Finally, acknowledging long pending customers’ requests, Symantec Corp. is entering the encryption market with the twin acquisition of PGP Corp. and GuardianEdge Technologies Inc. Both strongly established vendors. Currently the worldwide encryption market is estimated to be roughly around a billion dollars and growing at 18 percent pa. The twin acquisition not only signifies Symantec’s entry into the encryption market but ensures it leadership position in terms of market share. Below we will outline our early initial guidance for end-user clients as to the significance of the deal, the need to acquire both companies, the likely roadmap ahead and our advice on what you should consider.

The Deal

On 29^th April 2010, Symantec signed a definitive agreement to acquire PGP Corporation and GuardianEdge Technologies Inc. for an aggregate sum of $ 370 Million. Symantec agreed to pay $70 million for San Mateo, Calif-based GuardianEdge and $300 million for Menlo Park, Calif.-based PGP. The agreements are subject to regulatory approvals and are expected to close during the June quarter. After the closure of these deals Symantec plans to integrate the two vendors’ platforms into its very own centralized management platform - Symantec Protection Center (SPC).

Significance of the deal

PGP and GuardianEdge are substantial vendors in the encryption space having a combined revenue of $ 93 million for LTM ending March 31, 2010. In addition, both the acquired entities currently have an OEM relationship with Symantec Corp. GuardianEdge Hard Disk Encryption and Removable Media, complements Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Suite as well as the Altiris Total Management Suite. PGP’s encryption technology, meanwhile, resides in the Symantec Data Loss Prevention offerings, which are based on the former Vontu solution. After the deal closure the integration issues for Symantec are expected to be minimal. The twin acquisitions largely expand Symantec’s addressable market. It also provides greater cross-selling opportunities for Symantec’s global sales team and it’s extensive partner network. PGP Corp has a strong customer base of around 110,000 corporate clients and more than 1 million individual clients. Whereas, GuardianEdge has significant penetration in the government and healthcare verticals. The most important aspect of these acquisitions is the augmentation of Symantec’s existing security portfolio with comprehensive and proven data protection technologies which will help them fuel growth and market share.

Why the need of acquiring two competitive vendors?

Currently the Encryption market is very fragmented with lots of sub segments (basically functionalities) and niche vendors. Even though PGP and GuardianEdge have some product overlap they are pretty good in their respective product functionalities. PGP has a comprehensive protection suite for Full Disk encryption, file/folder encryption, email encryption, mobile protection as well as strong policy-based key management. Whereas, GuardianEdge is good at providing removable media protection, device control and device control audit. Combining these two portfolios will provide a strong end-to-end data protection suite for Symantec. It is clearly visible from Symantec’s past couple of acquisitions that the company aims to address the end-to-end concept and should eventually end up leveraging its market leadership position. The perfect examples are Symantec’s acquisition of Vontu in Data Loss Prevention (DLP) space and MessageLabs acquisition in the hosted messaging security space.

Symantec’s likely integration roadmap

As pointed earlier, although the two acquired entities have some product overlap it doesn’t pose much of a product harmonization issue for Symantec. TekPlus believes that Symantec will go for best of breed or look at minimal disruption caused to the existing install base while selecting products or more appropriate functionalities from the two entities. Before going into the integration roadmap let’s just look at what these two vendors bring to the table.

Table 1: Product Mix of PGP Corp. and GuardianEdge Technologies Inc.              Source: TekPlus

Integration Roadmap

Phase 1: Integration of both vendor’s product suites and harmonization of product portfolio.

Phase 2: Integration of harmonized product suite with PGP’s Policy Management and Key Management Console.

Phase 3: Subsume Policy Management and Key Management Console into a broader Symantec Protection Center (SPC).

Phase 4: Bundling/Integration of end-to-end Encryption suite with Symantec’s existing offerings - Endpoint protection suite, Data Loss Prevention, Gateway Security, Hosted Messaging Security, Cloud services, Backup & Recovery etc.

Tek-Advice

As part of Symantec’s information centric approach to security, integrating encryption technologies and PGP’s key management platform into the Symantec portfolio will help the vendor to better address customer’s information protection concerns. If Symantec successfully demonstrates that it can continue to improve in integrating its acquisitions, as it did with DLP vendor Vontu it can be a huge growth opportunity for Symantec. Customers can get a consistent key management experience to more efficiently manage their information security and that too at reduced TCO.

Existing customers of PGP and GuardianEdge should continue doing business with each respective company as per usual. However existing customers of GuardianEdge Full Disk Encryption and Mobiledevice encryption need to carefully assess their renewal plans as Symantec might replace these technologies with those from PGP.

Perspective customers looking for encryption suites should consider putting their project on hold until the deal goes through and a clear integration roadmap with timelines is presented by Symantec.

Expect a lot of bundled offerings from Symantec to existing as well as new clients - Endpoint protection Suite + Encryption suite, DLP + Encryption and so on.

Ask for a clear direction plan from your channel partner after the deal has closed and provide particular attention to the upgrade/renewal timeline. If not cost effective leverage the competitive plays of other vendors to bargain a smarter deal.

TekPlus believes Symantec will play smart and effectively price to hang on to the install base of GuardianEdge and PGP.

The Infrastructure landscape is changing to the next-generation and is increasingly impacting business processes and it’s critical component -’Information’ and how we configure, mesh, leverage and access it. This will only lead to more complexity and demand for a more holistic approach which we believe Symantec is positioned for. The above deal only enhances it further.

[From our Advisories]

Another young lady who, from her online name aspires to own a Porsche, asks “Does anyone know a new proxy that actually works? I need a new and current proxy that actually works and is unblocked or unused because my school basically blocked everything and I need to get on Facebook ASAP. So please help me out.”

Maybe the boys can help. Miles claims to have a solution. “I’ve been checking more, this only works on websites in the “Uncategorized” category, which is all websites that haven’t been pre-approved. I still need some more people to test this though, as I’ve not verified it yet.”

Smierg may be almost there. “I attend a technical college that uses Websense, and there’s a definite way around it, but I haven’t quite gotten to it yet. I’m trying to find a way to bypass the network’s DNS servers…If you can do this, Websense doesn’t exist. I haven’t tried it yet, but me and a friend have a vendetta against Websense so I should have something going within the next week or two”.

Then comes a cry of despair. “You are all weird…why won’t you stop lying…I tried everything yall said and couldn’t work…your all fakes…If I know who you all really are I’ll sue yall…”

These guys are being frustrated by Websense Web. This is the key offering from Websense (www.websense.com/) that provides real-time analysis and classification of content. It stops threats, web exploits and malware arriving and prevents users accidentally or deliberately visiting vulnerable sites or addresses.

Websense has now added - or is in the process of doing so – two more elements and has launched it as Triton. (www.websense.com/Content/Products.aspx?intcmp=HomePageCampaign_TRITON-021210) The Triton offering will probably be of less interest to schools and colleges who merely want to stop their students mucking about with dodgy sites. But Triton will be of enormous interest to international enterprises as it can be scaled to 100,000 seats and operate world-wide.

Triton does this through both corporate appliance(s) and through the cloud. A client can deploy its licences flexibly, either via an appliance (each appliance can handle up to 8,500 seats) or cloud as appropriate to clients’ needs – mobile workers included. This means achieving synchronicity of security policy across enforcement points in different parts of the world. The ‘handoff’ between appliance and cloud is handled by similar ‘awareness’ technology as used in mobile telephony. Thus if a mobile user enters a site where the corporate appliance is within range, it links with that. As soon as the worker leaves the site, the link is dropped and security is delivered through the cloud by WiFi links the worker may access.

The deliverables of Triton are Websense Web gateway as described, the Websense Data Security Suite for outgoing data loss prevention (DLP) and Websense Email Security. The last of these is claimed to provide a counter to targeted attacks propagated over the Web or through email such as the Aurora attack on Google and others. (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/operation-aurora/)

Triton is managed by means of a console that has all three elements, unifying the three main vectors of system compromise.

Websense sees Triton as a ready made solution for controlling content Facebook’s so-called vanity sites. (http://www.facebook.com/marketing) Created to help (brand) marketers share with users and create movements (i.e. lots of followers) on Facebook, it is vital that they stay ‘on message’. Firms like Coca-Cola, BMW, McDonalds or Toyota don’t want scurrilous material or spurious links appearing.

The Websense solution is via software-as-a-service Defensio. (http://www.websense.com/content/Defensio.aspx) Aimed at bloggers, Facebook users, and social Web site owners it should protect them from comment spam, malware, and other nasties in user-generated content including embedded links. As before, Websense draws on its expertise in real-time analysis of Web 2.0 environment and its threats.

So those students really don’t have much chance. With the technology on an appliance, it is no longer behind a firewall. Everything on the corporate site must go through Websense. Reminder, kids, with real time classification of web pages going on all the time, Websense can examine Twitter, Facebook and similar social sites on the fly.

It is unlikely to be the Triton package though. Triton is not really feasible for less than 250 seats so Websense will not be targeting the SME sector.

Let’s probe behind yesterday’s announcement that IBM is acquiring Intelliden, a privately-owned technology company based in Menlo Park.
Before we look at the technology, what about the market presence of IBM’s latest conquest? It has an interesting European dimension that is not typical of the usual Californian high-tech outfit. Its CEO, Alan Black, was previously managing director of Openwave Systems’s EMEA operations in Belfast. Alan McKee, head of engineering, comes from BT and Nortel EMEA, both based in Belfast where, no doubt, he and Black met. It is clearly a fortuitous combination as Intelliden’s key customers include Telecom Italia and Telefonica.
A Brownfield Network, just like a brownfield site in the construction industry, is one that has been built on before. It is composed of legacy. This means it could well be large, many hands have been involved in its creation and support, it has different technologies and poor documentation. In management terms too often the cry is ‘Fix the problem’. It should be, of course, ‘Solve the problem’ but that would take time and effort that may not be available when an emergency arises.
Imposed on this unstructured network are the regulatory compliance, operational compliance, security demands and audit. Even these processes are less than satisfactory in the Brownfield scenario. Today’s compliance calls may be irrelevant to yesterday’ equipment. An audit procedure may not match the syntax that has developed over time. Remember that these procedures for most network service management suppliers, rely on the command line interface (CLI) specification. Yet some of these can comprise half a million lines!
Intelliden has taken a new approach by developing a model based on XML it calls SmartModel. This is where IBM’s decision to acquire the company shows great shrewdness. Not only is the technology smart, it nicely complements IBM’s own skills in Tivoli.
Intelliden technology will be integrated into IBM Tivoli Software. As Intelliden provides network change and configuration management solutions by automating the management of thousands of network devices, Tivoli will enable its deployment and integration across organizational boundaries.
Intelliden pokes around in the innards of your network and sorts it out while Tivoli oversees it by providing the visibility, control and automation.
Looks a good combination.
Overall, this acquisition is of enormous significance to IBM. It is very strategic in nature and brings the above stated strengths to the Tivoli offerings. Additionally It also positions IBM well to compete with HP and Cisco who have made sizable inroads into the Service Provider space. Looking forward, the full portfolio from Intelliden enhances both the IBM stack, its ecosystem and its segment positioning leverage. The Intelliden client base also helps!

With the addition of servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle’s portfolio of database, middleware, and business applications, Oracle can be truly labelled as a “one-stop-shop” for all IT needs. In a live event on January 27, 2010, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, outlined the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and customer benefits. Below we highlight the key points of the integration plans.

Oracle plans to invest heavily in developing and selling hardware bundled with applications and database software. Already Oracle’s first such product, the Exadata appliance, has a pipeline of $100 million in sales. Exadata is a high-end storage server based on hardware from Sun released last year. However, the company has killed off Sun Open Cloud platform, a rival to Amazon’s cloud services that was launched less than a year ago. According to Oracle, Sun’s cloud technology will be integrated into its own cloud services, which will target service providers looking to roll out their own public clouds, and enterprises that want to build private clouds. Wherever the two portfolios overlap the general theme is - Oracle’s products remain the flagship offerings whereas Sun’s portfolio will be used as the reference technologies and for lightweight environment/ departmental needs.

Software development tools - Sun’s flagship Java NetBeans will be positioned as a tool for Lightweight Development Environment. However when it comes to develop enterprise-ready applications the developer community has to use JDeveloper, code written for Oracle’s umbrella ADF framework that underlies its database, middleware, and applications offerings.

SOA suite - Oracle’s SOA Suite 11g will remain as the flagship offering whereas Sun’s SOA suite - Composite Application Platform Suite (JCAPS) and GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus products will go on maintenance. Oracle will support collaboration between Sun JCAPS and Oracle SOA Suite through bridge technology while facilitating transition to the converged product line over time.

Identity & Access Management - Oracle Identity management will embed some provisioning technology from the Sun stack, but otherwise Oracle’s suite will remain the core attraction. However Sun’s identity and access management wont be discarded all together, as it will be promoted for midsized web installations. Integrating the two product lines will be a daunting task for Oracle because of all-together different product architectures.

Servers & Storage- Oracle will continue to invest in Sun’s multi-threaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. Oracle will also continue to develop and sell Sun’s x64-based servers, which use processors from Intel and AMD, and also its Netra servers. Moving forward, TekPlus expects more of a custom-built server line from Oracle to run its enterprise applications. Oracle also plans to keep Sun’s disk storage business as well as its tape business. Sun 7000 open storage line and the ZFS storage file system will be at the heart of the company’s storage strategy.

Support Services - Oracle’s network of 8,000 support professionals operating out of 18 support centres will continue providing 24x7 support for customers across Oracle’s product lines. This support will be extended from applications to disk. Sun’s support delivery team will be joining the Oracle team to ensure continuity in how support is provided to Sun customers.

Supply Chain/ Marketing/Channels - Oracle plans to go with the Direct Sales model for the large customers. Oracle’s direct sales force will service 1,700 strategic named accounts and Sun’s top 4,000 customers. Oracle will move from Sun’s “build-to-stock” channel-marketing and supply strategy to one of “build-to-order.” As a result, it will close Sun’s distribution centres in the United States and in EMEA.

Tek-View
All the integration and combined strategy announcements seem to end the speculations of Oracle parting-off any of the Sun’s business units. Oracle is also going to hold worldwide welcome events to learn more about the integration throughout the rest of 2010. The major announcement seems to be the overhaul of the channel model and we believe it’s the right move as Sun had some unique and innovative technologies but it’s execution was not up to the mark. It will be interesting to see what direction Oracle takes in terms of Cloud Computing. Currently it seems that Oracle will follow Cisco’s approach of offering converged infrastructure to enterprise looking to build private clouds. Enterprise clients really need to ask for more clarity here.

The approval of Oracle-Sun merger should be welcome news for enterprise customers. Customers can expect innovative bundles from the combined company. Customers can also get better platform and application integration benefits with a complete stack under one roof. On the other hand, it also brings the disadvantages of vendor lock-in. The system integration and maintenance cost are expected to go down with Oracle-Sun combined offerings. The acquisition has created a big stir in IT market and TekPlus anticipates a price war between the big IT vendors. TekPlus advises end-users to ask for more details regarding product harmonization and bundling strategy before committing to a big project. Oracle needs to move faster in some places to outline more detailed roadmaps for high-end customers looking to invest over a longer time frame. Oracle also needs to better position its services group and create a higher value value stack to take advantage of the integrated solutions. TekPlus believes clients need to wait should clearer answers not be forthcoming but hopefully Oracle will soon articulate a more detailed picture. We will continue to advice in more depth as the announcements are made.

[From our Advisories]

In all the high falutin’ talk about TelePresence, Cisco always skated round the fact that its system was not compatible with others on the market. It focused on the fact it was a superior product. Cisco said it had better vision, better sound, better all round immersion experience. And Cisco was probably right - but it only worked with another TelePresence installation.

But all is conceded now. Following the conclusion of the legal steps of acquiring Tandberg, “Cisco will create an open architecture that provides greater interoperability with Tandberg and third-party systems".

After getting its confession out of the way, Cisco goes on to mention some of the Good Things that will come from this development. “…valuable features…such as One Button to Push and Continuous Presence, as well as integration with leading unified communications platforms", it says. Telepresence is not video-conferencing although for maximum benefit both types should be able to connect together. Frost & Sullivan defines telepresence as a “tightly integrated set of visual, audio and network technologies and services that together deliver an immersive, life-like communication experience".

It provides a road map that will be developed by a newly formed Cisco
TelePresence Technology Group. The portfolio will comprise:

Immersive TelePresence: The flagship Cisco TelePresence System 3000 series,"…the optimized experience for scalable deployments". Not quite available yet, but expect soon high-definition, immersive, multiscreen interoperability with other multiscreen systems. After all Tandberg’s T1 and T3 systems are already doing so.

Multipurpose Room Systems: Tandberg’s Profile Series will lead here and we expect it to absorb the Cisco TelePresence System 1300 for conference rooms.

Personal Systems: By conceding the strength of Tandberg offerings, (http://bit.ly/t48GP) it is probable that Cisco’s TelePresence System 1100 and System 500 will go the way of all flesh.

Platform Portfolio: Tandberg dominates here with the C-series, MXP codecs, set-top systems, PC video and high-definition cameras. This is stuff for integrators to create customized systems and must oviously be industry standard.

Infrastructure: Both companies will continue to offer the nuts and bolts products of teleconferencing like control units. Over time the ranges will be consolidated to meet full interoperability needs.

Services: Cisco TelePresence Exchange and Cisco TelePresence Public Suites will continue to operate.

Tandberg sales and channels organization will become a specialist sales team within Cisco for the sake of continuity. Does this mean autonomous?

Nah! Long time experience of mergers shows there will be a period of uncertainty. Lots of jockeying for position by the ambitious ones, while the others will flounder around bewildered by the new products and new reporting lines.

Cisco made a fine acquisition in Tandberg but that does not mean things will go smoothly. It has set out on the road of standards-compliant technology, notably H.323, H.264, H.239 and SIP. Sales also require networks supporting high-end bandwidth - a minimum of 4 Mbps and as much as 15 Mbps for theatre type presentations. Add in a recession and it could be 2011 before Cisco/Tandberg start to come right in this market.

Whilst this is ‘only’ a project, it looks very much like the Obama administration fulfilling its intent to adopt cloud computing in the federal government. Of course the usual benefits of this are trotted out by both government and suppliers: improve IT efficiency, reduce costs, greater flexibility and so on. With this defence (or, in view of its provenance should we write ‘defense’?) application it is said the “cloud model strengthens the resiliency of mission-critical applications by removing dependency on underlying hardware. Applications can be easily moved from one system to another in the event of system failures or cyber attacks".

The risk of cyber attacks on the military has been very much in the news lately. So IBM Research’s work on advanced cyber security and analytics technologies will have a ready audience in the Pentagon.

IBM says the project will push the technology boundaries and that is believable. Look at the canvas on which the IBM team will be working. On home territory, the USAF has Air Combat Command (ACC), Air Education and Training Command (AETC), Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC), Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), Air Mobility Command (AMC), with separate overseas commands covering Europe and Pacific. Remember the enormous responsibilities residing within those commands: AFGSC with a global capabilty to deliver atomic weapons and AFSPC looking spacewards. Think aircraft dropping bombs in Afghanistan while being remotely piloted from Louisiana. Think over 250 flying squadrons, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active military personnel around the world.

Wow! This is some challenge as the Pentagon and the whole US military infrastructure has been under attack for well over 10 years. ‘Moonlight Maze’ was the code name given to the attacks from Russia in the 1990s and ‘Titan Rain’ to the more recent campaign that appeared to come from China. In 2009 it was asserted on a CBS documentary that the whole US defense estbalishment had been electronically rolled up. Probing is occuring all the time.

It seems counter-intuitive, therefore, for the Air Force to think it can manage, monitor and secure its information more securely by using the cloud. Time after time in many surveys, users identify security as the no. 1 issue that concerns them.

However, IBM anticipates that it will be able to demonstrate an unprecedented level of security and network resiliency into the Air Force cloud design. How? Well how about advanced “stream computing” analytics as a key element? In its press release, (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/29326.wss ) IBM says little to explain the term.

Tekplus has looked a little closer into what might be meant here. The term computing stream is used in a number of ways, but essentially it refers to a sequence of data elements made available over time. One of those ways is the data stream model, where the data cannot be randomly accessed - as on disk or memory - but must be accessed in order and can be read usually only once. There is more. IBM Research has published stuff on its System S Stream Computing System. It says it is a breakthrough technology that enables production and management of key information that is extracted from enormous volumes of potentially unimportant data.
(http://bit.ly/buLDgb)

IBM intends to couple this technology with USAF’s sensors and monitors – presumably in aircraft and satellites – to analyze the massive amounts of data flowing through its network. It aims to enable commanders to get fast, accurate insights about threats, including cyber attacks, while ensuring the network is not disrupted. And the guys making the decisions will do so with the aid of “customized executive-level dashboards”. As an old airman myself, all I can say is ‘bravo, USAF, I hope it works’. There is an old military maxim, ‘Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’.

But, but, but, I hear my reader cry, where is the super-dooper level of security in the cloud that everyone worries about? It looks as though there will be sensors that are monitoring the health and status of the network. In the event of cyber attack, officers could automatically shift the prevention environment based on rules-based protocols. But there is also an autonomic computing resource, where virtual cloud services are managed remotely. The USAF’s cloud infrastructure will constantly be able to retune itself for optimal performance - without human intervention.

This is not the first step by the US Department of Defense into the cloud. Warren Suss in Government Computer News summarised the five efforts he knew about last fall. (http://bit.ly/cDGmPy) Nevertheless this latest announcement by IBM and USAF appears to be the most ambitious so far.

Following the recent formation of its dedicated cloud consulting group, international solutions provider, Logicalis, today launches its Cooperative Enterprise Cloud Service. Architected on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and NetApp storage solutions, the service is the first to offer a single reference blueprint for on-site and hosted cloud services, enabling enterprises and public sector organisations to flex and scale their cloud computing strategies while ensuring seamless interoperability.

Why do companies that have a good story to tell, mess it all up by wrapping it in such pretentious twaddle? For this is an interesting story and Logicalis is a sound company. Fortunately TekPlus has Sandip Kale, a skilled linguist on the staff, who was able to translate this and the rest of the document.

Logicalis is an important Data Centre system integrator. It has launched a new product: Cooperative Enterprise Cloud Service. This is a private computing cloud that can be run (a) on the customer’s own equipment or (b) be hosted by Logicalis. Potential customers will be large organisations and the public sector. The key parts of the product are Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and NetApp storage. The service can be tailored to the size the customer wants and integrated with existing systems.

The on-site part of the implementation is offered as a service which Logicalis names as BOCS (Bespoke Onsite Cloud Service). The whole lot can be delivered in a container if that is what the customer wants. The hosted cloud services will be implemented in Logicalis Data Centre. This offers flexibility to enterprise clients as they can get additional computing resources if the need arises.

For example, suppose Client A is running 40-50 applications in its private cloud implemented by Logicalis. If a situation arises where the Client A requires additional storage or server resources to keep all the applications running, it can use Logicalis hosted cloud resources instead of buying more storage/server infrastructure.

Tom Kelly, managing director of Logicalis UK puts it a different way.

“This is the first enterprise-class cloud computing service that truly addresses the challenges driving ICT change. The Cooperative Enterprise Cloud Service enables CIOs to safely exploit the commercial and operational benefits of cloud-based strategies without necessitating an all-or-nothing approach. Moreover, it allows customers to build and right-size on-site private clouds, and then utilise our hosted cloud to scale as required. Our belief is that matched-architecture hybrid clouds are going to be the private and public sector’s first choice for their cloud computing strategies.”

Sorry, Tom, we prefer Sandip’s explanation.

Sandip goes on to explain how the offerings fit together and make things easy for the customer – what Logicalis calls ‘seamless and interoperable’. The private cloud implemented on a client site by Logicalis will be based on Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, NetApp storage and VmWare hypervisors. So it matches the same architecture used by Logicalis for its very own Data Centre, which provides the hosted cloud services.

The benefits are fairly obvious: security, reliability, energy efficient, sized to suit the customer but flexible enough to be readily expanded to actual business need, disaster recovery and an onshore location. Logicalis has facilities in the UK, US, Germany, South America and Asia Pacific.

Many years ago Hugh Trevor-Roper, an Oxford academic, historian and author, later enobled as Lord Dacre, wrote: “My cardinal rule for myself is that no one should ever have to read a sentence of mine twice in order to understand it. If they do, then I am at fault”.

Please, Logicalis, take note.

There have been plenty of observers who have questioned its market durability. “Cautious in business, but willing to jump headlong into new technologies with little regard for their eventual success, 3Com made many mistakes but got lucky more often than chance would seem to allow". (Bill Ray, CFO publication http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10723373?f=related )

That HP bought it is also unsurprising. Who else could? Regulatory issues would rule out firms like Cisco and IBM. Other smaller networking companies would face similar issues even if they could afford the USD 2.7 billion price tag. A non-US firm? Uh-uh, bad history there, man.

HP makes much of the Chinese contribution in this bid but HP has had deep links in China for a long time. There are security assets in the 3Com portfolio but are these that valuable when the security scenery is changing to a much more holistic approach?

The inevitable questions arise about integration of 3Com into HP’s Procurve house. Can it be done? What will it cost? How long will it take?

In all the China talk, no official mention has been made of Huawei’s place that was. With Huawei,( http://ww.huawei.com )3Com set up a 51/49 JV in November 2003 as H3C. (http://www.h3cnetworks.com/) It did well and three years later each partner bid against the other to gain 100% ownership. 3Com won out with a bid that valued H3C at USD 1.8 billion.

Huawei got closer to getting hold of 3Com when it became a junior partner to a bid by launched by private equity firm Bain Capital in late 2007. Assuming Bain Capital expected to bail out of the deal after 3 years or so, Huawei would have been in pole position to buy the lot. In the event the deal was scuppered early last year by the American government in the form of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), worried about foreign ownership of 3Com’s other main business, Tipping Point. (http://www.tippingpoint.com/ ) A supplier of intrusion prevention systems, Tipping Point Technologies was bought by 3Com in 2004.

So it seems that H in 3Com’s future will stand for Hewlett and not Huawei. Does this therefore mean there will be competition in China? After all Huawei sources a considerable part of its IP products from H3C. Will it want to continue to do so in view of the fact that its non-compete clause in the H3C sales agreement expired early in 2008? Will the Chinese authorities treat this development benignly? Might they want to play tit-for-tat after the way the US government interfered in the Bain bid?

While we see no overwhelming merit in the HP case we do see it could create serious competitive issues for Cisco. Cisco may have thought it was one step ahead when it announced it was entering the server and unified computing market just six months ago. (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_031609.html )

It looks as though HP may have countered that move – but it may be at too high a price. It’s worth noting that when Bain bid for 3Com about 2 years ago, it put only USD 2.2 billion on the table.

It has taken time to make the agreements with partners that will be delivering the package. One of the most recent is T-Systems (http://www.t-systems.com), Deutsche Telekom’s corporate customer arm.

BPOS-D forms part of Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services computing model. (http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx) Microsoft scarcely mentions ‘Cloud’ (maybe it regards the term as too resonant of IBM aspirations) but defines this model as using “the reach of the Internet with the power of local software applications”.

BPOS-D is a package including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting. It is aimed at customers of at least 5000 seats, giving them the capability to run services online for a fixed monthly fee per workstation. T-Systems, with its telecom background, can enhance the package by adding in the network infrastructure, storage and bandwidth.

T-Systems has been a Large Account Reseller for Microsoft products since 2003 and in Germany supported the launch of Vista (why boast about it!), Exchange, Biz Talk, Unified Communications, Business Intelligence and SharePoint. T-Systems has developed mobile solutions based on Microsoft technology. It is a big player with revenues around EUR 9.3 billion in the 2008.

Strangely, while BPOS-D has been rolled out worldwide, the regular issue BPOS, named imaginatively as Business Productivity Online Suite Standard, is only available in the US. We suspect this may be something to do with inadequacies of, or lack of development in, Microsoft’s distribution channel outside the Homeland.

This is the latest development to come along thanks to an agreement between Verizon Business and McAfee. On one side we have a big communications company (Verizon, remember, was formed from Bell Atlantic, GTE and Nynex in the early 2000s) and on the other, one of the two major software security companies. (Originally anti-virus, anti-spam firms, McAfee and Symantec are generally acknowledged as market leaders)

Here is what the suits say in PR speak:
“Verizon Business will be able to expand and more fully touch every facet of enterprise security so that enterprises can confidently do business in this digital age", said Kerry Bailey, SV-P Verizon Business global solutions.
“This agreement underscores the importance of delivering comprehensive security solutions to meet the needs of business and government clients,” said David Scholtz, SV-P McAfee worldwide strategic alliances.

As for the Cloud, well those products are still in the offing, apparently. The Cloud gets a plug but it seems we shall have to wait a while to see what appears. On paper it looks good.

There will be a range of security technology stuff including firewalls, intrusion prevention services, anti-malware, content control and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN). The services will be developed by McAfee and managed by Verizon. They look the sort of thing that distributed business may find suitable.

McAfee is strengthening its partner network and support thereof trying to make business with it easier and better rewarded. There will be new rules of engagement. The Verizon arrangement seems to be more in the way of an OEM deal but will Cloud delivery upset McAfee partners?

The problem – if it were one – arises from the notion of Cloud computing being a diffuse, amorphous presence within which resides all means of performing tasks. Some may recall the Fred Hoyle sci-fi novel The Black Cloud (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud) wherein a peripatetic cloud arrives in the solar system and is revealed to be a super-organism, many times more intelligent than humans. But we digress.

Cloud is, of course, not like this. Cloud is not any kind of computer model - real, virtual or abstract. It is a delivery model.

For decades the IT department has agonised over build versus buy decisions. Now that argument is being leapfrogged to an entirely different debate. It is about provision of services that solve workloads. Should that provision be via the IT department or should it be direct to the party that needs the solution? The growing evidence is that it will be the latter.

Recall how Commercial Off-The-Shelf products (COTS) superseded special in-house designed or contract-developed products? Recall how PCs began to be sourced direct by user departments? Look how personal mobile phones are invading the corporate space. And so, in a similar way, will user departments procure their own solutions from Cloud offerings.

This development presents an opportunity for both the mid-sized Cloud supplier as well as a host of SME Cloud suppliers. These will be the companies that can make contact at different levels in a company from CEO down to operating departmental heads with solutions to problems.

At a recent presentation by Logicalis (www.logicalis.com) the company outlined an evolution from a supplier perhaps first monitoring services, then managing services, hosting services, integrating services and ultimately delivering them from the Cloud. Logicalis believes the key instrument for achieving this is through the Data Center. As this is the area of expertise that the company has been focused on and from which it gains half its revenues, in the words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Forgive the cheap jibe, for it is difficult to gainsay Logicalis’ thesis. While there are Google Aps running from the desktop (code.google.com/appengine/) , Amazon appears uncertain of its business model for the Cloud (aws.amazon.com/ec2/), Microsoft looks for direction with Azure (www.microsoft.com/azure/services.mspx), only big blue IBM seems to be focused.

So if you are not a giant, Logicalis may well have the right answer to the Cloud.

It’s all open systems, folks, nothing proprietary. What would you like, private Cloud or public Cloud. You’re not sure? How about hybrid Cloud then? Only pay for what you need – just like software as a service.

IBM says Cloud is industrialisation of delivery of the IT process. It has identified the key concerns and appears to be ready through its consultancy services to address them. Many potential customers baulk at the challenge of moving from legacy to cloud. ‘Forget apps, break it down into workloads’, says IBM. Figure what sort of workload. If it’s a highly transactional, low latency, highly optimised with big rework costs, then leave it be for the time being. If the workload is or can be standardised, it may be a candidate to run from the Cloud. If the workload is one you would love to get enhanced but don’t have the resources, it may be you can use what’s in the Cloud to do so.

Security is an ever present concern and even more so where the Cloud is concerned. The attraction of the private Cloud (within the corporate firewall) is unmistakeable. In research undertaken by IBM, while public or private Clouds are seen as equally acceptable for web conferencing, a workload like transactional databases has very little traction in the public space although quite acceptable in the private.

The IBM offerings today are of Lotus Live iNotes (starting at $3 per user per month) and Smart Business Storage Cloud (for enterprises with active-active architecture and unlimited scaleability). Driving everything along are the consultancy services - IBM Strategy & Change Services for Cloud Adoption, the same for Cloud Providers and IBM Testing Services for Cloud.

It may not be on the IBM published Cloud road map but be assured the apps will be rolling out steadily. Remember how Express grew and grew just like Topsy as more and more apps were added to the portfolio? In just the same way as Express was grown, so with Cloud: Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud is the persuader to get developers on board. Just go to http://www.ibm.com/cloud/developer to have a look-see.

And on this Cloud development journey, what firms might be acquired?

It will flesh out Cisco’s product line, for sure.

It does more than this, as Cisco’s TelePresence, introduced in 2006, has not prospered as the company hoped. It’s a Rolls-Royce of a product that has probably garnered only a few hundred installations among Fortune companies. One of its severest limitations has been its proprietary architecture. Cisco set out with the aim of owning the videoconferencing market - like Microsoft dominated the desktop - by being proprietary and soooo expensive.

Tandberg, like several other companies in the videoconferncing game Avaya, LifeSize, Polycom for example, has stuck to industry standards. H.323 is the most prominent of a series that covers multi-media transmission over ISDN, H.239 extends this to multiple channels on a single session and H.225 is concerned with signalling protocols.

Products conforming to these standards can all interoperate. Cisco’s products can’t.

Except that belatedly Cisco has developed software switches such as BTS 10200 that permit compatibility but its not a native compatibility built into TelePresence.

The acquisition of Tandberg, gives Cisco an entrée into a sector, downmarket from where it currently operates. Will it be a worthwhile investment? Profit margins are claimed to be broadly similar to Cisco’s target of 35%. Fredrik Halvorsen, CEO of Tandberg, will apparently lead Cisco’s TelePresence unit if the acquisition goes through.

The whole thing looks a bit like a rescue of a floundering product sector. And there may be a bigger threat.

Peter Burrows in Business Week suggests that the younger generation won’t need videoconferencing – they already have all they need on webcams on their PCs. (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc2009101_844344.htm) Linking a flat panel TV to Skype could offer a cheap and cheerful way of video communication.

If so it may mean videoconferencing of the TelePresence variety is destined to remain a niche market.

To many there must be a sense of natural fulfillment in seeing Dell go down the same path as HP in acquiring a ready-made advanced services and integration company. But first the essential facts.

Dell Inc. (www.dell.com) made its name selling PCs direct to customers by phone, mail and internet. Over the years it has evolved into a more conventional business model and added to its product range with servers, network switches and, more recently, consumer electronics. In 2008 (year ended 31 Jan 2009) it had revenues of USD 61 billion and net income of USD 2.5 billion. The company founder, Michael S Dell, controls around 13% of the equity.

Perot Systems (www.perotsystems.com) was founded by Ross Perot in 1988, four years after he sold Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for USD 2.4 billion to General Motors. Perot Systems essentially recreated EDS but without the emphasis on outsourcing of huge government contracts. It has a serious amount of healthcare business. Ross Perot Jnr, the founder’s son, now heads the company that had revenues of USD 2.8 billion in 2008 with net income of USD 117 million. (GM sold EDS later and it is now part of HP)

The terms of the agreement look quite cosy. Dell is offering USD 30 per share in cash, apparently from its own resources. If the regulatory authorities approve and the deal goes ahead, Perot Systems will become Dell`s services unit led by Peter Altabef, the current CEO. Dell is expected to invite Ross Perot Jnr. to join the Dell board.

Certainly there seems a clear complementarity about the product and services fit of the two companies. But has Dell paid too much? Some financial observers think so. (http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/09/21/dellperot-kind-of-pricey-dontcha-think/?mod=yahoobarrons) Perhaps Dell wants to avoid all the hastle of a bidding match by pitching its first ball so high.

IBM, Accenture, Capgemini, TCS - or another of the Indian service companies - are possibles who might have counter-bid but will they do so now?

Last thought: around a third of Perot Systems’ staff are based in India!

‘Merge the Fabric’ is the tagline and for a company that has originated some terms that have been absorbed into the main IT dictionary, the phrase should not be ignored.

What does it mean in this case? HP pushes three aspects: bringing ProCurve and BladeSystem together, a new Proliant workstation and upgrades to the Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity Model (AIMM).

Well two of these can be fairly disregarded. The new workstation is just that – a new workstation with enhancements. The changes to AIMM, which is not a great deal more than a clever sales aid, (http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/600172-0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_UKEN) include 1,500 profiles and 75,000 statistical data points added to its database, networking now in the offerings portfolio and coverage of cloud technologies. Would it be unkind to call it an even cleverer sales aid?

So what about the third element: merging of ProCurve networking and BladeSystem hardware. (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platforms/new.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN) One of the key elements of the proposition is to invest less in maintenance and more on innovation. The tools to achieve this include automated provisioning and lifetime warranty. Certainly the higher performance of the latest 8200 series BladeServers will deliver the process resources to get more out of the system. So bonus points here.

There seems little in this announcement about wireless. Strange, when unified network and virtualised edge are supposed to be key elements. Wasn’t the acquisition of Colubris Networks at this time last year (see TekBlog 15 August 2008) supposed to deliver some of these features?

‘Merge the Fabric’ is all predicated on HP’s assertion that the market is characterised by rigid infrastructure, complexity in applications and data and poor business processes. That it may be, but this latest announcement from HP will only chip away a little from this market vision.

After the usual PR guff about the benefits to Mankind of cloud computing, the announcement gave a view of what is on offer. It will be a subscription service that offers virtual desktop services. It will provide “a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources”. Does this phrase simply provide naïve users with a definition of virtualisation or is there an alternative interpretation?

Apparently there will be three standard cloud-based offerings although whether all three will be available from the launch in Europe and North America, scheduled for October, is unclear. The service is being developed in association with four partners along with a host of IBM supporting tools.

Citrix (http://www.citrix.co.uk/lang/English/home.asp) has its high definition virtual desktop. In its proprietary offering this is marketed as HDX Technology.

VMware (http://www.vmware.com/) is the standard bearer for virtualisation – one might say the doyen of the industry. For the desktop its leading product is VMware View.

Wyse (http://www.wyse.com/) confidently describes itself as the global leader in thin computing and few would dispute this. It offers desktop appliances, for example the Viance. It also has its own virtualisation software of which Virtual Desktop Accelerator – part of the TCX suite – is probably most relevant.

Desktone (http://www.desktone.com/) is the surprise in the line-up. Only formed 3 years ago, its CEO Harry Ruda is naturally cock-a-hoop about clinching this deal. “We’re thrilled that IBM recognizes Desktone’s pioneering work in desktops as a service® (DaaS®)”, he says. “[It] is the first and only virtual desktop hosting platform designed specifically for the cloud era…”

How will each of these offerings fit into the overall IBM offering? It’s not obvious at present.

How will the service be marketed and distributed? Again, not specified at present but presumably through IBM channel partners.

At which market segments will it be aimed? IBM says it will “address PC replacement dilemmas, deliver resilience and reliability for critical information, and resolve Internet access parity problems, all at competitive subscription service pricing”. The inference is the SME sector particularly as the project name is ‘IBM Smart Business Desktop’.

At the lower end of the market, IBM would have to consider the pricing implications of the free software-as-a-service offerings from Google Docs. (http://docs.google.com) This has all the key bits equivalent to Office plus collaboration, lots of storage and a mobile browser.

There are interesting times ahead as cloud computing grows up.

There are many facets to cloud computing and they cannot all be covered in one blog entry. Security alone is such a significant issue that I shall say no more about it here but look at some other points.

There are exciting applications of course. bMobile, http://www.bmobileroute.com/archives/83 for example, offers plenty of stuff for iPhone and other mobile devices. Songsmith from Microsoft is an innovative and human scale idea. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/01/microsoft-songsmith-review.ars Also from Micrsoft is Office 2010, Office Web, described as software as a service (SAAS) to distinguish itself from those common cloud computing providers such as Google. http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/blog/microsoft-office-rises-into-the-clouds/

Naturally Google is taking the fight onto its competitor’s territory with Chrome. That should be enhancing the Cloud with a downloadable operating system in 2010. And there are views on this such as http://www.taranfx.com/blog/?p=1369

With so much going on it is unsurprising that the matter of standards is raisng its ugly head. One of the bodies taking a shot at this is the Object Management Group http://www.omg.org/ which, at its recent Cloud Standards Summit, announced a collaboration with leading technology Standards Development Organizations to coordinate and communicate standards for Cloud computing and storage.

And there are forums, seminars and conferences such as the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum where such assertions as It is generally agreed that open source software is already taking a leadership role in the world of cloud computing can be made. http://press.redhat.com/2009/07/13/open-source-cloud-computing-forum-agenda-posted/

If a conference is called, can market research studies be far behind? (Or is it the other way round?) Well in addition to specialist analysts like TekPlus (see our home page) the big firms such as Gartner and Frost & Sullivan have contributed their six-figure studies.

The technical offerings are principally software applications but there are tools where Vmware is a natural player and highly spoken of by some. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/07/13/vsphere-suite/ Even hardware components are launched on their reputed cloud computing capabilities. The newest Opteron processors are targeted at cloud computing and web serving environments, it is said. Does the fact that it may deliver up to 18 % better performance-per-watt compared to the quad-core version, make it inherently suitable for the cloud? Some think so http://www.pclaunches.com/processors/amd_opteron_he_sixcore_energy_efficient_processors_launched.php

Often there is a suspicion that things to do with cloud computing may be overstated. At http://www.abugidainfo.com/?p=10340 there is heart warming story that Amharic picked up from the ‘Seattle Times’.
Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to its schoolteachers nationwide, all running on Microsoft’s cloud platform, called Azure. The laptops will allow teachers to download curriculum, keep track of academic records and securely transfer student data throughout the education system, without having to build a support system of hardware and software to connect them….“They’re going to be able to leapfrog ahead of most companies in the U.S.,” said Danny Kim, chief technology officer of FullArmor. This is a Boston company that just happens to be working on the deployment of the Ethiopian project.

There is even the suggestion that cloud computing is transitory. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/ektron-cms400net-deployed-in-the-amazon-cloud-005025.php reports The cloud appears to be the new black in the fashion of web content management…vendors are conquering the cloud in hopes of dazzling their customers with more hosting options and improved scalability.

Out final comment comes firmly back to the ground at http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/07/minnesota-law-review-936-june-2009.html There is a link to the words of lawyer David A. Couillard who writes on ‘Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing’. It took nearly a century after the invention of the telephone for the Supreme Court to recognize that the Fourth Amendment could be applied to the content of private telephone conversations. Today…courts [are] reluctant to grant Fourth Amendment protection to data [on the Internet]… “Cloud computing” …is now used as a virtual platform for storing and interacting with data that are intended to remain private yet accessible anywhere. He argues that because the Internet has evolved to allow new uses, data placed in the cloud merit some level of Fourth Amendment privacy protection. The Fourth Amendment is the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In a sense that brings us back to the sordid business of security that I avoided in the first paragraph!

Larry Hirst, chairman of IBM Europe certainly does. He was an assistant to Akers in the early 1990s when IBM, bloated, bureaucratic and ossified came close to collapse (http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins/ibm-corporate/93-07.htm ). Hirst survived into the reign of Gerstner (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-828095.html ) who arrived to head the company in April 1993. Before he arrived the belief was that IBM’s core mainframe business was headed for obsolescence and the company should be split. Wall Street rubbed its hands in anticipation.

Gerstner saw the problem was not the lack of vision but the lack of cash flow. From experience – as a customer rather than technologist – he saw the need for large IT integrators. By his focus on IT services business, and later, open systems and the Internet, IBM regained its status and culture.

Now, under the regime of Sam Palmisano (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/biography/10055.wss), Hirst is a keen ambassador for the Global Delivery Centers (GDCs) that IBM has created around the world.

“Sam is the man”, said Hirst at the 2008 Analyst Insights event in Bucharest. An understandable statement as Palmisano was a key figure in creating IBM Global Services.

GDCs are now operating in China, Philippines, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina and Romania. IBM describes them as available “to provide clients worldwide with business consulting and application services”. They are, of course, located in areas where IBM foresees potential but, more importantly, they are a way of leveraging the lower cost base in each of these developing countries.

Some see the GDCs as IBM’s answer to outsourcing. In other words, the only way to beat them is to join them. IBM sees it differently. The announcement about the opening of the GDC in Pune, India said, “Due to the vast presence of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and automotive industry expertise in Pune, the new center serves as a strategic location for IBM’s global and local automotive clients. …IBM offers clients a wide range of services that cover key areas such as product lifecycle management, manufacturing productivity, business consulting, human capital management, financial services, technology services, and solutions for small and midsize automotive manufacturers”.

Those who see in the present financial crisis and recession the decline of capitalism and globalisation are mistaken. Capitalism has survived worst downturns and globalisation has scarcely begun. Interconnected finance, ease of transportation, global threats requiring global solutions and the blossoming Web ensure globalisation for a generation at least. Whether the West will be the driving force behind it is less certain.

From its very earliest days IBM has carried the ‘I’ of its name with significance. The international dimension has always been important so that the GDCs can be seen as the very latest development of a characteristic deep in the corporate DNA.

How will the GDCs develop? Hmm. Suffice to say that when this observer heard that Shanghai was to be worldwide base for IBM outside the US and Europe, analogy with the Roman Empire immediately sprang to mind. After Rome fell in the 5th century, the Empire survived for almost a thousand years with its capital in Constantinople.

This issue of Trust arose recently in discussion with a major IT vendor, which might have been IBM. Keen to penetrate the small and medium-sized business (SMb) sector, the company was defining its strengths. One of these was clearly trust – older readers will remember the maxim ‘No one ever got fired for choosing IBM’.

Of the two elements, Integrity is the more difficult deliverable. I may be honest, truthful and fair but how do I ensure my subordinates, my agents and representatives are the same? They may be motivated by targets, commissions or other incentives and thus be less concerned about the aspirations I hold dear. And how can I be sure that the providers of services essential to my business are trustworthy? My source of finance, my insurer or the firm that clears my rubbish may indulge, unknown to me, in dubious practices for short-term advantage.

While there can be no absolute assurance that those in the supply chain above or below you have the same standards of integrity as yourself, you can take some steps that give comfort. Training, contract terms, service level agreements that are monitored and enforced go a long way but your own example should not be overlooked. If, as a firm, you are known for high standards of integrity and are known to expect it in others, dealings with you should be uncomplicated by suspicion.

Competence is the ability to deliver in a timely fashion a product or service that performs to spec, with reliability and appropriate ongoing support. The reputation for competence is not gained from a one off project but from long time commitment to good performance.

Now while trust goes a long way by impressing customers, it is not the whole story. Take IBM’s aspirations for the SMB sector. Its products may not be suitable for the SMB sector. Its prices may be higher than the SMB sector can afford. Its sales and marketing structure may not be such as to make it easy for the SMB sector to do business with it.

In this particular story, over the last 3 years IBM has developed its Express Advantage (http://www-01.ibm.com/partnerworld/pwhome.nsf/weblook/pub_strategies_smb_uk_express_built.html)portfolio to address price and product suitability. More recently its Concierge service tries to address the SMB access issues with named individuals taking ownership of a customers enquiries until resolved. It has also restructured internally to get its own people to think SMB. The results are that IBM claims it has achieved 10% annual growth in SMB revenues.

While trust in itself may not win customers, it provides a sound foundation on which winning may be possible.

But what of the competition? The obvious candidates are Microsoft and Oracle.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx is an on-demand service hosted and managed by Microsoft over the Internet. It delivers a full suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities through a Web browser or directly into Microsoft Office and Outlook. All this comes without the need for any IT infrastructure investment or set-up.
Nevertheless implementation may be easier for HP customers because of the partnership between the two companies. HP also offers the Sage suite of CRM applications for SMBs. Many smaller outfits would probably feel comfortable with the SMB background of Sage – but it is not yet available on-demand only on HP blades.

Then there is Oracle www.oracle.com which, to the casual SMB observer, seems a complex and intimidating beast. As well as the eponymous software, Oracle also has JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel in its stable. Yet in its CRM On Demand Release 15 it offers software-as-a-service with the latest Web 2.0 capabilities. Its capabilities are impressive but its scalability may be suspect and at the present time of asking may not be the most suitable for SMBs.

So SMBs are no longer excluded from the the world of CRM. Many of them may feel, however, that it is an exotic world too far removed from their day-to-day experience, practice and needs.

First of all, at bottom, cloud computing is simply a data processing resource. It is a data processing resource with certain attributes:
o It is distributed
o It is a shared
o It is heterogeneous
o Virtualisation is essential
o Access is via the Internet (shown as a Cloud on so many network diagrams and hence the name)
o Its proprietary aspect is the global infrastructure and thus delivered through major corporations

Now it is certainly more complex than this simple list as any guide will explain (see for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing). Yet it is these attributes that will determine its acceptance. The benefits are clear in savings on capital investments, flexibility, scalability and sustainability. Reliability should be better but there will be choke points or points of vulnerability in any distributed system that can cause interruption to service. Security and confidentiality will continue to be an on-going issue that will not be satisfactorily resolved for many years to come. The involvement of the big, competing guns like Google, Microsoft and IBM provides an enormous commercial pressure for expansion.

Cloud Computing can trace its origins, perhaps, to the ‘software-as-a-service’ concept introduced a dozen years ago. Social networking has contributed to the development by creating an immense population of individuals who are familiar with the concepts of Cloud Computing although not necessarily with the term. Many are already customers of Cloud Computing if they are using Google not just Search but Google Apps – Gmail, Calendar, Docs and so forth. And all for free, of course.

Pricing models in the commercial world vary depending on the type of application, the number of users, hours, resource consumed and level of service. Competition in the form of specialist and niche providers will make pricing more complicated.

Just as so many other markets based on the Internet have experienced rapid growth, so will Cloud Computing. Yet for structural reasons it is unlikely to achieve J-curve expansion. Customer awareness of Cloud Computing choices will be slower, so that for providers this looks like a market that should have comfortable margins for a while.

In 1961, John McCarthy http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ first suggested at MIT that data processing power might in future be sold as a utility like water or power. That future is still on the cards and Cloud Computing has brought it a step nearer.

Hmm. In that case since they were introduced by Sun two years ago (Project Blackbox) http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp and Rackable early in 2007 (Concentro latterly ICE Cube) http://www.rackable.com/products/icecube.aspx?nid=servers_5 why have sales not begun climbing the hook curve?

The idea seems to spring from the need for speed and flexibility. Build a conventional data center with bricks and mortar, suspended floors, environmental controls, and you have planners, plumbers, electricians, installers, commissioning engineers and the rest - and a two-year timescale. With a data center in a container there is an assembly team in a factory somewhere building data centers on a production line. Haul the container to the customer’s site and plug it in - in weeks or less.

In fact there appear to be at least two distinct scenarios for the use of these data centers. One is the one we have suggested above and suitable for disaster relief, emergency use and the military. The other is centered around the idea that IBM has postulated with its own Portable Modular Data Centre (PMDC), one element of its Project Big Green initiative: energy efficiency. It claims roughly 60% of the capital costs and 50% of the operational costs of running a data center are linked to energy requirements.

So is there life in the concept?

You think you can rely on the good reputation of a renowned, well-ordered, ethical organisation to have a clean website? Think again.

According to Websense a massive attack earlier in the year compromised hundreds of respectable websites. MSNBC, ZDNet, Wired, the United Nations and a large UK government site were among those hit. If a user’s browser opened one of the many compromised sites, a carefully crafted iframe HTML tag redirected the user to a malicious site packed with exploits. As a result, malicious code, designed to steal confidential information, was launched on vulnerable machines.

But at least if you have your email from a sound outfit like Gmail, Yahoo or MSN, separating out the spam and securing your own stuff, that’s OK? Uh-uh. No, sir!

Spammers have been able to sign up for email accounts on a mass basis by using sophisticated tools and bots to break the CAPTCHA system. That’s the technique using weird and wonky letters that only a human was supposed to be able to decipher. Now the evil spammers have cracked CAPTCHA, they have access to a wide portfolio of services and domains to launch attacks on millions of users worldwide, anonymously and free of charge.

So you always check very carefully the URL in the address bar and stick to the official pages. Sorry, that may not be enough.

Web 2.0 is arriving and it means users can edit web content and upload files. (Think You-tube stuff; think E-Bay adverts) Without adequate security technologies and practices, hackers can use mash-ups and unattended code injection to alter web pages. The URL you have carefully checked may identify the origin but can no longer be relied on as being true of every bit of content on the Web page you’re using.

Is it no wonder that the commercial progress of Websense Inc http://www.websense.com/global/ continues on its upward track? The URL filtering technology for which Websense was created has grown and spawned new product areas as the Web itself has widened and deepened.
Its in-house developments have been complemented by acquisitions: Inktomi source code filtering in 2006, PortAuthority content technology and SurfControl premises solutions, both in 2007.

Evidence that the market is coalescing is marked by Websense’s competitors. Symantec got Vontu while MacAfee got Reconnex.
An obvious challenge at the moment is dealing with social websites, ensuring that incoming content is clean. However in the corporate and government spaces, endpoints are where the serious thinking is taking place. How does the organisation stop the leakage of information out through email attachments, instant messaging, PDAs or the humble memory stick? A variety of techniques have been developed for Data Loss Prevention (DLP), some longer established than others. Keywords, document registration, lexical analysis, fingerprints, natural language profiles and other more abstruse techniques are available. Websense claims that it is even able to do filtering on financial documents.

Websense Security Lab uses ThreatSeeker to inspect and categorise 40 million websites per hour, sharing that information with all its customers. A knowledge based system is used to achieve such high rates of processing in this security research and intelligence grid. Its power and effectiveness accounts for the whingeing seen from certain surfing freaks. (see below)

Websense hosted security provides a centralised email filtering service, blocking threats before they reach customers’ networks. Available world-wide, it has been taken up by American customers particularly.

The Websense Security Gateway sits at a customer’s premises. With links to ThreatSeeker data, it can automatically categorise content and deal with malware in realtime. It is easy to use and the customer creates its own individual policy.

Websense Security Gateway is very scaleable and can sit on a blade server. All Websense business – now up to 50,000 accounts - is handled through channels. Websense sees its business in terms of 3 distinct solution sets in Web, Data and Messaging Security. Put all those together and Websense calls it Essential Information Protection. Hmmm.

Data Security involves a number of issues if it is to be effective yet flexible enough to meet the demands of Web 2.0 business, administration and entertainment needs. Contextual Awareness is one of the factors but human frailties and flaws in process will be ongoing issues.

Look at some blogs such as http://johannburkard.de/blog/www/spam/websense-block-web-sense.html

“Websense, Inc. is one of the busiest net abusers. Their stealth scanning never stops. [examples given] If you go through your own log files, you’ll notice that Websense never uses the same user agent twice (simply to never show up in statistics)”.
Or what about the lady librarian at http://maclibrary.edublogs.org/2008/08/12/tuesday-tidbits-thinking-out-aloud-about-poetry/

“The day turned out well. People participated. No one sat there chatting with their neighbor out of sheer boredom. Everyone shared a poem draft they had written. The time flew and of course, we ran out of time. My greatest frustration was when attempting to share some of the blogs I frequent and ran up against the “Websense” blocking of certain sites. Drat! Blogspot.com is one such site that is unilaterally blocked. Grrrr!”
Here we have ordinary folks, unaware of the dangers and blaming their protector.
More insidious are deliberate attempts such as this one described at Techpedia, http://technopedia.info/tech/2008/08/12/ultrasurf-probably-the-best-proxy-server.html
“Great discoveries are mostly derived out of absolute necessities in life. At office, we have Websense enabled which blocks almost every second website on the Internet especially webmails. My perennial search for a proxy server ended with UltraSurf proxy server application.
Other proxy servers that I stumbled upon were mostly web based and browsing speeds were lethargic. Many components like Javascript and Flash on websites were disabled and on top of that, pop-up ads. Damn!!!
The way UltraSurf works is just magical. The application is sized around 200 KB and works sans installation…I have checked with my network administrator and this application doesn’t leave any traces behind. The Mac address is hidden and so is the origin IP address. Network admins can never make out that the proxy server has been enabled and there is no dang proof on your system to suggest that you have used the application. Just ensure to keep UltraSurf at a hidden location and share this love with your colleagues”.
Similar stuff can be found on You-Tube such as http://youtube.com/watch?v=Lf1teSojvfQ
“my second video detailing ways to get around or bypass websense. thhis one takes a little more time but almost 100% guarantees you getting through websense. take a look at my other video on websense also”
It was gratifying to see a response a little later at http://youtube.com/watch?v=pKv41ge8XcQ
“Shameless self-promotion video describing how to bypass Websense. NOTE: the method described has been fixed. Sorry, kids. . “

Human frailties will take a whiles longer to sort. In the meantime it seems Websense and other companies in the field are keeping abreast of the threats – just.