As companies emerge from the recession, IT managers need to rethink their careers, especially as businesses recast IT's role more as growing the business than running the operations. The old approaches to career growth won't work. Instead, IT managers -- and those who aspire to be managers -- should focus on seven key skills for the new era.

Twitter was one of the first to see what happened when traffic to the site came more from the API than the Web. It now has more than 65 million tweets per day, most coming from services that use the Twitter API.

Twitter has made numerous changes to fix its API. Those experiences have taught providers what mistakes not to make when launching a service.

A startup, who wishes to remain anonymous, is delivering an innovative new business service from an IaaS cloud and most of the time pays next to nothing to do this. This isn't a story about pennies per virtual server per hour - sure they take advantage of that- but more a nuance of cloud optimization any enterprise can follow: reverse capacity planning.

Most of us are familiar with the black art of capacity planning. You take an application, simulate load against it, trying to approximate the amount of traffic it will face in production, then provision the resources to accommodate this load. With web applications we tend to capacity plan against expected peak, which is very hard to estimate - even if historical data exists. You capacity plan to peak because you don't want to be overloaded and cause the client to wait, error out, or go to your competition for your service.

Robert Johnson, a director of engineering at Facebook, celebrated Facebook's monumental achievement of reaching 500 million users by sharing the scaling principles that helped reach that milestone. How did Facebook get to this point?

Even in tough economic times, small businesses need to find new ideas, develop original products, and engineer fresh market approaches. These are the pillars of good business, and each is made from a mixture of creativity and expertise. While it may seem counterintuitive, it's entirely possible to implement strategies that drive not only employee engagement, but also innovation and, ultimately, sales--all without enormous investment in systems or people.

What can your company do to remain fresh, vibrant and alive--all without breaking the bank? Here are five ways.