BMC's boss: “It’s ludicrous that IT is the last automated department today."
NEW YORK — With all the new technology that’s changing the industry, someone has to secure and manage it.
Thursday’s waltz through the last day of the UBS Warburg Global Communications conference here provided an overview of where some of the players in the network security and management marketplace are focusing their efforts.
The morning started with a briefing by Entrust on its priorities for the consumer market. Late this year or early next, the company plans to roll out a product called Extended Validation SSL.
EV SSL will change the color of a browser screen once a user has passed through all of the authentication procedures, says Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. Microsoft will support EV SSL in its upcoming Vista operating system release, he said.
WebSense, a maker of URL filtering tools, will continue to expand its products in Web security, extending them to other media and content.
The company plans to unveil a data leakage product late in the second quarter of next year, said CFO Doug Wride. This product will detect Trojans and other malicious code unknowingly introduced into corporate networks by employees surfing the Web and that might expose sensitive data.
“We’ll focus on data leakage for at least the next couple of years,” Wride said. He said the market is expected to grow tenfold over the next five years to $763 million.
Secure Computing is also extending its product line with offerings such as Webwasher 6.0, software unveiled earlier this week that keeps score on the “reputation” of IP addresses to prevent spam and phishing. This capability was obtained through the acquisition of CipherTrust three months ago (Secure Computing plans to integrate CipherTrust‘s TrustedSource technology across its product line).
“We’ll bring a lot of that to market in 2007,” said Tim Steinkopf, senior vice president of operations and CFO.
Secure Computing also plans to bring to market a product that combines its enterprise gateway security software with that of CyberGuard, a maker of firewall and content-filtering software that Secure Computing purchased last year.
On the management side, BMC plans to unveil Release 2.3 of its Performance Manager software next month, said CEO Bob Beauchamp. Performance Manager is essentially a renamed and enhanced version of BMC’s Patrol and Patrol Express software that consolidates management information into a single view, with central configuration, reporting, administration, and a Configuration Management Data Base.
BMC also plans to aggressively market its line of business service management (BSM) software aimed at automating IP processes and people. BSM is an approach to application and infrastructure management that involves identifying critical business services and managing the infrastructure to support them.
Forrester Research says firms that implement BSM can potentially shave 25% off the 76% of the overall IT budget that goes to operations.
“It’s ludicrous that IT is the last automated department today,” Beauchamp said.
Outsourcing giant EDS plans to focus more intently on helping organizations modernize old software. The company has tools that can probe old, legacy software and programming languages, like COBOL, and software that’s not working anymore and help bring it up to date, said CFO Ron Vargo.
“We’ll use some additional strength in consulting in applications modernization,” he said.
As more companies come to depend on the Internet to transact business and create demand and awareness, Web analytics company WebTrends plans to aim its enterprise software squarely at marketing performance management. The company next week will unveil Marketing Warehouse 2.0, said Greg Drew, president and CEO.
“How do we change the performance of the entire company?” Drew said. “There is no place where the [chief marketing officer] has a system of record.”
Lots of activity, to be sure, but management and security of the technology changing the industry cannot be overstated.
“If you don’t handle security well enough, or focus on it, you will fail,” said Michael Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research in Motion, whose BlackBerry handheld data device is revolutionizing mobile communications. “The security model continues to be an underestimated one.”
To read about Day 2, click here.
