In this poll, I'd like to find out what role monitoring plays in your network and the kind of tools you are using.

I don’t want to say much more about this poll at the moment because I somehow think that I influence readers with my introductory articles. I think, the questions speak for themselves. So, be a worthy 4sysops citizen and fulfill your voting obligations.

Note that you can select more than one answer. Feel free to tell us what monitoring solution you are using in a comment below.

In this poll about IT employment, I asked how the number of IT pros in your organization has changed in the last four years, mostly because I was interested to find out if Nicholas Carr's claim, that IT doesn't or won't matter, can be measured.

The results are somewhat surprising to me. More than 1,000 4sysops readers took part in this poll. At the time of this writing, 36% said that the number of IT pros decreased, 34% said that the number of IT pros increased, 20% said that the number of IT pros didn’t change, and 10% didn’t know whether the number changed or not. (Note that these numbers can change again; see my comments below.)

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The purpose of this poll is to find out if recent developments in cloud computing are already affecting the value of IT for businesses.

Exactly eight years ago (May 2003), Nicholas Carr published an article with the provocative title “IT doesn’t matter” and, in 2004, a book with the interestingly less aggressive title “Does IT matter?” caused quite a stir. In IT, eight years correspond to a century in other fields (electricity, for instance—one of Carr’s favorite analogies. Thus I thought it would be interesting to see if Carr’s prediction a century ago has come true or not.

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This article discusses the results of the 4sysops IPv6 poll where readers could share the plans of their organizations regarding IPv6.

More than 400 4sysops readers took part in this IPv6 poll. It is no surprise that the majority of organizations (73%) have no plans to deploy IPv6 any time soon. However, it is a surprise that 10% are already working with IPv6. Another 8% plan to deploy IPv6 in 2011, and 9% plan to deploy in 2012.

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I will argue in this article that IPv6 will not come gradually but overnight. In this poll, you can share the plans of your organization to get prepared for the big change on the Internet.

I am quite aware of the fact that running such a poll on 4sysops won’t reveal representative data. It is not just that I hope I have whetted your appetite for IPv6 with my IPv6 tutorial. It is no secret that some regions, most prominently the emerging markets in Asia, have a bigger interest in deploying IPv6 than do the countries in the west that won’t really suffer from the fact that all IPv4 addresses have been taken. And according to the statistics of my web analysis tool, mostly westerners enjoy reading 4sysops.

You know, about two years ago I recommended to disable IPv6 in your organization mostly for security reasons and for reducing complexity. If you followed my advice, you probably didn’t miss anything since then. IPv6 still plays no significant role on the Internet and in corporate networks.

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In this post, I explain why I think that IT certifications are indeed overvalued.

More than 600 IT pros took part in this poll, and the majority (58%) thinks that IT certifications are overvalued. 21% believe that they are undervalued, and the same portion thinks that IT certifications have just the right value.

Usually, 600 is a significant number of participants for such a survey. However, it is interesting to note that it is different this time. When the poll started, even more IT pros felt that IT certifications are overrated by organizations. I am not completely sure about the numbers, but I think after the first 100 votes or so this option got about 65% of the votes. The difference in the result at the time of this writing can’t be explained by statistical variations.

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The IT field is flooded by the proliferation of certification training from Microsoft, Cisco and others. Are IT certifications overvalued by employers? Please take part in this poll!

When I started in IT, IBM dominated the computer market. There were no certifications and training was provided primarily to businesses data processing departments. Microsoft, Dell, EMC and Cisco had not been born. I took data processing courses comprised of programming and computer science concepts, since my institution did not have a CS minor. I was hired after graduation as a programmer for a bank and was immediately sent to IBM school for DOS (Disk Operating System) and COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language). Then I was sent to the same IBM school for JCL (Job Control Language). Most of you haven’t heard of IBM DOS, COBOL and JCL.

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I admit this was an ill-matched fight. Only 16% of 4sysops readers believe that the iPad, or tablets in general, will replace the PC. How could I ask such a silly question? On the other hand, no less a man than the fabulous mastermind Steve Jobs, elected as the most powerful business person, made this prediction.

Could it be that that was just another sales pitch for the iPad? I think, we can rule out this option. Steve Jobs is a marketing machine, but his ego is more important to him than a few more sold iPads. This was a video interview that was seen by millions of his admirers and opponents. He can’t just use the excuse later that a journalist misinterpreted him.

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At the All Things Digital conference, Steve Jobs predicted that the iPad (some people still call them tablets) will replace the PC. He did not say that PCs will completely disappear, but that only a minority (“one out of x”) will use them.

He compared PCs to trucks and the iPad to a car. When our civilization was transformed from an agrarian to an urban society only a few people kept using trucks. The majority are driving cars nowadays. I suppose with this analogy he wanted to indicate that PCs come from the pre-Internet era. In the post-PC era, the Internet (or perhaps the cloud) will dominate our way of interacting with digital assets and this is why we will need a new device with a user interface that is adapted for this purpose.

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Of course, the winner of this contest was decided right from the outset. Nevertheless the results of this poll are quite interesting. More than 700 IT pros took part in this poll and to my experience this number is statistically significant; that is, it is quite likely the results represent the search engine market share among Windows admins.

As the time of this writing 86% of 4sysops readers prefer Google as their search engine, and 10% use Bing. Note that these percentage numbers are rounded. This is why the results still appear to change. So if you wait a few days, Bing might have 11% of the votes. However, the overall pattern is stable now and I don’t expect any major changes.

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You’ve probably read the news that Bing is gaining market share lately, although these advances are only moderate and it appears they are at the expense of Yahoo! and not Google, Microsoft’s arch rival. Considering that Microsoft has invested a lot in Bing’s technology and marketing I have been wondering why progress is relatively slow.

I have a theory, meanwhile, but I’d better not reveal it now because it might influence the outcome of this poll. I am really curious to know if the share of Bing decision makers is different among 4sysops readers.

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As the time of this writing more than 500 4sysops readers took part in this poll. I must admit I am a bit surprised about the results. 44% of 4sysops readers already deployed Windows 7 and 26% plan to deploy Windows 7 without the service pack. Only 17% want to wait for SP1, 8% will skip Windows 7, and 5% are undecided.

I only added the option that got the majority of the votes after Lukas complained about the incompleteness of this poll. I never imagined that 44% have already deployed Windows 7 by now. Considering that the Windows 7 market share is now about 10% this number can hardly be representative.

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At first, I wanted to run a poll about your Windows 7 adoption plans. But others have been faster. According to Computerworld’s survey a whopping 72% want to deploy Windows 7 and only 11% will stick with what they know. So the interesting question is not really if but when.

The fact that Windows 7 sells like hot cakes is certainly mostly because many skipped Vista and are now forced to update their IT environment. Many also didn’t replace their hardware for a while because of the bad economic situation. Since the prospects are looking better now, a lot of organizations will start investing again in new PCs and will take the chance to also upgrade to the latest Windows version. The media hype about Windows 7 is probably also a reason why Windows is again everybody’s darling.

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I somehow forgot my poll about cloud computing which I started last year. I wanted to know how many Windows admins are already involved in cloud computing and how interested 4sysops readers are in this new technology. The result is quite interesting:

At time of this writing, 17% are already using cloud technology, 11% are planning to introduce cloud computing in their organization, and 24% have no such plans. The most interesting result here is that 48% of those who took part in this poll didn’t choose any of these three options. Does this mean that almost half of participants simply don’t know if their company will introduce cloud computing?

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You might have noticed that I’ve blogged more often about cloud computing lately, especially about Amazon’s AWS. This is not just because I have moved 4sysops to EC2. It is more the other way around. I have moved 4sysops to the cloud because I want to get more experience with cloud computing. I must admit that I got somehow hooked on EC2 since I played with it the AWS Management Console a while back.

On the other hand, it is possible that I have been taken by just another hype. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle cloud computing is now at the top of the hype curve. It is interesting to note that it shares this position with eBook readers which is the other topic that fascinates me for quite a while. (Just ordered the new Kindle International.) So you see I am prone to fall for all kinds of new technologies which are sometimes just hypes.

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