would provide educated immigrants, including tech professionals, with a two-year, renewable permit to work and reside in an EU member nation. Because the EU aims for a worker's blue-card application process to take less than three months, the visa would provide a fast track for foreign-born individuals to land jobs in EU member countries.

By contrast, the U.S. green-card process can take anywhere from five to 10 years for an individual to gain permanent residency. And the 85,000 annual quota on H-1B visas for temporary foreign tech workers has been running out quickly for the last few years, forcing many prospective workers to take jobs elsewhere.

In addition to being an alternative to the U.S. green card, the blue-card program will also provide an option to foreign-born individuals who might have considered taking jobs in Canada or Australia, two other favorite destinations for the highly-skilled international workforce.

The EU's unveiling of the blue-card program this week comes at the same time that the U.S. Senate approved a spending bill amendment that could raise employers' H-1B visa fees to US$5,000 per worker from US$1,500. The additional fees will be used to fund new scholarship programs for U.S. students pursuing technology, math, and science-related degrees.

Compete America, a coalition of technology companies that has been lobbying Congress for several years to raise the H-1B visa cap and make green-card reforms, blasted the fee hikes and expressed worry about the blue card's potential impact on the U.S. tech workforce. "Europe has sent a message. They're aggressively pursuing the professional talent they need to compete on the global stage," said Robert Hoffman, VP for government and public affairs at Oracle and co-chair of Compete America, in a statement.

"The Senate has unfortunately also sent a message, and it doesn't bode well for the U.S. economy," Hoffman said.

Copyright (c) 2007 CMP Media LLC, All rights reserved.

Sustained attack launched last Thursday overnight --

Hackers launched a sustained attack last Thursday night, 8 February 2007, against key root servers forming the internet’s backbone.According to reports from the security firm Sophos, botnets of zombie PCs bombarded the internet's domain name system servers (DNS) with traffic."These zombie computers could have brought the web to its knees," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "While the resilience of the root servers should be commended, more needs to be done to tackle the root of the problem: the lax attitude of some users towards IT security."Cluley elaborated that root servers that manage the internet's DNS help to convert website names to their numeric IP address, acting as the internet’s own address book.Three of the 13 servers at the top of the DNS hierarchy are reported to have felt the impact of the attack, although none is thought to have stopped working entirely."If the DNS servers were to fall over then pandaemonium would ensue, emphasizing the importance of properly defending all PCs from being taken over by hackers," said Cluley."A denial-of-service attack like this swamps web-connected servers with traffic from many computers around the globe."It is a bit like 20 hippos trying to get through a revolving door at the same time: there is no route through and everything clogs up.

SAP expects to launch a quickly deployable application in March 2007 that can gather and analyze sales and operations planning data, delivering it to multiple departments within the organisation --

The new software will be SAP’s latest offering in its portfolio of xApps, an array of composite applications that perform specialized business tasks across diverse industries. The software runs on top of SAP NetWeaver, integration middleware used to draw data from SAP's own ERP systems & other data stores.SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning, or SAP xSOP, gathers data from throughout any organization & brings it together under one application that in turn can be accessed by finance, sales, purchasing & production departments. The data is delivered through role-based dashboards. The dashboards can have key performance indicators built right in, under general categories, like demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget, can be built in to the dashboards. The German software maker SAP touted its xSOP this week, as built to address the problem of collecting planning-related data that can be scattered within an organization’s spreadsheets and applications. Assembling the information into one central location facilitates compiling reports that can then be passed along to managers.The new software product is set to ship in March 2007, and can be bought as a standalone product, or as an extension to SAP's enterprise resource planning system.