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Outsourcing, of course, has made a big impact on the IT job market over the last few years, only it’s sometimes called “managed services.” Companies are still very nervous about hiring full-time talent. Security, however, is a tremendous place to be in IT right now. Companies wants skills in forensics, biometrics, data leakage prevention, intrusion detection and compliance.

David Foote is CEO and chief research officer, as well as cofounder, at Foote Partners of Vero Beach, Fla.

David closely tracks the hiring and human resources trends across the IT landscape. He’ll share his findings of where the recession has taken IT hiring and where the recovery will shape up. We’ll also look at what skills are going to be in demand and which ones are not. David will help those in IT, or those seeking to enter IT, identify where the new job opportunities lie.

Here are some excerpts:

David Foote: I cofounded this company with a former senior partner at McKinsey. We developed a number of products and took them out in 1997. We not only have that big IT executive and trends focus as analysts, but also very much a business focus.

We’ve also populated this company with people from the HR industry, because one of the products we are best known for is the tracking of pay and demand for IT salaries and skills.

We have a proprietary database — which I’ll be drawing from today — of about 2,000 companies in the U.S. and Canada. It covers about 95,000 IT workers. We use this base to monitor trends and to collect information about compensation and attitudes and what executives are thinking about as they manage IT departments.

For many years, IT people were basically people with deep technical skills in a lot of areas of infrastructure, systems, network, and communications. Then, the Internet happened.

All of a sudden, huge chunks of the budget in IT moved into lines of business. That opened the door for a lot of IT talent that wasn’t simply defined as technical, but also customer facing and with knowledge of the business, the industry, and solutions. We’ve been seeing a maturation of that all along.

What’s happened in the last three years is that, when we talk about workforce issues and trends, the currency in IT is much more skills versus jobs, and part of what’s inched that along has been outsourcing.

If you need to get something done, you can certainly purchase that and hire people full-time, or you can rent it by going anywhere in the world — Vietnam, Southeast Asia, India, or many other places. Essentially, you are just purchasing a market basket of skills. Or, these days, you can give it over to somebody, and by that I mean managed services, which is the new form of what has been traditionally called “outsourcing.”

It’s not so much about hiring, but about how we determine what skills we need, how we find those, and how we execute. What’s really happened in two or three years is that the speed at which decisions are made and then implemented has gotten to the point where you have to make decisions in a matter of days and weeks, and not months.

There have been some interesting behaviors during this recession that I haven’t seen in prior recessions. That lead me to believe that people have really resisted the temptation to reduce cost at the expense of what the organization will look like in 2011 or 2012, when we are past this recession and are back into business as usual.

People have learned something. That’s been a big difference in the last three years. … Unemployment in IT is usually half of what it is in the general job market, if you look at Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers. I can tell you right now that jobs, in terms of unemployment in IT, have really stabilized.

In the last three months [of 2009] there was a net gain of 11,200 jobs in these five [IT] categories. If you look at the previous eight months, prior to September, there was a loss of 31,000 jobs.

So going into 2010, the services industry will absolutely be looking for talent. There’s going to be probably a greater need for consultants and companies looking for help in a lot of the execution. That’s because there are still a lot of hiring restrictions out there right now. Companies simply cannot go to the market to find bodies, even if they wanted to.

Companies are still very nervous about hiring, or to put it this way, investing in full-time talent, when the overhead on a full-time worker is usually 80-100 percent of their salaries. If they can find that talent somewhere else, they are going to hire it.

There are certain areas, for example, like security, where there is a tendency to not want to hire talent outside, because this is too important to a company. There are certain legacy skills that are important, but in terms of things like security, a lot of the managed services that have been purchased in 2009 were small- to medium-sized companies that simply don’t have big IT staffs.

If you have 5,000, 6,000, or 7,000 people working in IT, you’re probably going to do a lot of your own security, but small and medium size have not, and that’s an extremely hot area right now to be working in.

We track the value of skills and premium pay for skills, and the only segment of IT that has actually gained value, since the recession started in 2007, is security, and it has been progressive. We haven’t seen a downturn in its value in one quarter.

Since 2007, when this recession started, overall the market value of security certs is up 3 percent. But if you look at all 200 certified skills that we track in this survey that we do of 406 skills, overall skills have dropped about 6.5 percent in value, but security certifications are up 2.9.

It is a tremendous place to be right now. We’ve asked people exactly what skills they’re hiring, and they have given us this list: forensics, identity and access management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, disk file-level encryption solutions, including removable media, data leakage prevention, biometrics, web content filters, VoIP security, some application security, particularly in small to medium sized companies (SMBs), and governance, compliance, and audit, of course.

The public sector has been on a real tear. As you do, we get a lot of privileged information. One of the things that we have heard from a number of sources, I can’t tell you the reason why, is that a lot of recruiting is happening in the private sector right now with the National Security Agency and Homeland Security — in-the-trenches people.

I think there was a feeling that there weren’t enough real deep technical, in-the-trenches kind of talent, in security. There were a lot of policy people, but not enough actual talent. Because of the Cyber Security Initiative, particularly under the current administration, there has been a lot of hiring.

Managed services looks like one of the hottest areas right now, especially in networking and communication: Metro Ethernet, VPNs, IP voice, and wireless security. And if you look at the wireless security market right now, it’s a (US)$9 billion market in Europe. It’s a $5.7 billion market in Asia-Pacific. But in North America it’s between $4 and 5 billion.

There’s a lot of activity in wireless security. We have to go right down into every one of these segments. I could give you an idea of where the growth is spurting right now. North America is not leading a lot of this. Other parts of the world are leading this, which gives our companies opportunities to play in those markets as well.

For many years, as you know, Dana, it was everybody taking on America, but now America is taking on the rest of the world. They’re looking at opportunities abroad, and that’s had a bigger impact on labor as well. If you’re building products and forming alliances and partnerships with companies abroad, you’re using their talent and you’re using your talent in their countries. There is this global labor arbitrage, global workforce, that companies have right now, and not just the North American workforce.

IBM’s new Power7 processors provide the foundation for several new Unix server offerings from the company. Each Power7 processor has up to eight cores and four threads per core. Power7 also features “TurboCore” mode and has “intelligent threads,” meaning the number of threads varies depending on the workload.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) on Monday launched a one-two punch with its new Power7 processors, which the company claims have twice the performance of the Power6 line but consume less power.

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A Power7 ceramic module with a lid is shown here bottom side facing up. Each Power7 processor contains eight cores, with four threads per core.

(click image to enlarge)

These processors power IBM’s Unix servers, four new models of which were also unveiled Monday in a move that might strengthen IBM’s position in the Unix server market.

The Power7’s Tech Specs

The Power7 uses a 45 nanometer process. Each Power7 processor has up to eight cores and four threads per core. That’s four times the maximum number of cores and eight times the number of threads per chip as the Power6.

The Power7 has a TurboCore mode, which is optimized for database and other transaction-oriented workloads. This runs with four cores active and with most of the resources from the other four cores behind the eight active cores. Doing this gives the four active cores more cache memory and memory bandwidth and increases their clock speeds.

Power7 technology has “intelligent threads,” meaning the number of threads varies depending on the workload. More threads increase total capacity, and fewer threads increase individual processing tasks, such as real-time analytics and database transactions.

Active Memory Expansion, a new Power7 technology, dynamically adjusts the amount of compressed memory required based on a workload’s needs. This expands the memory capacity of Power7 systems without requiring the installation of more physical memory. A server using Active Memory Expansion can handle up to 65 percent more transactions or users than servers without this feature, according the IBM’s estimates.

Intelligent Energy technology in the Power7s lets customers power on and off various parts of the system, or dynamically increase or decrease processor clock speeds based on thermal conditions and system utilization. They can do this on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers.

More Bang for the Buck

IBM probably managed to increase the Power7’s processing capability while reducing its power requirements by shrinking the die, Carl Howe, director of anywhere research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld. “That will reduce your power consumption and put more cores on the die,” he explained. “It’s simple geometry.”

The latest processors have a high degree of power management through very refined clock gating, Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat, told TechNewsWorld. This lets the processor shut down the parts that are not required in a transaction or a process, he explained.

In addition to offering more performance, Power7 could change the market, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, contended. “With Power7, IBM is shifting the focus from mere processor evolution to systems-wide innovation,” he told TechNewsWorld. “As vendors of every sort have moved towards multi-core, multi-threaded solution development, the value of the microprocessor has increasingly become just one part of overall system quality.”

Battles in the Unix Market

IBM on Monday launched four servers based on the Power7 processor. The Power 770 and 780 are based on modular designs and will accommodate up to 64 Power7 cores; the other two are the Power 750 Express and the Power 755.

These are positioned against Intel’s Itanium processor, which powers Unix servers from HP (NYSE: HPQ).

The processors will power servers in the Unix market, which Pund-IT’s King said racks up US$16 billion in sales annually. IBM’s and Intel’s new processors unveiled Monday indicate the battle for control of the Unix and Linux markets is still raging.

“IBM moved from third place to first place in the Unix server market, with about 40 percent of the sector’s sales, by delivering better systems performance, increased energy efficiency and a forward-thinking road map,” King explained.

What about Sun’s Sparc, which Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) pledged to support at the Jan. 27 briefing on Oracle’s roadmap with Sun? “The No. 1 product beneath our installed database is Sun,” Oracle copresident Charles Phillips said at the briefing. He pledged to make Sun the gold standard for computing for servers running Oracle’s products.

Power7 systems may pull well ahead of those powered by the Sun Sparc and Intel Itanium, King contended. “Both HP’s Itanium-based servers and Sun’s UltraSparc servers have been stuck in the doldrums, and there’s nothing on the horizon which indicates that either company will provide anything close to the performance of the Power7,” he said. “While Intel’s launch of Tukwila Monday seems to be designed to keep IBM from hogging the spotlight completely, there appears to be more meat in the Power7 announcement.”

Locking Horns With Intel

Meanwhile, after many delays, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) announced its Itanium 9300 series processor, previously code-named “Tukwila,” in San Francisco Monday. This has 2 billion transistors, four cores, and eight threads per processor through enhanced Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. The Tukwila offers up to eight times the interconnect bandwidth, five times the memory bandwidth; and up to seven times the memory capacity of its predecessor using DDR3 components, Intel said.

Yet another chipmaker, AMD (NYSE: AMD), has promised to unveil its own multicore processor, the 12-core Opteron “Magny-Cours,” in the first quarter of this year

It’s apparently possible to hack into someone’s Facebook account without even meaning to, as a Georgia family recently discovered. After signing on through a cellphone using their own names and passwords, they were given access to an account belonging to a complete stranger. It’s possible the error was due to a carrier routing problem, and it’s just one more way online information can go astray.

A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: Strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T (NYSE: T) — revealed a little known security flaw with far-reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn’t appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. However, experts said such flaws could occur on email services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

“The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook,” said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Hey Facebook, That’s Not My Face

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia (NYSE: NOK) smartphone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn’t look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page’s owner.

“He’s white — I’m not,” she said with a laugh.

Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

Mari landed inside another woman’s page.

Fran’s phone — which had never been used to access Facebook before — took her inside yet another stranger’s page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an email to one of their own accounts to prove it.

They were dumbfounded.

“I thought it was the phone — ‘Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,’” said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Ga., outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T.

Sawyer contacted The Associated Press after reporting the problem to Facebook and AT&T.

Trouble in Transit

The problem wasn’t in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet.

That illuminates a grave problem.

Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn’t. However, in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers’ Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers’ phones to Facebook and back.

Fortunately, Hamiel said, the vulnerability would be of limited use to a hacker interested in pulling off widespread mayhem, because this hole would let him access only one account at a time. To do more damage, the criminal would have to pull off the unlikely feat of gaining full control of the piece of equipment that routes Internet traffic to individual users.

AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in “a limited number of instances” and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

The Sawyers experienced a different glitch. Coe said an investigation points to a “misdirected cookie.” A cookie is a file some Web sites place on computers to store identifying information — including the user name that Facebook members would enter to access their pages. Coe said technicians couldn’t figure out how the cookie had been routed to the wrong phone, leading it into the wrong Facebook account.

He also said AT&T could confirm only that the problem occurred on one of the Sawyers’ phones, possibly because they had logged off Facebook on the other two before reporting the incident.

Facebook declined to comment and referred questions to AT&T.

Not Universal

Some Web sites would be immune from this kind of mix-up, particularly those that use encryption. A Web browser would have trouble deciphering the encryption on a page that a computer user didn’t actually seek, said Chris Wysopal, cofounder of Veracode, a security company.

Sensitive sites and those used for banking and e-commerce generally use encryption. However, most other sites, including some Web-based email services, don’t use it. One way of checking: The Web addresses of encrypted sites begin with “https” rather than “http.” Facebook uses encryption when user names and passwords are entered, to cloak the sign-on from snoops, but after the credentials are entered the encryption is dropped.

It’s unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won’t load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers’ case, “somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That’s what’s strange,” he said.

Odd Connections

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and emails were not returned. It’s unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that’s likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November.

Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing , was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Wash., when he logged onto Facebook from his cellphone. He didn’t recognize the people who had written him messages.

“I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong,” he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner: A young woman.

He got her email address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.

“No,” she wrote back, “but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!”

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones. (AT&T had no comment because the incident wasn’t reported to the company.)

“I felt like I had been let down by the phone company and by Facebook,” he said.

He says he has put the incident behind him. But one piece of it remains: He and the young woman are now Facebook friends.

Blaming online agitators for riots that happened months ago, the Chinese government has blocked Internet access, text service and international phone calls in the entire region of Xinjiang since last summer. Some residents — many of whom run businesses that cannot continue without the Web — must regularly journey hundreds of miles to towns outside the blackout zone simply to check their email.

They arrive at this gritty desert crossroads weary from a 13-hour train ride but determined. The promised land lies just across the railway station plaza: a large, white sign that says “Easy Connection Internet Cafe.”

The visitors are Internet refugees from China’s western Xinjiang region, whose 20 million people have been without links to the outside world since the government blocked virtually all online access, text messages and international phone calls after ethnic riots in July. It’s the largest and longest such blackout in the world, observers say.

Every weekend, dozens of people pile off the train in Liuyuan, a sandswept town on the ancient Silk Road that’s the first train stop outside Xinjiang, 400 miles (650 kilometers) east of Urumqi, the regional capital.

“We must get online! We must!” said Zhao Yan, a petite, ponytailed businesswoman from Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. She has rented the same private booth in the Internet cafe every weekend since August in an uphill battle to keep her small trading business going.

“If this goes on another couple of months, I’ll have to give up,” Zhao said. “I can’t keep up with the outside world, and I’m losing money.”

Traveling Far and Wide

Xinjiang residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung places like Liuyuan. One customer had traveled 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) just to get online.

Authorities unplugged Xinjiang, a sprawling area three times the size of Texas, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the ethnic rioting between the Han Chinese majority and the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that the government says left almost 200 dead. China’s government blamed overseas activists for the riots, saying they stirred up resentment in the Uighur community through Web sites and e-mails.

For many, it feels like being thrown back in time 30 years.

Xinjiang now has no e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this month promised Internet access would resume “gradually,” but it also said the same thing in July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted Web sites, half of them state-run media, have returned.

No country has shut down an information infrastructure so widely for so long, said the Open Net Initiative, a Harvard-linked partnership that monitors Internet restrictions around the world. Some former Soviet Union countries have done it during sensitive elections, but “the blackout only lasted for hours or days at most,” said Rafal Rohozinski, the group’s principal investigator.

The normal Internet in China is already among the world’s most restricted.

“The fact that the Chinese authorities had to resort to shutting down and cutting off the entire infrastructure … is indicative of the difficulty they are having in controlling cyberspace,” Rohozinski said.

“You can look at news or movies. That’s it. It’s all one-way,” said a 23-year-old from Urumqi, who sat a few screens away from Zhao and was clicking between an e-mail account and a Russian-language Web site. He’d been online for 11 hours. He didn’t give his name because he’s half Uighur and was worried about retribution from authorities.

‘It’s Like a Social Experiment’

Liuyuan has little more to offer the Xinjiang refugees besides its Internet connection and its steady supply of cross-country trains. “You don’t want to stay here,” said the desk clerk at the Liutie Hotel, the only guesthouse in town. Most people who get off the train are headed for the famous oasis of Dunhuang, two hours to the south.

On Sunday, most of the Xinjiang customers bolted back home after hearing word that mobile phone text-messaging services had finally resumed. The region’s mobile phone users sent 42.84 million text messages the first day of service alone, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

Users are still limited to no more than 20 texts per day, with no international service. International calls from Xinjiang were blocked, but the official Xinhua News Service reported that they were now allowed, starting Wednesday.

One Xinjiang woman who wanted to chat with her American husband finally took an overnight bus to neighboring Kazakhstan to get online.

“It’s like a social experiment — what would happen if we take away the Internet?” said the husband, Kevin Komoroski, who lives in Missouri. He said their work on her U.S. visa application has slowed to a crawl and now relies on air mail. “No one at any sort of level knows when it will end.”

An international scientific conference was relocated outside the region. A board member of an international academic association travels regularly to Beijing, 1,800 miles from Urumqi, to check her e-mail. The Federal Express office in Urumqi tells customers to check orders by phone instead.

Laptop-Toting Refugees

The Xinjiang government has said foreign investment and tourism were “seriously” affected last year, though it points to the July violence alone. Import-export business fell 38.8 percent in the first nine months of last year, dropping almost 18 percentage points more than the rest of China, it said in a report this month.

“We’re like deaf people now,” said Wei Chengzhi, who works in the online service office of Xinjiang Wind Energy. “We’re working on a joint project with a partner company in Shanghai. We can’t communicate with them. Nor can we do any online research.”

Xinjiang’s commerce department says it now offers Internet access to companies that can get approval from the local foreign trade or foreign investment office, but only on weekdays.

One business owner couldn’t wait. Just after the riots, Ma Hui and her husband took off on a three-day road trip east to Beijing to keep their dried fruit company going. Since then, her husband has lived in the capital to deal with online orders, while Ma lives in Urumqi and handles the product.

“We’ve been married three years and we’ve never lived apart before,” she said. “We don’t know when to expect the Internet to come back to normal.”

One person who doesn’t mind the blackout is the owner of Liuyuan’s Easy Connection Internet Cafe, who wouldn’t give his name but said he was quite happy with the increased business.

As night fell in Liuyuan, Zhao sighed and returned to her work online. She had three more hours before taking the overnight train home to Urumqi, but she expected to be back and online Saturday morning.

It’s easy to recognize her fellow refugees by their computer bags, Zhao said.

“You should go to Jiuquan,” the next major stop east along the railway, she said. “It’s a bigger city, and even more people go there. They check into the hotels and use the broadband.”

A faster connection — another 200 miles (320 kilometers) away.