Linux Certification Value

Acquiring certification indicates that you have completed the steps and have the knowledge required to perform at a specified level as an IT professional. Certification also proves to your employer and clients that your expertise is confirmed by a recognized industry organization and can increase your salary, enhance your skills and make your job more satisfying. If nothing else, it can keep your resume from being rejected by the resume-scanning programs now used by every Human Resources department these days.

Why a Linux certification?

The number of job ads calling for some knowledge of Linux has risen by nearly 100% over the last year. On the other hand the number of applicants choosing Linux certification hasn’t risen proportionally. Part of the reason for this anomaly is that employers generally haven’t put much faith in Linux certifications and therefore there has been little demand for them. Also, many of the Linux jobs advertised are for more senior and technical roles such as programmers and developers – skills that far outweigh the level that are tested on some Linux certification tracks. All that appears to be changing however, with Linux becoming ever more mainstream and people with Linux skills becoming more in demand.

Will Linux certification really help?

While actual work experience with Linux or any computer technology will always count for so much more than any piece of paper, gaining Linux certification certainly won’t do your credentials any harm. The demand for credentials in every field, computer-related or not, is increasing and one has to keep up with the pack. Having that certification ticket punched may not make your resume stand out in a positive way, but not having it might make it stand out in a negative one. Large bureaucratic IT organizations take them more seriously than groovy startups if that’s the environment you’re looking to work for. There are several specific situations where I’ve found computer certification in general to be of benefit. First, certification courses offer better knowledge retention than the typical corporate training course since you do have to study to pass an exam, even if only a multiple-choice one. Another one is where you have related experience and are moving (or were moved) into a new environment. In my case I was re-orged from a Unix-centric to a Windows-centric IT environment. Getting a Microsoft System Administrator certainly helped come review time. Finally, if you have a discrimination issue, such as the common one that as an older tech worker you’re skills aren’t up to date. If push comes to legal shove human relations people, lawyers, and judges do take evidence of continuing education very seriously.

Which Linux certification?

There are several options to choose from and, given the amount of time and money that you’ll need to invest into gaining your Linux certification, you’ll want to be sure that you make the right certification track choice to begin with. For those new to Linux then the entry-level, vendor-neutral certifications offered by CompTIA and LPI an appropriate choice. However, these involve only multiple-choice tests and as a result have rather less credibility with technical managers. If you are already working with Linux then one of the proprietary, more difficult, and more expensive Linux certifications (Red Hat, Novell) would be better suited. Like the respected Cisco certifications these certs involve rigorous hands-on practical exercises under severe time constraints and have much more credibility with technical managers. The cost is significant, especially if you have to retake the test, as almost 50% of Red Hat wannabes fail the first time around. Given that there are numerous distributions of Linux available one problem of Linux certifications is that there is no central organization that can set the certification standards and ensure that the candidates meet those standards. What this means is that you have quite a degree of freedom to choose which certification track is right for you, but you equally need to be sure that the one you choose will meet your end needs. As with any other certification track that you take, Linux certifications can be taken by way of instructor led courses or you can undertake a regime of self-study on your own. Don’t get too bogged down on deciding which distribution is better or is more likely to result in a job at the end of the day. While there are obvious differences between the various Linux distributions a degree of competency in one flavour will set you up to transition to the others if need be at a later stage.

Remote DBA

In today’s business world, information is money. Your database is one of your company’s most valuable assets and you may be reluctant to trust such a valuable commodity to an outside provider. However the importance of your database is exactly why you should add remote DBA services to your organization’s IT tool set.

Don’t Pay For Support You Don’t Need

Are you wasting money on a 40-hour-a-week database administrator when your company needs only 30 hours of support a week? Worse, are you expecting your 40-hour DBA to provide 50 hours of service each week, leaving you with a stressed and overworked employee? What you need is a flexible solution to match your changing administrative needs.

When you hire remote DBA services, you get exactly the level of service you need. You don’t have to waste a valuable employee on trivial tasks just to round out his week nor do you have to worry about burning someone out through overwork. As your support requirements change, DBA outsourcing ensures you always have the help you need when you need it.

Get Access To Experienced Professionals For Less

DBA support services are not all equal. Most of the time you need someone who can perform routine maintenance but every now and then your system needs the attention of someone that extensive database experience. If you hire someone with lots of experience, you end up paying a high salary for mundane tasks. But if you get someone less skilled, you have an administrator who is going to get overwhelmed by the first major database problem.

Remote DBA services give you access to IT experts in a range of skill levels. You have skilled administrators who handle the routine tasks but you also have access to highly experienced specialists for those times you need them. You get a team of database professionals for less than the cost of a single in-house DBA.

Round The Clock Access

If your database glitches at 2 am Sunday morning on a three-day weekend, you need help right away not sometime Tuesday morning. Is your internal DBA going to be available? What will you do if the database has problems while your DBA is home sick, away on vacation or attending a class in another state?

Successful companies can’t function with databases that won’t get fixed for days. Remote DBA services provide support at all hours, every single day of the year. The support team concept means your database is always covered no matter what because no one person is essential to proper operation. Most companies simply can’t afford to hire enough internal DBAs to provide this level of coverage.

Your organization needs access to the best administrators, the latest monitoring software, and reliable, round-the-clock support and that can’t be done in a cost-effective manner with internal IT personnel. Hire remote DBA services to give your company the tools necessary for success.

Data Warehousing & BI

How to Hire A Consultant

One of the most common mistakes that companies make when hiring a computer service is assuming that a computer consultant’s technical knowledge is the only thing that qualifies him or her for the job. Just as you wouldn’t hire a potential employee on the strength of his or her credentials alone, you should go a bit deeper during your initial meeting with an IT computer consultant to determine whether the person has the intrinsic qualities that will make them a good temporary employee, because that’s essentially what they’ll be. Below, we list four questions that all companies should ask a computer consultant before retaining his or her computer service for the job.

Does the Consultant Seem sensitive to Your Company’s Wants and Needs?

If you were considering someone for a permanent position at your company, chances are that you would turn them away if they seemed arrogant, preoccupied with salary or seemed to view the interview process as being insulting to their talent. So, why hire a computer consultant that displays the same traits? Unless you’re a computer guru, chances are that a consultant will need to translate his or her normal frame of reference into computer talk for laymen. If they’re not willing to do it or they do it begrudgingly, it probably shows that they don’t empathize with your concern about how a proposed solution will affect your company.

Does the Consultant Guard the Confidentiality of Former Clients?

If your company has proprietary data that it doesn’t want being blabbed about, you shouldn’t hire a computer service whose consultants speak about other companies’ proprietary information, even if they do it as a presentation of how much they can help you. Because the assessment of your company’s computer needs will probably involve examining how it does business versus how its competition does business, you want to hire a consultant who can keep their lips sealed about what makes your company a success.

Does the Consultant Speak Proudly of Past Achievements?

While consultants that speak only of their tremendous abilities can come off seeming self-consumed and too eager make the sale, it’s a good sign when a consultant mentions past achievements with a sense of pride. Because a consultant will be paid the same whether or not they take personal pride in their IT consulting endeavors, a consultant who shows pride displays that they have a personal connection with their past achievements. Because a consultant could easily decide to cut corners instead of going the extra mile, a consultant that takes pride in his or her work is the one that you want.

Does the Consultant Display the level of Knowledge that you expected?

If you find yourself speaking with a consultant who is drawing as many blanks as you are as you discuss solutions to your company’s problems, you should probably consider it a sign that, at the very least, your company’s solutions will come of with some hitches. Although all computer consultants have technical training, that doesn’t mean that their visionary ability is on the same level. Because you’ll be investing significant money in a computer solution, always insist on hiring someone who both looks like an expert on paper and talks like an expert in person.

Postgre SQL vs MySQL

Postgre SQL vs MySQL is a loaded question indeed. Both are great applications and often the choice of which to use is purely a matter of personal preference. However they can be compared side by side to try to help users decide which might be the right choice for them. 

• Features: Here probably PostgreSQL has the advantage. MySQL does not support stored procedures, sub queries views or cursors, which was probably a big mistake on the part of the MySQL developers, although their claim is that such features are not necessary. However you probably need to consider if you really need the extra features in PostgreSQL at all, as many developers really do not have any real use for them.
• Support: This term can of course have a number of meanings. As MySQL is far more widely used many more applications support it, and that also means there is a wider community available to assist and offer advice about problems you may encounter in every day use. PostgreSQL does however have many active mailing lists and forums, and there are a few commercial concerns offering support services, so both applications are fairly well matched in this area.
• Ease of use: This is a toughie. This is how a debate between users of the two usually goes; Person A: “Well MySQL is easier to use because” then Person B immediately interrupts with “No, fool, PostgreSQL is much easier because” and the debate goes round in circles. In reality just because Person A finds MySQL easier does not mean that Person C will and the same for PostgreSQL. This is truly a matter of personal taste, and new users might to well to try working a little with each, to decide for themselves which is the better choice.
• Stabilty: In press releases MySQL claims to be more than stable, but the buzz often is that this is not quite true. This may be due in part to the fact that some of the features in recent upgrades to MySQL are still “under construction” as it were.
• Speed: MySQL was designed to be a speedy database, while PostgreSQL touts itself as a more fully featured application, although both seem to be trying to meet somewhere in the middle with recent modifications, and the difference in speed is becoming pretty much a non issue.
• Licensing: MySQL is most commonly used as a working model for Open Source firms attempting to generate income. It is released under the GNU GPL (general public license) which does require that derivative works be licensed in the same way, although commercial licenses are available for those who do not want to work under that kind of limitation. PostgreSQL uses a BSD license, which really allows the use of any code, so long as the original credits are maintained.

 So, as you can see, there is no clear winner in this contest, and the new user should draw his or her own conclusions based upon what best works for their unique needs.

SAP Implementation Challenges and Issues

Typical Implementation Problems: Enterprise Packages or ERP Solutions have come a long way and progressed over the years. Today it is possible to keep track of most transactions in real-time across an entire enterprise.

SAP is a software package that is highly configurable and was developed building on Best Business Practices. Implementing SAP will most likely alter existing business processes for the better, as long as change is accepted. One of the most difficult issues during an SAP implementation is most often the reluctance to change. People become comfortable with the way things have always been done. To put the necessary changes in place a well laid out plan must be established.

Any ERP implementation has its challenges, which range from financial over functional to technical issues. During any implementation, problems can appear at all levels of the project. These can be business problems, financial problems, ERP systems functionality issues as well as conflicts between project team members. Combined these problems can make the management of the project a true nightmare. There for it is important to deal with all problems in a timely manner. Procrastination may lead to a accumulation of problems, which can make resolution almost impossible without any delays in the overall project time-frame.

Anyone who has participated in multiple systems implementations knows that there is no such thing as a typical implementation. Every implementation is different. Every implementation has its unique risks and challenges.

It is important to have a defined project scope. The project scope is necessary to keep the entire project focused on delivering the implementation with its agreed upon functionality. Usually projects start with a scope definition based on business functionality. Organizations usually put together a document specifying its requirements based on its current business model. This document is used to identify the proper ERP Solution. After selecting the ERP Solution of its choice this document is then used as project scope, meaning the attempt is made to make the ERP Solution to fit the existing business model. Again, here comes the reluctance to change in place.

For any SAP Project, it is recommended and better to define the scope by SAP functionality. SAP has been developed using standard business rules. A SAP implementation may require a change in current business rules in order to adapt easier to SAP and be able to stay as close as possible to the standard. Staying as close as possible to the standard will allow also for easier compatibility with future SAP releases and make any upgrade easier and less costly. Staying with the standard and following SAP project scope will help also to avoid ambiguity within the project team in regards to what SAP functionality is within the scope and what functionality is out of scope.

It may be difficult to manage the scope. During an implementation the implementation team will discover and learn more about the SAP functionality and the business itself, which may make it necessary to change the project scope periodically.

Potential Resource and Management Problems during an SAP Implementation

The following categories are all part of the overall project resources:

• Infrastructure, which entails: Hardware and software components required to run SAP
• Project Teams: The resource “Project Teams”, which may consist of internal and external team members who are participating in the SAP implementation project.
• Support Personnel: the employees needed to support SAP during the implementation and after the going-live phase.

Internal resources are usually the so-called key-users that participate in the SAP implementation. A key-user is a employee that is intimately familiar with all business processes and requirements as it pertains to their job function and/or department. Problems may arise if such key-user is selected on seniority or workload within a department rather than on their individual knowledge and familiarity of the various business processes. Since these key-users know the internal business processes as it relates to the current infrastructure but have no or only very little SAP experience, it is imperative that these key-user learn the SAP functionality before start of the project.

Keep in mind that these resources are responsible of how a company transacts business in the future. These key-users must learn the functionality and configuration possibilities in enough detail in order to make intelligent implementation decisions. Key-users usually also train employees and act as first level support within their area of expertise.

Therefore, it is important that the project team is staffed with the right employees.

Many companies today feel that they do not have the internal full-time resources available to participate in the system implementation. Companies that are already operating on a bare minimum staffing, due to downsizing or rightsizing, think that there are just not enough people left within a department to support the day-to-day business and support a SAP roll-out. Here companies have to become creative. It could mean retrain some of the staff that is not actively participating in the roll-out project to take over some of the functions a key-user would not be able to fulfill during the roll-out project participation.

Sometimes it seems those internal resources, that seem to be able to balance the act between their day-to-day work and the SAP roll-out project responsibilities will eventually burn themselves out.

This could also be a point where careful budget planning can come in handy. Options could include retraining existing staff to take on the responsibilities of the key-users and additional temporary staff could be hired to do some low level work. Using interns to replace key-users could be another option.

External resources are usually skilled consultants that participated already in multiple SAP implementation projects and have the technical knowledge on how to customize the SAP System to the specific requirements. Skilled SAP consultants today come at a premium price. There for the proper management of SAP resources is even more critical in order to receive the most “bang for your buck”.

External Resource items to consider should be:

• How many consultants are needed?
• What is their implementation experience?
• What is their industry experience?
• At what time during the various phases of the project, are which resources needed?

Another important factor to consider would be not trying to do all at once, but rather in Phases. Many projects have failed or were bogged down by trying to do too much at once. Often, organizations are so used to, with what they have currently in place that they oversee the fact that some of the current functionality has grown over time and is not a drop-dead requirement to operate the business.

It is imperative to have a fact-finding session, to determine: “What would be the minimum functionality that is needed to operate the business and what could be done in a second or third phase?”

Change Management experts have also determined that organizations change more effectively through multiple cycles of learning (1).

The biggest problem I have so far encountered during any SAP implementation was the lack of management support. It is imperative that a project of this multitude has a sponsor that some sort of influence within the organization. This should usually be an executive team member that has an interest in the success of the project.

Another important governance of any major SAP implementation is the Executive Steering Board. The steering board will have the final saying if significant changes or existing business processes are required or if business impacting process additions have to be implemented.

The steering board or project management board usually consists of high-level executives, representatives of the systems integrator, a quality assurance representative and a change management representative. (2)

For the SAP Implementation to be a success management must understand, support, and eventually direct the new business processes under SAP.

(1) SAP R/3 Implementation Guide: A Managers Guide to Understanding SAP

(2) Keane Whitepapers: Getting it right the first time: 9 Best-Practice Guidelines for a Successful SAP Implementation

Expanding to Europe…Which ERP?

This article is targeted at US-based mid-size and large companies, planning the expansion and opening branches in Europe. It is for IT director, who is nowadays responsible for ERP/MRP platform selection and following implementation. The format of the article doesn’t allow us to come up with detail specs comparison, we will be rather giving you highlights for further research and checklist of things that you should not miss at the consideration. We will begin with the specific of the market and then point out to the solutions available.

o Multiple Languages. Continental Europe doesn’t speak on English language natively – documentation is in German, French, Italian or whichever country you consider. It is not just a question of finding English speaking and writing accounting personnel – as you will see, reading further

o Taxation. Now it is becoming more standardized, however you should now that in Europe you have to deal with VAT (Value Added Tax), in comparison to Sales Tax in the US. VAT should be paid not only by end consumer, but also by resellers, distributors, etc. Also it is common practice when Services are taxable in European countries.

o Government Reporting. In the USA you report on the federal and state levels and usually IRS and the states don’t care about the accounting system you use. In Europe, again depending on the country and probably this tendency is more applicable when you move Eastward, the government might have more involvement in the ERP brands selection, recommending several systems as approved, certified, localized, etc.

o Accounting Procedures. In some countries (France, Russia) you may encounter with the situation, when government wants you to use recommended chart of accounts, usually generalized and geared toward manufacturing accounting, which might be a nightmare in the case if you are service-oriented business. Considering innovative nature of US businesses in expansion mode – this issue should be addressed

Now we will give you solutions highlights

o Local ERP. The specific legislation and conditions of the country you chose for your European penetration probably produced several locally originated ERPs. As a tendency – these systems typically deal with government reporting and available in local language only. If you decide to implement such a solution, please understand the trade-ins – you can not find US/international managers who could efficiently take the control over when needed.

o Microsoft Dynamics. Microsoft Business Solutions these systems for continental Europe: Navision, Axapta – Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics AX (Microsoft Great Plains/Microsoft Dynamics GP will be pulled out from France, Germany and Holland, where it currently has some market presence). Navision & Axapta are both localized and “approved”

o SAP Business One. Assuming that you represent mid-size business – this system has all-in-one and the named user license includes all the modules (you can have CRM-only client for your sales people at ½ of the price). SAP Business One was designed with the ideas of the Multilanguage, flexible reporting and object-oriented tax engine. Plus SAP Business One has transaction integration to mySAP.

o Oracle Financials/E-Business Suite. This solution, coming from Oracle, also referred as Oracle Applications should be considered as very efficient and reliable. It is also localized and has very long market presence history in Europe. Oracle comes with J2EE/EJB/Java customization & development

o IBM Lotus Notes/Domino. It is not an ERP – it is rather the platform, Lotus is very popular in Europe and you should consider and respect it if you purchase existing company, using Lotus for document workflow

o Integration, Customization & Reporting. You should consider European branch ERP integration ability to your corporate ERP in the USA and management reporting compliance.

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