*Sixty-four percent of IT hiring managers rate certifications as having extremely high or high value in validating the skills and expertise of job candidates.

The national Tech Excellence Awards are Ireland’s principal badge of honour in the IT industry. The Awards will take place on May 14th in the Ballsbridge Hotel Dublin. These awards celebrate success in the country’s most vibrant sector, with an annual prize giving and Gala Dinner which has become the principal networking event in the technology business calendar.

Apache Hadoop provides a platform for building distributed systems for massive data storage and analysis using a large cluster of standard x86 based servers. It uses data replication across hosts and racks of hosts to protect against individual disk, host, and even rack failures. A job scheduler can be used to run multiple jobs of different sizes simultaneously, which helps to maintain a high level of resource utilisation. Given the built in reliability and workload consolidation features of Hadoop it might appear there is little need to virtualise it. However, there are several use cases that make virtualisation of this workload compelling:

Bracknell, UK – 17th of April, 2015 – Saba, a global leader in cloud-based intelligent talent management solutions, announced today that it has chosen SureSkills Limited as a solution provider and reseller in EMEA. Founded in 1993, SureSkills provides a portfolio of services in training and certification; IT consultancy and corporate education services for many of the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies.

For any business that currently uses Microsoft Lync video and Web conferencing platform, April 14th brings a changeover to Skype for Business.

Redmond is rolling out the new Skype for Business client as part of its April monthly update for Office 2013 and Office 365 users worldwide. The rollout is expected to be complete by the end of May, at which point all businesses using Lync Online will be transitioned over to Skype for Business.

SureSkills, a European and North American Partner of Saba sent a team of management, HR and Learning & Development experts to the highly anticipated Saba @Work 2015 conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.