Master data management software sales to soar in downturn

Sales of master-data-management (MDM) are going to touch $1.3bn (£910m) this year, recording 24.1% growth over last year, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The better-than-average growth forecast is attributed to ongoing efforts by businesses to enhance effectiveness, minimise costs and fulfil compliance requirements amid worldwide economic downturn.

MDM software deals with data collection, aggregating data, its consolidation and quality assurance for ensuring consistency through single view of entire company’s data. MDM allows use of variety of tools such as file systems, data networks and datawarehouses in conjunction with it.

Many companies have been using MDM as concept for some time. According to Gartner analyst, Chad Eschinger, MDM has been around probably for more than 10 years. While in good times people paid less attention to MDM, but the current situation has made them look at it more closely.

Eschinger believed that companies were looking at MDM for cost reduction, while to make MDM work for them; they would have to look at what was working inefficiently or may be broken.

Gartner defines MDM as a process which could be transactional or workflow-driven, one in which IT departments collaborate with business units, publish and ensure protection of information assets which could be shared across company.

Novell releases Group Wise collaboration software

A new version of Group Wise collaboration software, an alternative to Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook suite, has been released by Novell.

Group Wise 8 was available in beta form for the last several months. It comes in Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and web versions. Novell is claiming that the total cost of ownership of its software is lower than that of Microsoft.

Suites of Group Wise 8’s instant-messaging software, calendar and email are on par with Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook and IBM’s Lotus/Domino.

Microsoft has also launched Exchange as part of its online hosted service. This has set the stage for another competition among collaboration products.

Novell stated that new software provides features like blogs and RSS feed. It has capability to utilise wikis and has its dashboard in mashup-style. Novell also claimed that the software supports Blackberry, iPhone and Palm mobile platforms. Its calendaring system makes specific data publicly available.

The Group Wise collaboration has numerous contact-management features such as associating geographical maps to contacts. This would assist third party contractors to work closely with internal staff of the company.

An innovative feature of Group Wise software is that it supports threaded email which allows reading of conversations as discussions. Novell has not yet declared software’s price for the UK market.

Yahoo stops development of Messenger for Vista

Yahoo announced that it has stopped development of the Yahoo Messenger designed to run exclusively on Windows Vista.

It was a Vista-specific version of Yahoo’s instant-messaging programme. Its custom implementation was one of the mainstream, highest profile programmes.

Yahoo’s Terrell Karlsten, in a statement informed that it took a strategic decision to stop external release of Yahoo Messenger for the stand-alone Vista client and instead would be concentrating on delivery of One Windows experience optimised for users of Windows.

Karlsten added that the decision to stop development of Yahoo Messenger for Vista would help Yahoo in increasing efficiencies and provide one full-featured and consistent solution to Window users, whether using Vista or XP.

Public review version of Yahoo Messenger was released in December 2007 and later in March 2008 it issued a beta version. Karlsten informed that the company has no plans to prevent users from continuing its use the service if they had already downloaded the programme, but they would not be offered further updates.

Karlsten stated that Yahoo would encourage downloading of its full-featured Yahoo Messenger 9.0 client by users of Vista, since it was compatible with XP and Vista.

Yahoo also asserted that its experimentation with Windows Presentation Foundation that powers Windows Vista would continue.

Open source software a better economic model, asserts Red Hat CEO

Red Hat CEO, Whitehurst on his tour of Asia-Pacific region claimed that there will be a boost for open source software during the current global economic upheaval. He said that companies would be compelled by the crisis to reduce spending and consolidate technology infrastructure.

He remarked that when things get difficult people resort to cutting investments in the future. But he thought this would make more companies to opt for open source software. He also expected slowdown in spending over new systems. He considered open source to be in much better position to take companies out of the financial crisis.

Whitehurst explained that open source software was most useful option since it provided superior economic model for software creation.

The Sydney-based analyst, Kevin McIsaac, at Intelligent Business Research Service, holds a different view. According to him open source software is not likely to contribute in increasing market share of companies. He believes that financial climate will not drive people to Red Hat in big way. He considers deteriorating economic scenario not being conducive, since enterprise level open source software involved significant costs.

McIsaac suggested that a simple way to cut costs was to audit your licences and get those cancelled which were not needed by you.

Cloud-based security to be brought in Europe by Symantec

By next year, Europe will have cloud-based security that will be rolled out by Symantec. By March 2009, Symantec Security will be offering back-up and archive software. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will be offered in the European region.

Symantec Vision presently offers an online backup and disaster recovery service in the US. Slowly as cloud-expansion plan kicks off, the software will be rolled out worldwide, allowing businesses to perform offsite data backup with ease.

In today’s date, majority of company services are moving forward towards cloud. Symantec aims to take its entire range of products to the ones that are relevant. This entire range of products will be delivered as a service in the upcoming three years.

The online backup and disaster recovery service will be offering SaaS in beta. With this, users will be able to operate their PC from a remote location. Whatever software the company will provide will be delivered as SaaS on a global basis. Offsite data backup ensures business continuity in the case of any data loss incidents

The company also expects offer many other services like data archiving and data-loss prevention through cloud computing. The company aims to gain a strong foothold in Europe as well as around the world in the current fiscal year. Experts see cloud computing and SaaS as the future of computing in the coming decade.

Ban on sale of DVD copying software from RealNetworks

RealNetworks offered software known as RealDVD which it claimed was a legal way to copy DVDs. The company has stopped selling it after a court order restrained it from doing so. Six major movie studios sued RealNetworks on 30th September. The major studios include Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney Studio and Warner Bros. This is not the first time this has happened with RealNetworks.

RealNetwork claimed that the RealDVD software can legally turn your PC in a media server. With the help of RealDVD software you can easily pause any of the programme and resume from where you have left off. A US court issued an order to stop the sale of RealDVD software.

RealNetworks assured that they will continue to work on the software and provide their customers with an improved version that can let them copy DVDs legally for personal use. RealNetworks Company has a track record of 15 years in providing innovative products. All the products provided by the company are great for consumer use.

RealNetworks is not a stranger to controversies. In the year 2004, Apple accused RealNetworks with a tag of ‘hacker tactics”. It was found that music tracks that were not endorsed by Apple could also be played on iPod.

Europe’s largest software company SAP gets worried over unexpected drop in business

It is bad news for the UK’s software and IT companies as SAP, the largest European software company admitted that its major corporate customers were suddenly holding back their spending due to global financial crisis causing unexpected drop in its third-quarter revenues.

SAP shares tumbled by more than 15% after it issued a warning on its dwindling revenues. Chief executive Henning Kagermann admitted that dramatic developments in the market worried many businesses and triggered sudden and unexpected slowdown in business activity.

The maker of the world’s biggest business-management software is expecting €1.97 (£1.5bn) to €1.98bn revenue from its software and related services business during July to September, up by 13% from last year but far below its expectations.

Analysts are busy looking for details and the extent of drop-off in business in last few weeks of September when global financial markets were shaken by the greatest upheaval.

Kagermann stated that company was quite confident of meeting its third quarter sales and profit forecasts but unfortunately was not immune from global crisis in the second half of September causing company to report performance below its expectations.

The news is likely to have severe impact on the UK’s IT and software companies including Axon Group which deal in the business of SAP software implementation.

Oracle teams up with Dell and EMC for its data-warehouse package

Dell and EMC have joined hands with Oracle in its Optimised Warehouse Initiative which would offer data-warehouse setups for businesses. Dell would offer its hardware while EMC would provide software for the ready-to-go setup.

The new version of the package was announced at the Oracle Open World Sow in San Fransisco on Tuesday. The package uses EMC’s Clariion CX4 storage arrays and latest rack-mounted PowerEdge Dell servers.

EMC’s Clariion CX4 has a data storage capacity of 1 to 10 TB (terabytes) with advanced features such as virtual provisioning and flash storage, both of which enable fast access to data.

The preconfigured package will be sold by Dell under a joint Dell and EMC brand name. Dell and EMC have developed a close business relationship, Dell being the biggest third-party user of EMC’s storage equipment. Dell-EMC brand 1TB version of Optimised Warehouse was launched last year. The Oracle, Dell and EMC tie up brought Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC), Oracle Partitioning and Oracle database Enterprise Edition with Dell’s R900 PowerEdge servers which use 4 quad-core Intel Xeon 7400 processors.

According to Rick Becker of Dell’s product group teaming up with EMC and Oracle would remove complicities in implementation of sophisticated data-warehouse solutions and facilitate customers in scaling up their business.

EMC’s vice president of Technology Alliance Mike O’Neill stated that Oracle, Dell and EMC were focussed on high performance, high capacity and mainstream data-warehouse workloads.

Microsoft rebuts claims of malicious replacement of its hypervisor software

Microsoft’s senior security strategist Steve Riley, whilst addressing the Vendors’ TechEd conference in Sydney, rebutted Polish researcher’s claimed that it was possible to maliciously replace Microsoft hypervisor software without the administrator’s knowledge.

Hypervisor is a part of the overall operating system, which controls instances of a virtual operating system. Researcher Joanna Rutkowska developed a hypervisor rootkit claiming that it could go on a PC undetected.
Steve Riley contested the claim, informing the audience that it needed to become the administrator at the root to attack PCs, which is exceedingly difficult to happen on an appropriately configured machine.
Rutkowska and fellow researcher Rafal Wojtchuk, claimed successful development of a means to implant a “Blue Pill” rootkit into a virtual system. They also claimed that flaws in Xen software could be compromised to gain access to its administrative Domain 0, ultimately leading to an attack on the hypervisor control system.

Riley asserted that it was possible to detect modifications to the hypervisor and the replacement of it. Even if the attacker’s malware could succeed in gaining root access,  it would be a highly imperfect copy. He claimed that a replaced hypervisor would have gaps, which could be easily detected by Microsoft. Also the behaviour of the attacker’s malware would not match with the original hypervisor, leading to changes in network disk activity and processing.

Experts claim Apple patch for Mac OS X System is not fully effective

Security experts are not satisfied with the new patch that Apple has introduced for its Leopard and Tiger operating systems. The vulnerability of the system was highlighted by the security researcher Dan Kaminsky.
The Domain Name System (DNS) flaw enabled attackers to redirect browsers secretly to any malicious site.
Security vendor nCircle points out that Apple’s patch does not randomise source ports for the libraries of OS X clients, though it works for OS X servers. According to Andrew Storms, director of nCircle’s security operations, Apple should introduce enhanced entropy with randomisation of the source port and query ID.

He points out that Apple erred somewhere in developing the patch, since client libraries on his personal OS X 10.4.11 system, which were installed after the release of patch, did not randomise source port. While acknowledging effectiveness of patch for OS X servers, he insisted that patching up of client library was more important and urgent.

Apple’s DNS patch also came under severe criticism from security experts of the Sans Institute. Its incident handler Swa Frantzen wrote that OS X 10.5.4 was using incremental ports and all those linked against a DNS client library still needed work arounds for protocol weakness. Apple representative did not offer any comments on the patch issue.

« Previous Page — Next Page »