2014 World's Best Multinational Workplaces

Sources http://www.greatplacetowork.net/best-companies/worlds-best-multinationals/the-list

Talk about world class! Great Place to Work® is proud to present the 25 World's Best Multinational Workplaces for 2014. Check out what companies made it to the 2014 World's Best Multinational Workplaces list!

• 1. Google

  
  www.google.com
  Industry: Information Technology
  Listed in: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, United States
  

• 2. SAS Institute

  
  www.sas.com
  Industry: Information Technology
  Listed in: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Netherlands, United States

• 3. NetApp

  
  www.netapp.com
  Industry: Information Technology | Storage/Data Management
  Listed in: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States

• 4. W. L. Gore & Associates

  
  www.gore.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production | Textiles and textile products
  Listed in: China, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States

• 5. Belcorp

  
  www.belcorp.biz
  Industry: Retail
  Listed in: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru
  

• 6. Microsoft

  
  www.microsoft.com
  Industry: Information Technology | Software
  Listed in: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States

• 7. Marriott

  
  www.marriott.com
  Industry: Hospitality | Hotel/Resort
  Listed in: Australia, Brazil (2), India, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States

• 8. Monsanto

  
  www.monsanto.com
  Industry: Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals | Biotechnology
  Listed in: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Guatemala, India, Mexico, Netherlands

• 9. Cisco

  
  www.cisco.com
  Industry: Information Technology
  Listed in: Austria, Brazil, Chile, India, Italy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, United States

• 10. American Express

  
  www.americanexpress.com
  Industry: Financial Services & Insurance | Banking/Credit Services
  Listed in: Argentina, India, Japan, Mexico, United States
  
  

• 11. Scotiabank

  
  www.scotiabank.com
  Industry: Financial Services & Insurance | Banking/Credit Services
  Listed in: Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico (3), Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico

• 12. SC Johnson

  
  www.scjohnson.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production | Personal and Household Goods
  Listed in: Canada, Chile, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, United Kingdom, Venezuela
  

• 13. Autodesk

  
  www.autodesk.com
  Industry: Information Technology
  Listed in: Australia, Canada, China, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States
  

• 14. Telefónica

  
  www.telefonica.com
  Industry: Telecommuncations
  Listed in: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, Mexico (2), Peru (2), Spain, Uruguay, Venezuela

• 15. National Instruments

  
  www.ni.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production
  Listed in: China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States

• 16. FedEx Corporation

  
  www.fedex.com
  Industry: Transportation
  Listed in: Belgium, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates
  

• 17. Atento

  
  www.atento.com
  Industry: Professional Services | Telephone Support/Sales Centers
  Listed in: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay

• 18. EMC

  
  www.emc.com
  Industry: Information Technology | Storage/Data Management
  Listed in: Austria, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom

• 19. Daimler Financial Services

  
  www.daimler-financialservices.com
  Industry: Financial Services & Insurance
  Listed in: Canada, China, France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Turkey
  

• 20. Diageo

  
  www.diageo.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production | Beverages
  Listed in: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Ireland (2), Jamaica, Mexico, Spain, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Venezuela

• 21. Hyatt

  
  www.hyatt.com
  Industry: Hospitality
  Listed in: France, Germany, India, United Kingdom, United States, United Arab Emirates
  

• 22. Mars

  
  www.mars.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production | Food Products
  Listed in: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy (2), Japan, South Korea, Poland, Portugal, Spain (3), Sweden, Switzerland, United States

• 23. Accor

  
  www.accor.com
  Industry: Hospitality | Hotel/Resort
  Listed in: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, India, Mexico, Peru, United Kingdom (2)
  

• 24. eBay

  
  www.ebay.com
  Industry: Information Technology
  Listed in: China, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, United Kingdom
  

• 25. The Coca-Cola Company

  
  www.coca-colacompany.com
  Industry: Manufacturing & Production | Food Products/Beverages
  Listed in: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Turkey

Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.

A central cooling plant in Google’s Douglas County, Georgia, data center.

Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor, referred to simply as “the floor.” My visit is the latest evidence that Google is relaxing its black-box policy. My hosts include Joe Kava, who’s in charge of building and maintaining Google’s data centers, and his colleague Vitaly Gudanets, who populates the facilities with computers and makes sure they run smoothly.

A sign outside the floor dictates that no one can enter without hearing protection, either salmon-colored earplugs that dispensers spit out like trail mix or panda-bear earmuffs like the ones worn by airline ground crews. (The noise is a high-pitched thrum from fans that control airflow.) We grab the plugs. Kava holds his hand up to a security scanner and opens the heavy door. Then we slip into a thunderdome of data …

Urs Hölzle had never stepped into a data center before he was hired by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A hirsute, soft-spoken Swiss, Hölzle was on leave as a computer science professor at UC Santa Barbara in February 1999 when his new employers took him to the Exodus server facility in Santa Clara. Exodus was a colocation site, or colo, where multiple companies rent floor space. Google’s “cage” sat next to servers from eBay and other blue-chip Internet companies. But the search company’s array was the most densely packed and chaotic. Brin and Page were looking to upgrade the system, which often took a full 3.5 seconds to deliver search results and tended to crash on Mondays. They brought Hözle on to help drive the effort.

It wouldn’t be easy. Exodus was “a huge mess,” Hölzle later recalled. And the cramped hodgepodge would soon be strained even more. Google was not only processing millions of queries every week but also stepping up the frequency with which it indexed the web, gathering every bit of online information and putting it into a searchable format. AdWords—the service that invited advertisers to bid for placement alongside search results relevant to their wares—involved computation-heavy processes that were just as demanding as search. Page had also become obsessed with speed, with delivering search results so quickly that it gave the illusion of mind reading, a trick that required even more servers and connections. And the faster Google delivered results, the more popular it became, creating an even greater burden. Meanwhile, the company was adding other applications, including a mail service that would require instant access to many petabytes of storage. Worse yet, the tech downturn that left many data centers underpopulated in the late ’90s was ending, and Google’s future leasing deals would become much more costly.

(More information read http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/)

Tablet Android Google Akan Memulakan Perang Harga

Tablet Android Google bersaiz 7 inci yang akan dibina dengan kerjasama Asus (dinamakan Google Nexus) dijangka akan memulakan perang harga antara jenama-jenama tablet. Bahangnya akan terasa di Malaysia kerana tablet Google itu akan bersaing terus dengan tablet prestasi sederhana sebelum ini dari jenama ViewSonic, Ainovo, CSL, Kindle Fire serta Nook Color.

Secara tidak langsung tablet Google akan turut bersaing dengan jenama tablet prestasi tinggi seperti Samsung, Motorola, Sony, BlackBerry serta iPad. Khabarnya tablet Google itu akan diperkenalkan sekitar Mei 2012 pada harga antara RM400-RM800 ($199-$299 Dolar Amerika) yang mana hampir kesemua orang mampu untuk memilikinya.

Ura-ura awal mengatakan Google mahu menjual tablet mereka pada harga lebih rendah namun tindakan sebegitu akan mendapt tentangan pengeluar tablet Android lain seperti Samsung, Motorola, Sony, Acer serta Asus sendiri. Ia akan memulakan perang harga.

Jika harga tablet Google disasarkan pada paras rendah kemudian ia mendapat sambutan hangat, pengeluar lain akan terpaksa menurunkan lagi tablet mereka untuk meraih perhatian pengguna, kesannya mungkin akan merugikan pengeluar tablet yang sebelum ini sudah mengeluarkan tablet dalam lingkungan harga RM1500-RM1800. Kami merasa tablet Android Google pasti mendapat sambutan hangat. Siapa untung? Pengguna tablet.

(Sumber - http://www.iawani.com)

Top 10 Tech Acquisitions Of 2011

By Rob Preston InformationWeek
December 16, 2011 09:40 AM

While 2011 wasn't a year of historically huge tech merger and acquisition deals, activity was nonetheless vigorous. Google alone bought more than 20 companies, while the likes of HP, Oracle, SAP, Dell, and Microsoft rounded out their mature product portfolios with acquisitions. Among the strongest riptides in enterprise IT M&A: software as a service (SaaS), mobility, big data, and social networking.

What follows, in reverse order, is one editor's take on the 10 most important (though not necessarily the largest) enterprise IT acquisitions of the year. Not included on this list are the big OEM-oriented deals: Western Digital's $4.3 billion deal to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for instance, or Texas Instruments' $6.5 billion acquisition of National Semiconductor.

10. VMware and Socialcast: Virtualization market leader VMware isn't immune to social business fever, acquiring Socialcast, a maker of cloud-based communications and collaboration software that mimics "the interaction style of social networks, but with the security, management, and integration functions of an enterprise system," as my colleague David Carr reported in May. The Socialcast deal (terms weren't disclosed) followed two other cloud acquisitions by VMware: slideware maker SlideRocket in April and open source email software maker Zimbra in January 2010.

9. SAS Institute and Assetlink: This acquisition (no price tag was disclosed) isn't top 10 tech M&A material unto itself, but it's important in the context of the red hot trend it represents: the move by CMOs to apply analytics to their ad campaigns, promotions, social outreaches, and other marketing programs in order to prove and refine their effectiveness. Assetlink makes "marketing resource management" software, used to plan and budget ad spending, manage the content, create workflows, and manage leads. Its acquisition by SAS, announced in February, follows like-minded deals by IBM (it shelled out $480 million for Unica in October 2010) and Teradata ($525 million for Aprimo in December 2010).

8. Dell and Force10:Dell's acquisition of switching vendor Force10 Networks (financial terms weren't disclosed), following its $960 million deal in December 2010 to acquire storage virtualization vendor Compellent Technologies, enhances its credibility as a big league data center supplier, alongside Cisco, HP, and Brocade. Force10's market share is small--just 1%, according to Dell'Oro estimates around the time of the July 2011 deal--but its technology is considered first rate and Dell will bring it to many more customers.

7. Microsoft and Skype: Among the biggest tech deals of 2001, Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype is also emblematic of one of the biggest CIO trends: the consumerization of enterprise IT. The lines between business and consumer IT are blurring, and Microsoft is looking to capitalize on that trend by integrating the consumer-oriented Skype videochat software with its enterprise unified communications and messaging platforms. Speaking of consumerization, will 2012 be the year Microsoft finally lands Yahoo?

6. Oracle and RightNow: It's almost as if Larry Ellison plunked down $1.5 billion of Oracle's money to get back at a former protege, Marc Benioff, whose Salesforce.com and its cloud-based services have been stealing most of the thunder in enterprise software. Within weeks of his orchestrated rebuff of Benioff at the Oracle OpenWorld conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Ellison announced Oracle would be acquiring RightNow, a leading maker of SaaS-based customer service and management apps and a semi-competitor to Salesforce.

As my colleague Chris Murphy noted in a story on the RightNow deal, "Oracle, one of the tech industry's most acquisitive companies, isn't too concerned about overlapping products when it comes to buying into hot markets." Oracle had previously introduced its suite of enterprise software, Fusion, with a cloud-based option for CRM, as well as a hosted version of its PeopleSoft software licensed on a per-user, per-month basis.

5. Salesforce.com and Radian6: It wasn't among the biggest of tech acquisitions in 2011, a cash and stock deal valued at about $320 million, but it's strategically important to one of the industry's hottest vendors, as Salesforce.com pushes its "social enterprise" agenda, including its Twitter-like Chatter service. Radian6, a maker of social media monitoring and analytics services, has since become the basis of Salesforce's Social Marketing Cloud, a collection of services it rolled out in November to help companies manage their brands and engage with customers across the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

4. AT&T and T-Mobile: The biggest tech deal of 2011 ($39 billion) is actually the biggest non-starter, as competitors, regulators, trustbusters, lobbyists, and politicians dig in to stop this merger of the No. 2 and No. 4 U.S. mobile carriers. AT&T said in November that it's withdrawing its merger application from the FCC to focus instead on winning the antitrust lawsuit the Department of Justice had filed against it in August. Meantime, AT&T is reportedly trying to sell a sizable portion of T-Mobile's assets to a smaller mobile carrier in order to sway the DOJ. AT&T's incentive to compromise: It will owe T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom $6 billion in cash and compensation should the deal fall apart.

3. Google and Motorola Mobility: Google's $12.5 billion deal to acquire this Motorola spinoff, a maker of smartphones and set-top boxes, was the second-largest tech deal of 2011. As my colleague Paul McDougall reported in August, the deal, which still must pass regulatory muster, is a clear sign that Google intends to take on Apple--and to a lesser extent RIM and Microsoft/Nokia--as a supplier of tightly integrated mobile devices, namely its Android operating system on Motorola smartphone and tablet hardware.Motorola's extensive patent portfolio also appealed to Google, as it seeks to fend off Apple and Microsoft lawsuits claiming Android squats on some of its intellectual property.[ Try these best practices on for size in the new year. IT Leader Survival Guide For 2012: 5 Must-Do's. ]

2. HP and Autonomy: This $10.3 billion deal was the biggest enterprise software acquisition of the year--too big, according to many pundits, as the price tag was almost 12 times Autonomy's 2010 revenue. But HP's CEO at the time, Leo Apotheker, since ousted and replaced by Meg Whitman, needed to make a splash amid investor concerns that the hottest IT markets were passing HP by. And no question, Autonomy's no slouch. It's a leader in enterprise content management software--search, archiving, e-discovery, and more--helping customers make sense of their big (unstructured) data.

Rob Preston,
VP and Editor in Chief, InformationWeek
rpreston@techweb.com

(Source - http://informationweek.com)

Analysis: Skype, better with Facebook than Google?

By Jennifer Saba

NEW YORK | Fri May 6, 2011 7:33am EDT

(Reuters) - As two Internet powerhouses slug it out to tie the knot with Skype, Facebook looks likely to be a more aggressive suitor than Google, and the world's largest social network may make for a better fit.

Reuters reported Wednesday that Facebook and Google are separately weighing partnerships with Skype, the popular web video telephony service used by millions around the globe for communication.

Talks with Facebook and Google are still preliminary, but any deal could involve an outright takeout or a joint venture partnership, two sources told Reuters.

A deal involving Skype, which is readying for an IPO, could be valued at $3 billion to $4 billion, the first source said. Skype's public offering is expected to raise about $1 billion, several other sources said.

Analysts and technology observers are betting on Facebook, in the belief the two make better companions and that Skype completes Facebook by providing assets it does not have.

"It's not surprising to me that both these companies are interested," said Eric Jackson, founder and manager of the investment firm Ironfire Capital. "It's a much more valuable asset to Facebook than to Google."

Google already has voice chat and video capabilities, though Skype is a more robust product, said Rory Maher, an analyst with Hudson Square Research.

It could incorporate Skype into Google Voice, and even get some social-media credibility after it failed in an attempt to do so with Buzz.

"There are benefits that Google has from combining Skype, but I think it's less clean than it is for Facebook," says Maher.

Conversely, Facebook has that much more incentive to snap up Skype because it would encourage people to spend more time on the site than they already do -- virtually the social network's raison d'etre.

"Communication is core to what Facebook users do," said Mo Koyfman, a principal at the venture capital firm Spark Capital. "Owning that platform would be very interesting."

Google, Facebook and Skype declined to comment.

THE ART OF SKYPE

Skype is still on track for an IPO later in 2011, raising as much as $1 billion by some estimates. That it has become the belle of the ball, attracting the interest of the Internet's two most dominant powers, bodes well for its debut.

Last year, Skype boasted about 124 million connected users every month by the end of June. But just 8.1 million were paying customers, using Skype to make calls to traditional phones at discounted rates.

The company was founded in 2003 and bought by eBay two years later for $3.1 billion. Ebay then sold a majority stake in Skype to an investor group in 2009, while keeping about a third of the company.

Now, both Skype and Facebook could tap new users worldwide while Facebook stands to gain a new revenue stream, Koyfman said.

Facebook had net income of $355 million in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $1.2 billion. It is one of a handful of Internet companies including Twitter, Groupon and Zynga that have stoked interest from investors eager to jump on the social media bandwagon.

And it has also put the big Internet guns -- including Google -- on alert.

Indeed, some speculate that Google could be bidding for Skype just to keep it out of the hands of other companies.

"Any deal that takes a great asset away from Facebook is a win for Google," suggested Ironfire Capital's Jackson.

(Reporting by Jennifer Saba; Editing by Edwin Chan and Steve Orlofsky)

(Reference : http://www.reuters.com)

Linux patent suit ruled against Google

A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay US$5 million for the infringement.

The suit was filed in June 2009 by a firm called Bedrock Computer Technologies, which also named the likes of Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, PayPal, Match.com and AOL as defendants in the suit. Bedrock, as was reported when the suit was filed, was founded by a prominent patent reform advocate (the corporation has been accused of being a patent troll) and filed suit against the defendants in question for violation of Patent 5,893,120, detailing "methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data".

Since it's the Linux kernel itself, the core of the open source operating system, this could have implications well beyond Google--and even beyond the other defendants in the case, for whom court decisions have not yet been determined.

"Google can easily afford US$5 million if it has to, but this patent infringement case has major implications for the IT industry in general and for Linux in particular," patent and IP activist Florian Mueller wrote on his blog. "The plaintiff identified a portion of the Linux kernel as part of the 'Accused Instrumentalities.' Many companies using Linux have already been required by the patent holder to pay royalties, and many more will now, based on this jury verdict, elect to pay."

A potentially contested turf: the Android mobile operating system, which is Linux-based and continues to grow fast, evolving into many different mutations of a mobile (and now tablet) software architecture.

Mueller points out that not only did Google attempt to declare the patent invalid, but so did Linux software maker Red Hat, which counts several of its clients among the defendants.

"Google will continue to defend against attacks like this one on the open source community," a spokesperson for the company said. "The recent explosion in patent litigation is turning the world's information highway into a toll road, forcing companies to spend millions and millions of dollars defending old, questionable patent claims, and wasting resources that would be much better spent investing in new technologies for users and creating jobs."

(Reference : http://www.zdnetasia.com)