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Before I start I feel I should apologise for missing out skills like Prince and SAP and BSP and LSMW and ABAP in last week’s article. I’ll try and do something about them even if I haven’t got a clue what half of them mean! Okay – I know what Prince means., having studied it for a while. I just think it’s a shame that they didn’t have the imagination to call Prince II ‘DMFKAP’ (Design Method Formally Known As Prince). SAP apparently is some sort of business analysis tool, BSP I still haven’t worked out, seems to stand for Legacy System Migration Workbench and ABAP appears to be connected with SAP, although I haven’t got a clue what the acronym stands for. I found this site: www.SAPtips.com which had the title “Fun with SAP”. That sounds like a contradiction in terms to me… Then there’s AXAPTA from Microsoft. What’s that all about? So, if anybody asks nicely, the above areas will form the basis of next week’s article. Although I suppose if somebody asks nastily, especially with threats, then I’ll have to do it anyway… Back to this week’s article. It is by special request from Martin Audley, who has supplied me with loads of keywords all to do with the life-or-death struggle between Lotus developers and IBM. Sorry, I mean between Lotus/IBM and Microsoft. Or was I right the first time? Starting with Lotus, what sort of demand is there? Well, up until March, demand was steadily rising from 12 contract postings in October last year, to 170. However, last month postings dropped to 120 and so far this month there’s only been 60-odd. Domino requirements have followed a similar pattern although at a much lower level with a maximum of 40 postings in February. This month, so far, there have only been 8 postings. Lotus Sametime hardly appears at all with only one posting in December and one this month. Strangely, entering the criteria “Lotus Notes” upsets our stats engine. I have no idea why, except that it’s Microsoft based so perhaps it’s having an allergy attack! Using Notes on its own once again shows a peak in March this year with 170 postings, and then a dropping off down to only 55 this month. Mind you, in October last year there were only 12 contracts posted, so it’s still an improvement. What about rates? Not fantastic, I’m afraid. Average rates for Lotus generally (but bear in mind this could include lower-paid support staff) are hanging around the £20/hr mark at the moment. Notes rates are very similar. Domino rates have been a little higher, hovering around the mid-30s between November and March, but then dipped down to £26 in April. Lotus Sametime figures are not available, which generally means that the agents put “Market rate” or “Excellent” or any other meaningless drivel in the rate, which means that we’re unable to get a meaningful figure. Does anybody ever bother calling agents who put stuff like that as the rate? After all, nobody’s going to put “Rate: pants”, are they? Why not do it for location as well? “Location – Somewhere nice.” Now we’ll move over to the IBM side of things and look at WebSphere. Once again the trend is very similar. Having peaked in March at around 190 contracts, it’s now dipped again to 140 last month and has only hit 65 so far this month. Requirements for WebSphere Portal have been growing, albeit very slowly, and the postings per month have yet to hit 20. IBM Content Manager or DB2 Content Manager are not popular at all with only a few postings in the early part of the year for IBM Content Manager and not an electronic sausage for the DB2 version. But look at the rates! WebSphere generally gets you between £45 and £50/hour on average and if you have WebSphere Portal, it topped £56/hr last month! Having said that, Portal jobs seem to peak and trough quite dramatically. Searching for Lotus Workplace will get you nowhere. I know it’s an up and coming set of technologies but at the moment you may as well be advertising your origami skills (very in at the moment, apparently). It doesn’t appear that the contract market is getting many Workplace requirements at the moment. Certainly we’re not picking any up. But how does this compare to rates for the equivalent Microsoft products? – And don’t start arguing about whether these products can or can’t be considered equivalents – okay? Rates for Microsoft Exchange contractors have hit a peak of £44/hr in March but are dipping again. As I’ve said, this analysis covers anyone from a support person to a manager running a major Exchange network. But these are average rates so they should represent things fairly well. Outlook experience requirements are spasmodic and are fairly low at the moment, after a high of £33/hr in February. Don’t even bother looking for a Novell GroupMail contract. We haven’t seen a single posting in the last nine months. So there you are. Good rates on average for most skills, providing you can find the contract! That’s all for this week; if you read this when it’s posted on CUK’s website, have a good Bank Holiday weekend. If you read it in the newsletter, I hope you had a good Bank Holiday weekend! Alan www.webalertz.com May 27, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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