NEWS&ANALYSIS
the
LEGAL
Microsoft, Sendo settle
buzz
HOSTING
SECURITY
WebEx adds sales
application
OpenService updates
Threat Manager
WEB CONFERENCING SERVICE
OPENSERVICE LAST WEEK DEBUTED
provider WebEx Communications
this week will announce a new
version of its service designed for
sales professionals called WebEx
Sales Center.
The service is used for conducting Web conferences with
sales prospects. It includes special features to assist sales professionals, such as a subjectmatter-experts database, the
ability to launch a Web conference from within a CRM (customer relationship management)
application, private chat between
sales team members, and a feature called Attention Indicator
that shows when a prospect has
switched to a different application. Pricing is $225 per port per
month. Per-minute pricing packages are also available.
—Dennis Callaghan
the latest version of its flagship
Security Threat Manager security
information management solution, which adds functionality that
can correlate threats and weigh
risks based on the value of individual assets.
STM 3.0 considers several
factors, including the target vulnerability of a particular attack,
value of the threatened assets,
attack severity and sensor location, before assigning a risk value
to each event.
The new version also adds a
custom correlation rules editor
that lets security managers create and edit their own rules for
the system.
In addition, the updated
release supports Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. STM 3.0 is
available now. —Dennis Fisher
BY THE NUMBERS
MICROSOFT AND SENDO INTER-
national have settled the lawsuit
that the British smart-phone
maker filed against the software
company in December 2003.
Sendo had claimed that
Microsoft purposefully undermined Sendo with a “secret
plan” to use Sendo’s hardware
expertise to
establish new
manufacturing
partnerships that
would compete
with Sendo.
Officials did
not divulge the
monetary terms
of the settlement. Furthermore, as part of
the settlement
reached last week, all parties
deny any and all liability.
—Carmen Nobel
RFID
IBM taps midmarket
DESPITE SIGNIFICANT RFID ADOPTION
from the biggest companies,
IBM is turning its attention to
the midmarket.
The company announced last
week at the Frontline Solutions
Conference & Expo in Chicago
a suite of services designed
to speed the benefits of radiofrequency identification systems
to industrial companies and midsize businesses.
The offering includes a solutions development workshop
along with a site survey and
pilot and testing service.
—Renee Boucher Ferguson
SERVERS
Stratus readies
low-end unit
STRATUS TECHNOLOGIES IS BRING-
ing its fault-tolerant server platform down into the
volume server space, giving users an alternative to
Stratus’ ftServer W Series
offers fault tolerance with
lower-cost components.
clusters and giving Stratus
access to an area of the industry that didn’t have it before.
The ftServer W Series 2300
system has many of the features
of the higher-end 3300, but at
about $10,000, it is half the cost,
according to officials. The oneway system, powered by Intel’s
Xeon processor, runs Windows
and offers the same lock-step
technology that the larger systems do—two sets of components running in lock step, with
one taking over if the other fails.
Stratus is targeting the 2300
—which is due in mid-October—
at decentralized locations, such as
branch offices, retail chains and
warehouses. —Jeffrey Burt
Security appliances
Change in total worldwide security appliance factory
revenue, Q2 2003 to Q2 2004
60%
SonicWall
45%
30%
Juniper
Cisco
WatchGuard
15%
0
Nokia
-15%
Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Security Server Appliance Tracker
18 e W E E K n S E P T E M B E R 2 0 , 2 0 0 4
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
All
vendors
Solaris is part of our crown jewels, [but] the
real crown jewel is Java, and we are trying
to push people to write to Java so it doesn’t
matter what operating system you have.
John Loiacono, Sun Microsystems’ executive vice president for
software
w w w. e w e e k . c o m