- IBM blissfully absent - PACE2005
Friday and Saturday the National Infocomm Competency Centre (NICC) was hosting PACE2005. Pace stands for "Promoting Accreditation, Competency & Employability". In short it was a conference cum exhibition about the IT industry and its jobs. All big training institutes were there, some of the higher education and quite a number of IT firms. Various awards were given out and a cute 7 year old girl was proclaimed the youngest Microsoft professional in Singapore.
The IT firms participating were: Sun, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, CheckPoint, BusinessObjects and Iomega.
IBM was blissfully absent. Maybe I'm getting it wrong, and caring for the next generation of passionate users isn't important, however I was quite disappointed. There is so much cool IBM technology around but IBM (at least here) fails to create excitement among the IT professionals of tomorrow.
I talked to some of my training friends, they said demand for Lotus training is non existent, however my recruiter friends see an increasing demand for Lotus know how, which leads to a painful gap, that Microsoft is exploiting: "See you can't get Lotus people, why not migrate to our offerings" -- and they are right (at least here).
Where is that "Singapore's coolest RCP application" contest?
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