CES: SBC's Whitacre announces IP-based services suite
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LAS VEGAS - SBC Communications will roll out a suite of network services and products based on IP this year, featuring integrated next-generation TV, high-speed Internet access and VOIP (voice over IP) offerings for home users, company Chairman Edward Whitacre said Thursday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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(InfoWorld) - Narus Inc. is moving to help service providers scale up their network security, porting its NarusInsight Security Suite (NSS) to blade servers for the first time. NarusInsight is designed to detect IP (Internet Protocol) attacks on carrier networks, such as DDOS (distributed denial of service) and worm attacks, and alert network administrators as well as third-party tools that can halt those attacks. As the size of IP networks and the level of traffic on them grows, Narus aims to help carriers keep tabs on the situation. The Mountain View, California, company will unveil its latest software, NarusInsight Secure Suite 6, on Tuesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. With the latest version, it has ported both elements of the system -- data collection and logic servers -- to IBM Corp.'s BladeCenter platform. Carriers can fill a rack with 13 collection blades, each monitoring a network connection as large as 10G bps (bits per second), with one logic blade handling the collected data, said Steve Bannerman, vice president of marketing and product management at Narus. The carriers can also link multiple chassis together and the logic blades will work together as a unit, he said. Previously, the NarusInsight collection servers were available only on Dell Inc. 1U rack-mounted servers. (The logic server can run on any Red Hat Inc. Linux hardware platform.) Blades tend to take up less space and consume less energy than rack-mounted servers, which can be critical issues in crowded service provider facilities. Narus also put a new user interface in NSS 6 to help network managers more quickly interpret incoming data about the network. For example, it will be easier to distinguish the traffic spikes caused by DDOS attacks from those that happen because users are sharing a new music video, Bannerman said. The new version also has built-in software for interoperability with mitigation tools such as Cisco Systems Inc.'s Cisco Guard. Previously, making the third-party tools work with Narus' monitoring system was a separate task, he said. AT&T Inc., Korea Telecom and Japan's KDDI Corp. are among Narus' customers. The company began selling NarusInsight about five years ago, Bannerman said. As carriers move from basic IP transport to providing their own services such as VOIP (voice over IP) and IPTV, they increasingly are the victims of attacks, he said. Meanwhile, enterprises are relying on carriers to keep their networks free of threats and the service providers are seeking added business by offering special security services, Bannerman added. NarusInsight deployments may cost anywhere from US$1 million to $15 million depending on the size of the network and other factors, Bannerman said.
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New ServGate hardware, starting at less than $1000, has integrated antivirus, spam filtering, and other security features.
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As âa direct result of proof-of-concept testingâ indicating that the Washington-based Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) âcan cut costs, increase system reliability and security, and provide expanded IT support services,â AWC âwill begin systematically pulling the plug on all Windows-based PCs in its cavernous auto processing shop and power up Macs to execute virtually all of its revenue-generating operations. The move comes on the heels of a quiet wholesale replacement of Windows-based servers for data storage and Web operations, which are now running on Apple Inc.âs Xserve RAID machines,â reports Julia King (Computerworld).
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In 10-year deal, companies to provide IP television services like video on demand, DV recording. NEW YORK  - SBC Communications said Wednesday that it reached a 10-year, $400 million deal with Microsoft
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CES 2005 Courts CE vendors with 'fanless' reference platform
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SBC Communications this week entered the residential VoIP market by announcing plans to launch a service early next year for its DSL customers.
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SBC Communications SBC.N will use  Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O technology to launch video services  over upgraded high-speed data lines, the companies said  Wednesday.
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Microsoft, Sun and a trio of other leading hardware vendors today published the WS-Management specification, which spells out how data centers can use Web services
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Microsoft Corp. partners introduced to the company&#39;s software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services.
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EMC today is set to unveil its first software-as-a-service offerings based on technology gained from its recent acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems.
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Tools and hardware maker Stanley Works has deployed IP-based business communications software from Interactive Intelligence as part of a strategy to improve its customer service.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced it has made enhancements to its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture to ease deployment of a wide range of business-focused and consumer-based services.
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(InfoWorld) - Blueprints for implementing interoperable and secure Web services are being amended by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to incorporate the latest SOAP technology and reliable message transmission, representatives of organization said on Thursday. During a meeting at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco, WS-I officials cited plans to upgrade the group's Basic Profile and Basic Security Profile and release a Reliable Secure Profile. WS-I profiles feature implementation guidelines on using related Web services specifications together for interoperability. Membership in WS-I features a roster of the computer industry's major players. Companies like BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the participants. The industry has embraced the WS-I Basic Profile to enable interoperability of Web services between different vendors' products, said Michael Bechauf, WS-I president and chairman. "The reception has been incredible," said Bechauf, who also is vice president of industry standards at WS-I member SAP. WS-I is working concurrently on two upgrades to Basic Profile, versions 1.2 and 2.0. Due by the end of the year, version 1.2 adds support for SOAP-based attachments and WS-Addressing for addressing of Web services and messages. Version 2.0, expected in 2008, changes the SOAP implementation from SOAP 1.1 to SOAP 1.2, promising performance improvements for embedded devices, WS-I officials said. WS-I did not consolidate the two Basic Profile upgrades because switching SOAP versions requires a major upgrade to products. Basic Profile 1.0 was published in August 2003 with version 1.1 following a year later. The advent of Basic Profile has had a positive impact on Web services, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director of Burton Group. "Once that came out, a lot of our most egregious interoperability issues went away," Manes said. Vendors began adopting it, and people followed these rules as systems were being developed, she said. Manes cited errors in WSDL 1.1 as an example of egregious errors that impeded Web services implementation. Basic Security Profile 1.1, planned for ratification by the end of 2007, includes capabilities for single sign-on for Web services applications in multiple systems. This is accomplished through support for the WS-Security 1.1 specification, which backs new token profiles, particularly around XAML. WS-I is seeking five interoperable implementations of Basic Security Profile 1.1, which is a requirement for ratification. Basic Security Profile 1.0 was published March 30. With Reliable Secure Profile 1.0, also anticipated by the end of the year, WS-I is accommodating reliable transmission of messages. This differs from the Basic Security Profile, which covers encryption and signatures. Reliable Secure Profile will incorporate support for the WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 and WS-SecureConversation 1.3 specifications. WS-I at the conference Thursday evening plans to demonstrate interoperability offered by Basic Security Profile, featuring technologies from IBM, Microsoft, Novell, SAP, and Sun involved in a supply chain management application. Also, a group of companies at the conference will be featured in an interoperability demonstration of the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language 2.0 standard from OASIS. Among the participants are IBM, CA, Oracle, and Red Hat.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft partners introduced to the company's software-plus-services strategy this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) applauded the plan, though they noted a few challenges as the company makes the transition from selling business software to offering more hosted and Web-based services. Microsoft used its annual partner conference, held this year in Denver, as a coming-out party for the strategy, with CEO Steve Ballmer outlining the plan for the first time after other executives have been discussing it publicly for more than a year. It seemed fitting that the company's top executive was the one to deliver the message to thousands of partners who play a significant role in the company's success. "I had no idea how partner-focused Microsoft really is," said Linda Gillis, a first-time attendee of the WPC and director of marketing for Squirrel Systems, a British Columbia company that provides restaurant point-of-sale software and services. This dependency on partners is a double-edged sword for Microsoft as it moves to a more Web-centric services business model versus the software license model it has used successfully for years. The company not only has to revise its strategy, remaining several steps behind competitors such as Google that started business on the Web and have no traditional software business, but it also has to help its partners make changes, too. To do this, Microsoft has been slowly ramping up its hosted services portfolio with a series of both consumer and business services. Executives also said at the WPC that those services will eventually become a full-fledged development platform, being both an OS and platform for new applications on the Web in a similar way that Windows is on the desktop. Gillis said that moving toward offering more services for business in addition to software is the right direction for both Microsoft and its partners. "The addition of services helps to create long-term customer relationships and a recurring revenue stream," she said. Most partners agreed with this sentiment, but some noted challenges that both Microsoft and partners will face as they make the switch. Jay Blazensky, vice president of business development for RingCentral, a Microsoft partner that provides voice services, including click-to-call, agreed that creating repeatable revenue is a definite benefit of the plan. But he noted that a challenge for Microsoft and its partners is to convince sales people to "forgo the larger up-front commission in lieu of a recurring annuity." "Those that buy into the model and are successful -- and patient -- have the opportunity to be enormously successful," he said. Another partner, Joe McDermott of Solution Canvas, said Microsoft's strategy of transitioning services in a calculated and deliberateÂ manner is the only way to make the change, which is necessary because it is what customers are demanding. Solution Canvas has built a service for small law firms using Microsoft's Office Live hosted service. "I think the strategy is the way forward strategically for both Microsoft and [partners] ... because in the end the marketplace will dictate and demand," he said. "End-users are who ultimately matter, and now that we have new Web technologies like AJAX and a rapid application development platform in Office Live, the barriers to powerful online applications are gone." At the same time, McDermott acknowledged that some Microsoft partners will have to learn new skills to take advantage of the new services approach, though the company's "considered pace" for moving to services will help them in that endeavor. While McDermott praised the technologies that enable more hosted services, one of them -- reliable access to broadband -- remains a hindrance not only to Microsoft's services plan but also its competitors' plans, RingCentral's Blazensky said. "It's an industry-wide challenge ... [but] it's maturing every day," he noted.
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Next week, the Wi-Fi Alliance will release Wi-Fi Multimedia, or WMM, an interim standard that will provide early quality-of-service functionality for multimedia equipment based on the emerging 802.
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SBC Communications (SBC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) will introduce an Internet-based calling service for its local telephone customers early next year and will consider offering the service nationally later, the company said on