Entrepreneurs need to help California's IT systems
Wednesday, 27 January 2010, 23:45 IST   |    1 Comments
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Entrepreneurs need to help California's IT systems
Bangalore: People are still unaware of the fact that Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramen. Silicon Valley is known as the world's entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California's State capital. In his article published on TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa , Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley said, "While Silicon Valley's workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento's workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State's infrastructure and public services, and the Valley's workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight." Last November, the unemployed workers couldn't get cheques from the state, and their benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers waited for up to two months to receive their cheques, because the Employment Development Department couldn't make timely changes to its computer systems. Wadhwa said, "Like most of the State's systems, these were built in the '70s and '80s in now antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS." There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. Enterprise systems require large-scale transaction-processing capabilities, have stringent security requirements, and need to have high availability. But that is not different from what Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga require. Even fledgling startups in the Valley are building systems that make some enterprise systems seem like child's play. While talking at California's Executive Institute on Jan 21, Wadhwa discussed these issues with around 200 IT managers available there. He said, "Most were in agreement that new thinking was needed. IT managers seemed eager to be using the same technologies as their Silicon Valley brethren. Managers described how feverishly they are working to consolidate and integrate departments and move their systems into a more modern era." "What I suggest that the State do as a top priority is to engage Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to rebuild its systems infrastructure. These entrepreneurs can create new systems for a fraction of the cost of patching up old systems. Take the system that processes unemployment checks. The State has budgeted $50 million to upgrade it," added Wadhwa.

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