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Percona provides pay-as-you-go, prepaid and retainer-based consulting to create or scale applications built on the full LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and other open source technologies. Our customer list is large and diverse, including Fortune 50 firms, popular websites, and small startups.Percona's comprehensive full-stack support lets you get all the help you need from one source — for example, our services include solving database performance bottlenecks, data corruption, networking configuration, or page load and render optimization. Percona's team enjoys a worldwide reputation for expert MySQL knowledge, such as our widely read MySQL Performance blog and our latest book "High Performance MySQL". But we are also fluent in the other key components of enterprise-class applications, such as load balancers, web proxies, caching solutions, and SANs. Percona's uniquely flexible pricing models let you buy the troubleshooting time you need in 15-minute increments, with no lock-in from annual contracts or per-server costs. We can work onsite at your premises, but we ordinarily work remotely via SSH, telephone, email, and instant messaging, which has proven to be the most efficient and economical approach for most customers. Our engineers are distributed worldwide, so there's always someone available to help you 24x7. Percona's staff can serve as your remote DBA, architecture and design advisors, on-call support team, expert sysadmins, or whatever fits your needs. We also build binaries of an enhanced version of the MySQL server. It includes our advanced patchset for improved performance and manageability. In addition, we provide other unique open-source tools for database users, such as the InnoDB Data Recovery tool. Percona servicesMigration to MySQL Database ServerHelp Upgrading MySQL DatabasesSan Francisco Bay Area Onsite Day VisitComprehensive MySQL Performance AuditData Recovery Services for MySQL DatabasesFront End (Client-Side) Performance OptimizationUrgent MySQL TroubleshootingDevelopment to Customize MySQL Databases |
At Unitec you are classed an international student if:
International optionsGain the skills for a career as a professional liaison interpreter. Learn to perform interpreting tasks using accurate language and register, and develop your vocabulary for various interpreting situations. Practise what you've learnt in our fully equipped language labs, and find out about work opportunities for liaison interpreters.
Do you want a career as an interpreter? Are you fluent in two languages? Perhaps you are already working or volunteering as an interpreter and want a qualification to improve your skills. The Certificate in Liaison Interpreting is a four-month intensive programme that provides you with fundamental professional skills in the field of interpretation (the task of converting spoken statements from one language to another, and from culture to another).
With this certificate, community and government agencies can be sure you have the necessary knowledge and skills to work effectively and professionally as a liaison interpreter in a range of community settings. To gain the Certificate in Liaison Interpreting, you must complete the course LANG6200 Liaison Interpreting, which gives you an understanding of the nature and practice of liaison interpreting.
Learn to perform interpreting tasks using accurate language and register, and develop your vocabulary for various interpreting situations. Gain an understanding of how to manage the ethical dilemmas interpreters may face, and learn to employ effective and appropriate cross-cultural skills for your work as a liaison interpreter in New Zealand.
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Practise what you’ve learnt in our well-equipped language labs and during group exercises with your fellow students. Guest speakers will inform you about the different situations where liaison interpreters are needed, such as in legal and medical contexts.
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To help you combine study with the other demands of your life, classes are held two evenings per week and on Saturday mornings. There is also an online learning component.
The following is a selection of the compulsory courses you need to study to complete this programme. Click the links below to view the course details and timetables for 2010.
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top of page ^This qualification is more likely to open up part-time or freelance job opportunities.
To be eligible for admission, applicants must meet the general, discretionary or special admission requirements. Applicants must also meet the English language requirements.
Applicants must:
Applicants who do not meet the general admission requirements and who are less than 20 years of age when the programme begins may be considered for discretionary admission if they can demonstrate aptitude for study at the required level.
Applicants who do not meet the general admission requirements and who are at least 20 years of age when the programme begins may be considered for special admission if they can provide evidence of aptitude or appropriate work or other experience.
Applicants must:
Applicants may be interviewed.
The risk of non-compliance should rank high on the CIO’s list of concerns, yet more often than not seems to be relegated to an afterthought. Findings from a May 2008 Software License Compliance survey by KACE Systems Management indicated that more than half of the participants from companies with 1,000 or more employees believed they had unlicensed software deployed in their environments. Despite risking failed software audits, negative publicity and hurting the very companies they rely on to succeed (i.e., independent software vendors), many CIOs continue to ignore the issue. However, the software community is catching up by using technologies to identify, trace and litigate against organizations illegally using their products. CIOs can meet the software audit regulations by having an understanding of their companies’ software compliance policy, conducting regular surveys of their software inventory and more.
Victor DeMarines is vice president of products at V.i. Laboratories..
If a software audit is not conducted, there are a number of ways a company can be found using unlicensed software - for example, insiders (whistleblowers) or piracy business intelligence tools.
Insider reports often come through organizations such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) or Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), and are generated by the need for software vendors to be sure companies are compliant. This process consists of an outside lead coming into one of the software alliance organizations stating that unlicensed versions of software may be on a company’s network. The software vendor that created the product in question will be alerted by the software alliance organization. At this point, the primary enforcement tool is the software alliance organization sending threatening letters to the business using the software, indicating that an investigation is taking place and offering to give up litigation action if a compliance audit is conducted. If the compliance audit is conducted, the company must provide a list of all the software in question, as well as the purchase dates of the software licenses.
“... the insider report approach is not the most reliable or effective method of determining compliance within a company; there are many cycles involved before any reasonable evidence can be gathered.”
Not only can this approach cause negative publicity for the business in question, but it can be the result of a disgruntled employee trying to cause trouble within a company, or a person searching for a reward from a software alliance organization for turning in a potential non-compliant company. Because of these reasons, the insider report approach is not the most reliable or effective method of determining compliance within a company; there are many cycles involved before any reasonable evidence can be gathered.
The second method, piracy business intelligence, gathers concrete evidence first, then proceeds with an inquiry. With this strategy in place, software vendors are able to collect information about how the software within an organization is being used. Because this is a more granular and comprehensive method of detecting those that are non-compliant, it can help in a situation where a large organization is overusing software licenses or pirated versions of the product. Piracy business intelligence can also assist the software vendor by allowing them to pinpoint where software is being used unlicensed, and save on time and resources on both the vendor and customer end.
For those who are CIOs or who are planning IT spending, the message is, “hold the line.” It’s a rare thing to find an IT organization that is expecting increases in budget for 2010. The pressure on costs leads to conlusions like, "Seriously, I can't imagine any company that's looking at any upgrade to its telephony system not going the IP route at this point." It’s hard to argue with statements like this. If you want to have any room for new development, you’ll have to find money in Das Kloud, in VoIP, in virtualization and in a myriad of places like those. Here’s a handy CTO Edge list of Ten Technologies to be Thankful For.
So, what’s the math on holding the line on IT? The “rule of thumb” ratios are that for each dollar you spend in developing systems (D) in year one, expect to spend 20 cents in out-years on the maintenance and enhancement (M+E) of those systems and on total operations and support costs (P).
As a starting example, if you assume $1,000 in development spending (lever this up to your actual spend if you wish) and existing equal maintenance and enhancement costs, and ongoing operations costs 2.5 times as large, i.e., a typical distribution, and then continue your development spending for five years, with the above ratios for D->M+E and D->P, your overall IT spending will rise at a compound rate of 8 percent:
The reason the IT budget rises at that rate is that the M+E and the P numbers are compounding year after year. The only way to keep the IT budget flat is to constrain development spending or to continuously find savings in both M+E and P. Were you to hold the overall IT spending flat year over year, you would spend 15 percent less than the classic model suggests.
Suppose you refuse to compromise on your support of existing systems and their users and you refuse to compromise on your maintenance of assets you already have in place. That is, suppose you don’t change your M+E or P behavior but you constrain development spending only. If you do, the available investment for developing systems in support of the business drops precipitously and, most would argue, dangerously for any business:
If your competitor does this while you keep development spending steady, they will end up spending roughly one half the amount on development in a five-year period that you will. It’s hard to imaging a greater gift for your competitive advantage from IT than a competitor lying down in this manner. While you are building extensions to the supply chain or luring new customers through IT-enabled channels and systems, your competitor is flat-footed and inactive. You win. You should be so lucky.
What is far more likely is that everyone in your and your competitor’s shop will be asked to contribute, and the development spending might be cut to, say, 75 percent of current levels. The remainder of the savings needed to keep overall IT spending flat must come from M+E and P spending. If they participate proportionately, the planned spending would look like this:
There are innumerable variations on this theme. In this case, in order to retain development spending at three quarters of previous budgets and keep overall IT spending flat, M+E and P must each drop by an average of 15 percent, compounding year over year, from the “no change” model introduced as a baseline.
Holding the line on IT spending may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the company. A well-oiled IT function can be a great asset to a company. You may find you don’t have the budget for it. You may find you can’t afford not to.
It takes executive management with some level of IT savvy and an IT organization that is performing at a high level. If either is thin, you must either repair or hold the line and look for cost reductions.
For IT, there’s a classic — almost epic — tension between flexibility and control. It’s the idealized hope for diversity reeled in by the practical need for standardization.
You can see this tension play out as the saga between application development and IT operations today. On the “apps” side, you see the passionate idealist — the artist who sees nothing but possibilities. On the “ops” side, you see the pragmatic realist — the analyst who knows the costs of these possibilities all too well.
As the action unfolds, you see application development make its plea:
The conflict builds as IT operations responds:
And there lies the heart of this conflict: For IT, the cost of managing diversity is staggeringly high. Provisioning and maintaining software is complex enough in the best of circumstances. But when versions, variants and customizations proliferate, IT is left to care for a complexity mess of massive proportion.
There is no antagonist in this story. It’s not about right and wrong, parsimonious and profligate. In fact, there’s wisdom and good intention on both sides. It’s a story of naturally opposing interests finding their equilibrium — quite rationally — in the form of a new model that accommodates both flexibility and control.
You can see the same drama play out in the world of manufacturing. (OK, software is technically a form of manufacturing, but I mean the traditional form of manufacturing where you can more readily drop something on your foot.)
In this world, the demand side of the business (think of it as “apps”) puts pressure on the supply side (think of it as “ops”) to customize products to suit the (faddish, fickle, fleeting) markets they serve. Of course the supply side resists; the cost of retooling, producing and maintaining such diversity is way too high.
So high, in fact, that Henry Ford famously declared the Model T would come in any color the American public desired, so long as it was black. Ford, like others, recognized that the cost of maintaining many versions and variants of complex systems as a matrix (many parts, many versions) is nothing short of crushing.
This recognition gave rise to mass customization, a manufacturing model that allowed great flexibility in product specification without the incremental management overhead. Today, mass customization allows manufacturing organizations to have their cake and eat it too — flexibility and control.
It’s achieved by blending the best of standardization and customization — the “base” components are standardized and the “customized” aspects are layered on top. The lifecycle of each variant is managed rigorously to prevent chaos.
Think of the example of an automobile. The same chassis may support the minivan and SUV, but the functionality and fit-and-finish are quite different.
We see the same dynamic playing out in IT. The solution isn’t clamping down on software diversity — that’s too constraining. It’s also not about accepting diversity at any cost. It’s about changing the model by which we manage software — which brings us back to the saga of apps and ops.
Today, IT is under pressure to modify OS and middleware platforms to suit the needs of diverse and ever-changing applications. For IT operations, the inclination is to standardize on a single off-the-shelf platform.
But that’s not practical. Today, IT is forced to provision and maintain multiple platform versions and variants — without a control model for doing so. They’re forced to trick out the Model T when they’re only set up to support one-size-fits-all. IT accommodates because they don’t want to stand in the way of application innovation — but their acquiescence comes at a very high cost.
rPath was designed to tackle this very challenge. It provides a highly scalable management model for diverse software systems, allowing IT operations to take on ever more variability without an ounce of added cost. It’s a model for mass customization of software systems — IT can have its cake and eat it, too.
This week, rPath announced a management solution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowing Red Hat customers to bring this level of flexibility and control to the diverse software systems they’re wrestling with.
You can also attend the webinar we’re hosting on Dec. 10th with Linux Magazine and featuring Lee Thompson, former chief technologist at E*TRADE FINANCIAL, to learn how you can have your cake and eat it, too.
You don’t have to look much further than the high-profile credit card losses or data breaches of the last few years to realize that companies are extremely vulnerable to data theft. Take Heartland Payment Systems or the U.S. Military Veterans for example, each of which lost upwards of 130 million and 76 million customer records, respectively. Surprisingly enough, some companies facing litigation over data breaches were/are PCI compliant, and yet are still left wondering why they’ve suffered from data loss.
Compliance mandates aren’t flawless, and compliance in and of itself does not lead to better security, period. PCI mandates are simply guidelines that companies can (read: are required to) follow to improve their security against hackers and insider threats, but they shouldn’t stop there. Companies should focus on taking security initiatives one step further than just meeting here-and-now compliance requirements, and provide customers with the highest security regarding their personal information. While simply getting the compliance "check box" is a tempting option to the overburdened IT professional or line of business manager, it’s in the best interest of the company to use the budget allotted for compliance to go above and beyond what is required in the mandate. As long as companies and organizations need to comply, they should take the opportunity to operationalize an enterprise-wide security monitoring capability.
As an example, all companies looking to become PCI compliant have to undergo an audit – a standard practice – however, the reasons for undergoing the audit are really what is important. Surviving the audit simply to meet the check box is a bad thing; relishing the audit as a milestone to improved security is a good thing. PCI and other standards, such as NERC, are becoming more prescriptive, but even these mandates still teeter on the line of enabling companies to again simply achieve the check box. The prescriptive nature of some requirements, such as PCI DSS 10.6, can be passed in isolation, without meeting the broader goal of improved security.
For instance, the requirement states that companies should “review logs for all system components at least daily. Log reviews must include those servers that perform security functions like intrusion detection system (IDS) and authentication, authorization and accounting protocol (AAA) servers (for example, RADIUS).”
While this particular rule tries to drive the correct behavior, the rule can be simply validated by demonstrating a user-interface (UI) where logs can be read, or a report where logs can be historically viewed. The spirit of the rule is undoubtedly about using all of the log and information intelligence within a company to keep a vigilant eye over key information, like credit card data, so that security is preserved. In fact, one could argue that the rule should really demand a higher level of intelligence be derived from the listed log sources, not simply that review take place. Without using that intelligence, the technology deployed is not fully leveraged and the goal of greater security isn’t achieved.
The reality is that no one can review all logs for all systems on a daily basis; even in the smallest companies that are subject to PCI mandates, this cannot be achieved. Therefore, the intent of the rule – better security visibility – isn’t achieved. As a result, the implementation of technology to meet PCI standards should become more stringent, which will lead to better implementation of controls, rather than simply aiming to achieve the check box.
For those companies that are surpassing compliance mandates to better protect customer data, the benefits are endless. In addition to the avoidance of hefty non-compliance fees, companies are seeing additional business benefits from adhering to compliance mandates, such as more efficient operation of a secure network, and improved enterprise visibility, not to mention the millions of dollars they are saving by preventing data breaches and network attacks.
Aaron Weller says: You make a valid point in the article - but I can't see how the content relates to the title. Our learned response to pain is to try to minimize it - hence the behaviour that you are (quite rightly) indicating isn't very valuable (i.e. just doing the minimum to achieve a checkbox rather than anything meaningful).
To really succeed at security, compliance should fade into the background for people doing the work rather than being front-and-center. The trick is for security leadership can define broader goals for an effective security program that weave in compliance, without making it the be-all and end-all. Easier said than done in some cases, but a very worthwhile objective.
Peter Thomas says: I agree that it is difficult to measure the RoI of BI directly. You need to use proxies, these would include things like: -
1. User adoption
How many people use the system and do more people want to use it? How do these numbers change over time? What is penetration like in different areas of the organisation?
2. User retention
Of the people who are given access to the system and training in its use, how many go on to become regular users? How does this change over time?
3. Usage
Of course this relates to the previous two points as well, but directly measuring usage and even using your BI tool to analyse how this changes over time is important.
4. Demand for enhancements / extension to the BI system
If you have people wanting the system to do more, then they must be happy with how it is working in general terms.
5. Surveys
It always helps to get feedback on what you are doing. Partial results of one such survey appear on my blog at: http://tinyurl.com/dfxpkj
6. Do business users mention your system in meetings
When presenting figures to senior management, is the source quoted as a matter of course (hopefully to establish that the figures are reliable)?
7. Productivity studies
In a BI project I ran recently, we moved from it taking 5-7 days to assemble certain types of information to it being available virtually instantaneously.
8. Improvements in what you are measuring
If there is a correlation between what you are measuring and improvements in it, then you are on the right track. When this is sales and profitability, then RoI becomes somewhat easier to establish.
Business intelligence quality is different from the return on investment (ROI) for BI. A business intelligence project or system is designed to deliver specific information. BI quality is, most often, an IT-based assessment of the results of a business intelligence project. Measuring the quality of the BI system includes the basic logistics: getting the right information to the right people when needed and meeting the stated business goals for the BI system. Thus, BI quality is determined by assessing:
On the other hand, the ROI for BI is a business-management question. The ROI assessment is perhaps even more important to the organization. However, there are no industry standards for measuring the benefits of business intelligence. But listing them as “intangible” is no longer an acceptable answer.
Can We Calculate ROI for BI?
Placing a tangible value on the benefits of BI has been frustrating. In most cases, organizations have had to accept on intuition and faith that the benefits of BI are worth the costs, and that the risks of not making those investments are too great. What if your competitors are translating all their data into some fantastic information that will give them the edge?
We can start with the total cost of ownership for BI, which can be calculated with some level of reasonable accuracy. Deciding what should be included in those costs may be a matter of interpretation. However, there can be some standard and relatively straightforward decisions that will allow project-by-project comparisons and overall resource estimates. These costs include those for the data warehouse; information delivery; data gathering and management; and all the associated infrastructures, software, tools and support resources.
In addition, the BI project development, management and delivery costs, including the infrastructure, are part of the cost equation. What is most likely not being considered in current cost calculations are those involved in the training and experience base of the people who are a critical component of the BI product. Deciding what should be included in BI investment costs may be a matter of interpretation, but all these costs can be calculated, or at least identified, prorated and estimated.
Much more difficult is placing a value on the benefits received. How well are we using the information to make better decisions? There are metrics, such as comparisons of operational efficiencies, before and after, that are relatively standard for some of the most simple of BI applications. However, projecting and calculating tangible values for returns, especially on more complex BI investments, is not simple. The process can be frustrating and has often seemed impossible and, perhaps, pointless. But if we can assess these benefits and provide some tangible ratings, we can provide a basis for management decision-making about BI investments for the organization.
Think about it this way:
Good BI is the fusion of the right information, the right time, the right format, and the right human and/or system resources. If we wish to improve BI, we ask these questions:
A Benefits Audit for BI
The most effective way to assess the benefits of BI is to ask the people who are involved. We can use questionnaires and surveys administered at regular intervals. This is a simple and direct approach. However, such a benefits audit must also be rigorous and structured to give tangible, realistic assessments of the relative benefits of BI projects, BI capsules (designated BI groupings), and the total organizational BI investment.
Using formal, well-constructed metrics and patterns, we can turn the opinions of experts into a trustworthy assessment of the benefits of BI for the organization. Those experts are the people who use the information and the managers who daily assess the value of the performance of those people who use this information. We may also wish to add competitive analysis and opinions from customers, marketing teams and consultants. Thus, we can turn expert evaluations into a practical, meaningful assessment tool for management.
There are a number of valuable features to be gained from such a benefits audit. We can:
The questions, formats and process of the BI benefits audit will provide increased awareness, understanding and training for those who develop and implement the audit, as well as for those who participate.
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