My presentation opening Microsoft Faculty Summit 2009 in Dublin

1. Irish Software Industry Needs
What the Third Level Institutions can do
Giuseppe De Francesco
R&D Team Leader and CSO
Autentys International
Microsoft Ireland Academic Summit 2009
Dublin
18 June 2009

2. Introducing
Giuseppe De Francesco
Chief of R&D and CSO at Autentys
International
IEEE 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

3. Software Market
Understanding the targets
The main software markets
1. Consumer
1. Gaming
2. Personal computing (shopping, banking … …)
2. Business
1. Workstations (OA, CRM, DDM … …)
2. Servers (Web, Enterprise ACL, DB … …)
3. Mainframes
3. Computing Services
1. Cloud computing and services

4. Software Market
Understanding the targets
Strongly emerging market: The Cloud

5. Software Market
Internet Clients OS Platform
May 2009 – Source: Net Applications

6. Software Market
Internet Clients Browsers
May 2009 – Source: Net Applications

7. Software Market
Internet Servers (by Developers)
May 2009 – Source: Netcraft

8. Software Market
Servers by Operating System
May 2009 – Source: IDC

9. Software Market
Programming Languages
March 2008 – Source: O’Reilly Radar

10. 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

11. 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)

12. 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("%dn", x);
return 0;
}

13. 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.

14. 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

15. Thank you!
Questions ?
To contact me
by email: g.defrancesco@ieee.org
by phone: +353-87-2739446
IEEE website: http://www.ieee.org
Computer Society website: http://www.computer.org