News briefs: Cisco to sink $1.1 billion into India

Network World
October 24, 2005 12:05 AM ET

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Cisco last week said it will invest $1.1 billion in India over the next several years, with new projects in R&D, venture capital, equipment financing and customer support targeted for the world's second-largest country. Cisco CEO John Chambers said the move is to address the fast-growing economy and IT needs of India. "India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy," he said in a statement. "As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking." According to the World Bank, India's IT sector accounted for approximately 4% of its gross domestic product between 2003 and 2004, with almost a million employed in the sector. More than 100 multinational corporations have set up R&D centers in India.
Amazon.com will open a second development center in India, to be located in the southern city of Chennai. The center will focus on developing new features for Amazon.com's sites worldwide that will help customers find anything they want to buy online, the company said. The company set up its first development center in India last year, in Bangalore. That center is focused on search technology and Web services, a company spokesman said. The development center in Chennai is the company's fourth software development center outside the U.S. Amazon.com also has centers in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Cape Town, South Africa. Its primary development center in the U.S. is in Seattle.
Database administrators have added incentive to install Oracle's latest security patches released last week. Malicious software is circulating that can crash an unpatched database server, and one security expert predicted that more malware targeting the 89 recently patched vulnerabilities is on the way. On Thursday, code was published on the Full Disclosure security mailing list that exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in certain versions of Oracle's databases. This code could be used by attackers to bring down a database, using a technique called an SQL injection attack, says Alexander Kornbrust, a business director at Red-Database-Security. Earlier in the week Oracle released a bundle of critical security patches that fixed 89 bugs in its database and application servers, as well as some PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications. More information can be found here .
Microsoft last week released the second service pack for Exchange 2003, which is half of the software the company is developing to improve the delivery of e-mail to Windows-based mobile devices. The mobile features in Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 are a direct hit at BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion, which offers the same instant updates to corporate e-mail, calendars and contacts. Microsoft currently uses Short Message Service to notify a mobile device of new e-mail. The device then retrieves the e-mail from the server. With the new Direct Push Technology in SP2, e-mail will be automatically pushed to the device using an HTTP connection maintained by the device. SP2 includes new spam-protection features, including support for Sender ID and updates to the Exchange Instant Message Filter; remote management, including Remote Wipe to clear data from lost devices; and policy enforcement controls, such as requiring a password to unlock a device.
EMC last week agreed to acquire Captiva Software, a maker of software for digitally capturing documents. The price was about $275 million. EMC has a partnership with Captiva in which it integrates Captiva's InputAccell software with its own Documentum enterprise management platform. The company plans to further integrate Captiva software into its own. EMC will keep selling and developing Captiva's stand-alone products. The companies' combined technologies will let corporations eliminate paper or automatically digitally capture information and integrate it with electronic business processing, EMC says.