Irish Software Industry NeedsWhat the Third Level Institutions can do

Giuseppe De FrancescoR&D Team Leader and CSOAutentys International

Microsoft Ireland Academic Summit 2009Dublin18 June 2009

Introducing Giuseppe De Francesco

Chief of R&D and CSO at Autentys InternationalIEEE Senior Member volunteering as– IEEE UK & ROI Section

MD Officer

– IEEE Computer Society (UK & ROI) Member of the Executive Committee Representative for the Republic of Ireland

Software Market Understanding the targets

The main software markets1. Consumer

1. Gaming2. Personal computing (shopping, banking … …)

2. Business1. Workstations (OA, CRM, DDM … …)2. Servers (Web, Enterprise ACL, DB … …)3. Mainframes

3. Computing Services1. Cloud computing and services

Software Market Understanding the targets

Strongly emerging market: The Cloud

Software Market Internet Clients OS Platform

May 2009 – Source: Net Applications

Software Market Internet Clients Browsers

May 2009 – Source: Net Applications

Software Market Internet Servers (by Developers)

May 2009 – Source: Netcraft

Software Market Servers by Operating System

May 2009 – Source: IDC

Software Market Programming Languages

March 2008 – Source: O’Reilly Radar

Software Market Employment situation

FÁS and Future Skills Needs report– Shortages of Software Engineers– Shortages of Computer Analysts– Projected Strong Growth in IT employment– Shortages of software engineers and computer

analysts/programmers with employers continuously sourcing IT skills from abroad

– Many IT and CS graduates on Live Register– Steady negative trend in CS and IT graduates

CS and IT Education Improving the offering

Royal Irish Academy – Excerpt from the President’s Address • 28 February 2008 (Prof. James A. Slevin)– It seems self-evident then that, given these unknowable

challenges and changes, we should be thinking about reversing the excessive trend to utilitarianism and we should be thinking about returning to the Humboldt concept of a well-rounded education, and an educational system that promotes and teaches critical thinking and analytical skills to our students. Increasingly, leading employers seek graduates with generic rather than specific skills. They want graduates with an ability to think, to analyse complex situations and to communicate effectively their ideas. There is growing evidence, albeit anecdotal at this point, that some of the most prestigious international companies based here in Ireland are having to go to Eastern Europe to source graduates with these skills—Google being a particular and very important case in point. (Edited version 2009-ISBN 978-1-904890-09-6)

CS and IT Education Improving the offering

During my interviews only 2% of the candidates gave the proper answer to this question, 0% in the given time (1 minute):

On a Linux virtual machine (one core, 512MB RAM, KDE UI) the following code compiles without any errors or warnings but crashes when executed giving a “segmentation fault” error: why? Please make the needed corrections to the code.

#include <stdio.h>#include <stdlib.h>int main(int argc, char *argv[]){ int *i, x; x = 0; *i = x; *i += 1; printf("%d\n", x); return 0;}

CS and IT Education Improving the offering

During my interviews none of the candidates proposed an acceptable scenario for this request (time given: 2 hours):– ACME Ltd has the Accounting DB on a IBM iSeries (DB2/400 on

OS-400) and the Stock, CRM and Orders DB on a 2 Xeon machine with Windows 2003 Enterprise Server using MS-SQL Server 2000 Enterprise. The customer wants to allow sales persons around the country to create/update orders, query the stock, check customers’ solvency and so on while on the road. ACME Ltd. wants a 99.9% uptime SLA with a latency never higher than 15 seconds. They have already one IIS Web Server and want a .NET based solution.

What type of HW/SW infrastructure you’ll propose? Draft a macro-design.

What type of data you will collect to design and deliver a solution respecting the requested SLA? Explain your choices.

CS and IT Education Improving the offering

Old approach curricula, Industry biased– English communication proficiency– Understanding of Society and Market issues

Knowledge of Politics and Economics

– Enabling students to design complex applications using well established world class standards

Grid and Cloud computing, IPC, Remoting, Clustering Address computation/Pointers, applied physics calculus Full understanding of Managed Environments Agile methodology, Extreme Programming Communication and Network security Current OSs architectures .NET, C/C++, Java (scripting)

– Last year Internship

Thank you!Questions ?

To contact meby email: g.defrancesco@ieee.org

by phone: +353-87-2739446

IEEE website: http://www.ieee.orgComputer Society website: http://www.computer.org