The medical waistband is the latest front in the battle among smart-phone makers for the business customer.

Pagers have long reigned in hospitals, where they are prized for their dependability. But with doctors treating more patients and hospitals facing pressure to be more efficient, companies like Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM) see an opportunity to peddle their devices.

Last month, Stanford Hospital & Clinics, in Palo Alto, Calif., started a trial with Apple and Epic Systems Corp., a provider of health-care information systems, to test software that will let medical staff access patient charts on Apple’s iPhone.

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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) is on a mission to expand its partnerships in Brazil in response to the country’s growing information-technology market.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant is announcing today the formation of its Sao Paulo IBM Innovation Center, part of a network of 43 such centers that will provide training, consulting services and assistance to bring new technologies to market.

The company will also be making a “more concentrated effort to engage with the venture community in Brazil,” said Claudia Fan Munce, the managing director of IBM’s venture capital group, which invests in venture capital funds but not directly in start-up companies.

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Whilst I have often grouped Cloud Computing with the consumerization of IT (and the iPhone as it’s most visible example) together in concert in my disruptive innovation presentations, I never really thought of them as metaphors for one another. When you think of it, it’s really a perfect visual.

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They might be helpful for solving your computer woes, but watch out for those shifty information technology employees at your office–a recent survey says they may be stealing your passwords and copying your research and development plans.

In a survey of more than 400 senior IT professionals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, Cyber-Ark Software, a Newton, Mass.-based security software company, found that 35 percent of IT administrators admitted to accessing corporate information like human resources records, customer databases and M&A plans, up from 33 percent a year ago.

Moreover, if fired, 47 percent of the staffers surveyed said that they would take company financial reports and M&A plans with them, a sixfold increase from the previous year’s survey. About 46 percent said that they would snag CEO passwords and R&D plans, a fourfold increase.

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Satyam Computer Services (SAY) has more than 10,000 staff above what it needs, according to Vineet Navyar, the CEO of Tech Mahindra, which won the auction to buy the fraud-stricken IT outsourcing company.

According to Reuters, Nayer said today that it would be better to reduce staff significantly than to risk putting all 40,000 of Satyam’s workers out of jobs.

“I think the future is great but there will have to be a few sacrifices in terms of compensation, in terms of a large number of things… Some form of least painful way of reduction in staff is an option which will have to be looked at,” he said.

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Intel (INTC) reported stronger-than-expected earnings and said that it believed the slumping computer sales market had “bottomed out.” Wall Street’s response: Sell ‘em.

The chip giant’s shares are off four percent, dragging on the Nasdaq Composite and raising some questions about the tech sector generally. This bout of pessimism is probably a bit overdone and reflects more what’s happened in the past few months than what happened yesterday.

Tech shares have been on a strong run, with the S&P 500 information technology group up 15 percent in the last month alone. That’s a pretty quick sprint, and Intel’s merely decent news wasn’t enough to sustain it.

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Hey, we can’t all have careers at Google (GOOG). Sometimes when you work in IT, you have to hold your nose and hope for the best.

Last year we named “The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT,” but we barely scratched the topic’s grime-caked surface. In the world of technology, there’s plenty of dirt to go around.

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I don’t often look to movies about beer for poignant macroeconomic commentary, but as February ended with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate (and rising), a line from “Strange Brew” struck me as particularly relevant. As they’re introduced to their new jobs as the only two workers on the bottling line, the Mackenzie brothers are told: “Welcome to 1984, the age of automation and unemployment. The rise of the machine and the fall of man. The end of the human era.”

Will cloud computing, as some predict, be to information technology today what automation was to the assembly line in the ’80s? If so, what happens to those jobs? To the people who used to do them?

The impact on the bottom line is impossible to deny. Cutting IT costs while maintaining, or even improving, performance levels saves jobs in other departments and might even help keep the company afloat. When done right, the savings realized from server consolidation are well documented, and they only improve when cloud-like levels of virtualization, automation and outsourcing come into play. The cold, hard truth is virtualization and cloud computing let IT departments do a lot more with a lot less.

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It’s a rough morning for the Indian IT outsourcing sector, which has been hit hard by a highly negative report from Wachovia analyst Edward Caso.

Caso says the group is likely to take another leg down, forecasting that April conference call season will see most of the companies issue guidance below Street expectations. He writes that “demand remains lackluster and decision-making slow.” Customers budgets are down 10-20 percent this year, he contends, but with many operating on a month-to-month basis and focused solely on cutting costs. Caso writes that he is hearing pricing has come down close to 10 percent, and that existing contracts are being repriced. He also says the sector is seeing increasing competition for deals from Accenture (ACN) and IBM (IBM).

Caso cut his ratings today on Cognizant (CTSH), Wipro (WIT), Infosys (INFY) and Syntel (SYNT) to Underperform from Market Perform. He also reduced EPS estimates for all four companies. Caso said the stocks could see another 15-30 percent decline from Friday’s close.

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Meet Mark, an IT guy at a small company who occasionally has to renew licenses for the software utilized by the business. Recently, he had to activate a copy of PaperPort, the scanning and document management software from Nuance. In order to free up another activation slot, he had to uninstall the old one first while being online. Like most activation-licensed software, this doesn’t always work properly.

To resolve the issue Mark contacted Nuance’s support. To his surprise however, they didn’t want to help him straight away, instead asking him to take pictures of the CD in order to prove that the company owned a legitimate copy.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Mark told TorrentFreak. “After arguing with support for a while on how ridiculous it was, I still had to have the license within the day. To make a long story short I finally got them to unlock 2 licenses after 2 days of repeated calls and sending the picture of the CD multiple times.”

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There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan.

Well, those days are over.

This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO–that rumpled executive who, like Scotty on “Star Trek,” has limited social skills and usually emerges from the engine room only when something blows up. In these tough times, CEOs are frequently calling tech chiefs out of the wiring closet and into the boardroom, and putting their business skills to the test.

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International Business Machines is pushing ahead with “cloud” computing technology–storing information and running applications in shared computing facilities, connected to users over the Internet.

IBM (IBM) last month tacked on an additional role to Erich Clementi, its vice president for strategy. He’s now also general manager, enterprise initiatives, with responsibility for Blue Cloud, IBM’s name for cloud computing.

“Since customers are looking for new economics, this might be a good moment for clouds,” Mr. Clementi, 50 years old, said in an interview. He described his area of operations as “a new way of delivering IT as a service,” that can be cheaper and simpler than adding capacity in a data center.

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I’m at the Palazzo Ballroom in the Venetian/Palazzo Hotels in Las Vegas where Intel (INTC) chair Craig Barrett is talking a whole bunch about the developing world. He’s probably not going to talk much about the company’s “Atom” microprocessor for netbooks, or about any other chip stuff.

“There are more Internet users in China than there are people in the U.S.,” Barrett notes, “And more cellphone users in South Africa than in the U.S.” But it won’t matter, he says, if the world doesn’t address inequities, starting with education. “If someone asked me what’s the most important technology you could put in the classroom, I would say, a really good teacher,” says Barrett. He brings onstage executives from NetHope, which is coordinating IT for developing countries, including Kenya, and Save the Children, which is working on getting Intel Classmate PCs into classrooms in Bangladesh.

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Admit it. When you read that headline–“Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source”–you assumed that was a good thing, right? Who’s afraid of enterprises saving a lot of money and getting much more flexible IT for their IT budgets?

Gartner, apparently. According to Gartner, that widespread adoption is cause for alarm, as Glyn Moody rightly notes (and pillories). Somehow, Gartner assumes that if 85 percent are using open source and 69 percent don’t have a formal open-source management team, the world is going to end.

As Moody notes, however, IT organizations have virtually nothing to worry about when adopting open source:

“About a dozen times a year,” [Software Freedom Law Center general counsel Eben] Moglen says, “somebody does something [that] violates the GPL. Most of the time, they’re doing so inadvertently, they haven’t thought through what the requirements are. And I call them up and I say, ‘Look, you’re violating the GPL. What you need to do is this. Would you help us?’” The answer is invariably yes, he says.

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RBC Capital got religion this morning on the slowdown in IT spending, cutting ratings on four stocks and slashing estimates and price targets on a host of others. The multiple moves boil down to this statement, which is repeated in most of the individual reports this morning: “We are taking a more conservative stance across our coverage universe to reflect a degrading environment for global IT spending.”

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