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Market Roundup August 3, 2007 EMC Documentum 6 Now Available Trend Micro SecureCloud Offers Software-as-a-Service Security Platform Neverfail Addresses Criticality of SharePoint with Availability Software |
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EMC Documentum 6 Now Available
EMC Corporation has announced availability of the EMC Documentum 6 enterprise content management (ECM) platform that features a new services-based API as well as development tools that together modernize Documentum-based application development and configuration. New features of the Documentum 6 platform include Documentum Enterprise Content Services, a Web Services-based API with ready-to-use enterprise content services for integration with other enterprise applications within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA); Documentum Composer providing a standards-based platform for development and configuration tools that facilitate composition of application with reusable elements; and Documentum Branch Office Caching Services enabling all operations —read, create, edit, version, search—to occur locally to a user, regardless of location, to provide the fastest response times possible. The company stated that these latest infrastructure innovations collectively make it easier for customers to improve and automate business processes by standardizing enterprise-wide upon a common architecture for unifying people, processes, and policies across applications. In addition, the new services interface was redesigned to eliminate Documentum-specific methods and terminology in favor of a vendor-neutral framework for working with content management functionality. The Documentum 6 enterprise content management platform will be generally available at the end of August. EMC also announced a developer content whereby individuals or teams are challenged to develop and submit an ECM application based upon the Documentum 6 platform by September 30, 2007 for the chance to win cash prizes of up to $100,000. Submissions will be judged by a panel of internal EMC experts and external representatives with the top submission to be recognized at the EMC Developer Conference in Monaco.
Document management, as it was once known, had traditionally filled the need of organizations to maintain suitable control over the content and integrity of important documents. For many the thought of applying such control over most documents was very appealing; however, the discipline and overhead ultimately required to implement earlier solutions caused many to scale back their ambitions to only include certain classes of importance documents. As the number of ad hoc documents on mobile platforms and desktops soared, an ever-increasing number of documents simply did not participate in any document management scheme, which left earlier implementations limited in their scope. Fortunately, much has changed over the recent years and the notion of document management has grown to become content management, with all the implicit increase in breadth and depth of the content to be managed.
Documentum was one of EMC’s earlier software acquisitions and the company has made substantial progress integrating the management philosophies afforded by Documentum through the EMC information management infrastructure. The delivery of a Web services-based API to support SOA environments is a notable achievement, one that we believe should help broaden the appeal of content management throughout organizations. With the strategic push by many to adopt SOA within their enterprise, having direct integration with content management, and ultimately the storage infrastructure makes a great deal of sense. As such, we expect to see an renewed focus on ECM applications, in part driven by improved ease of creation and deployment aided by APIs and SOA, but also as compliance and best practices initiatives become more prevalent throughout organizations.
We are also heartened by the shift away from Documentum-specific methods and nomenclature towards a vendor-neutral approach. By embracing a more generic approach, the potential pool of Documentum developers can increase as non-Documentum developers familiar with Web services can learn to develop Documentum-based ECM applications more rapidly. Combined with the Documentum Composer, this implies greater inroads of ECM functionality across the organization as applications and business processes can be more readily modified to accommodate the benefits of content management.
Following on the heels of the numerous hardware platform announcements from last week, the Documentum 6 platform is another reminder that the days of EMC as a storage vendor are long gone. The updated ability of Documentum and its focus on Web services and SOA are yet another example of how information infrastructure is much more than disk arrays and there management. Over time, we expect to see the delineation between content, applications content management, and applications to become less clear. As such, the collective prowess of the tool kits afforded by EMC’s software investments becomes more evident and more essential in competitive enterprises today.
Trend Micro SecureCloud Offers Software-as-a-Service Security Platform
Trend Micro Incorporated , a vendor of network antivirus and content security software and services, has announced immediate availability of SecureCloud, Trend Micro's complete Software-as-a-Service Security platform offering its industry leading threat protection solutions for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. The SecureCloud security platform has three dimensions that together create a complete Software-as-a-Service solution: Security policy for all types of users that can be managed from a single Web console; protection against threats across email and the Web that includes Web reputation, anti-malware, and comprehensive content security; and services that deliver security across all elements of the customer's infrastructure from gateway to desktop. Trend Micro has designed SecureCloud to be fully channel-enabled. The recently announced Trend Micro Worry-Free Remote Manager promises resellers and partners quick access to sell SecureCloud Services and the ability to remotely manage desktop, server, and messaging security for multiple customers from a single, hosted location. In the future, functionality to manage customer's gateway and other services will be added.
Three distinct Security Applications are available immediately on the SecureCloud Software-as-a-Service security platform: Email Reputation Services, InterScan Messaging Hosted Security, and Botnet Identification Service. Email Reputation Services is a first line of defense for messaging gateway security, providing customers with a policy in-the-cloud capability to decide how aggressive they wish to be with abusive email senders. The portal enables administrators to apply a policy to a specific ISP or country, as well as run a Botnet Report to monitor their own network address space for malicious activity. The Service already has 6,000 active customers and over 100 million mailboxes protected on a global basis. Email Reputation Services is also available from Trend Micro's strategic partner Cisco, and can be purchased as part of the Security Plus pack which runs on the Trend Micro CSC blade for Cisco ASA Platforms. InterScan Messaging Hosted Security is a hosted email security service focusing on protection against viruses, spam, malware, phishing, and other email-borne blended threats. The Service offers streamlined management, with a “set it and forget it” interface, as well as granular access and control to enforce compliance and prevent data leakage. Trend Micro Botnet Identification Service protects against the growing threat posed by botnets, identifying in real time the Command and Control centers that operate the many networks of zombies. This information enables customers to block communications between these Command and Control centers and the compromised PCs they control. By breaking the communication cycle, the botnets are rendered harmless without affecting other services.
Email Reputation Services Advanced is available now globally,
with pricing for 250 users set at $6.80 per user. InterScan
Hosted Messaging Security Advanced is available now in North America and Latin
America with expansion to additional regions expected in Q4 2007, priced at
$28.50 per user for 250 users. Botnet Identification
Service is available now globally, with pricing for 500,000 users set at 9
cents per user.
The concept of software as a service is one the market is ready for in a big way. This especially true for the security arena where the threat du jour often spawns a number of vendors all claiming to being able to eradicate the latest scourge. For the most part end users, especially consumers and small businesses, do not really care what the latest threat it is or frankly how dangerous it can be. What they want is simple: no problems for them. Security vendors that combine services and products for customer aggravation minimization will find themselves a ready market, perhaps even a market willing to pay a premium for peace of mind. Having said this we are mindful of the conflict that exists between offering a comprehensive service and offering a number of individual products each with its own revenue stream. One of our executive sources indicated that Best Buy makes the market for retail consumers and that they want to see vendors offer a number of alternatives to maximize the revenue stream. Recognizing that Symantec has also released a bot security offering, we are going to be especially watchful of the notion of bot identification/protection.
HP recently announced that it has signed a definitive
agreement to purchase Opsware Inc., a datacenter automation software company,
through a cash offer of $14.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of
existing cash and debt) of approximately $1.6 billion on a fully diluted basis.
Upon closing, the acquisition will enhance HP's portfolio of Business
Technology Optimization (BTO) software. Combining Opsware's solutions with HP's
enterprise IT management software will deliver a comprehensive and fully
integrated solution for IT automation. Following the close of the transaction,
Opsware will become part of the HP Software business. At that time, HP also
expects to appoint Ben Horowitz to lead the Business Technology Optimization
(BTO) organization reporting to Thomas E. Hogan, Sr. VP, HP Software. The
acquisition will be conducted by means of a tender offer for all of the
outstanding shares of Opsware, followed by a merger of Opsware with an HP
subsidiary. The tender offer is subject to a number of customary closing
conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close before the
end of HP's fourth fiscal quarter of 2007.
As part of CEO Mark Hurd’s transformation of HP, software
has continued to have been given an increasingly important role in the company.
In particular, this acquisition, following on the earlier Mercury Interactive
and Peregrine Systems purchases, also serves to reinforce the software and
management mantra of the new HP. The focus of the company on BTO illustrates
the desire of the firm to not only provide infrastructure, but to actively manage
it end-to-end across the datacenter while also deriving considerable business
value from the IT investments. Opsware’s focus on automating the datacenter, be it provisioning of servers, networks, storage,
etc. or managing the ever-changing topology and business/regulatory
requirements, is a capability that only grows with importance as datacenters
continue their upward scaling.
While Opsware will now be assimilated into the larger HP juggernaut, we suspect that the role it plays for end-user organizations as well as HP’s BTO strategy will only continue to increase in importance. Competitive organizations cannot afford the overhead and time to market cost of manually driven management of the datacenter nor can they risk the exposure to compliance variances or being any less than best in practice in their operations. The broad portfolio of management capability that HP has assembled offers considerable strategic payback to organizations that seek to fine-tune and automate their operations to achieve the inherent risk reduction afforded by automation and realize a best-in-class competitive position. Over time, these abilities only reinforce the notion that the greater value derived from an IT solution is found in its management and operation as opposed to the raw technology. While HP continues to excel in raw technology, it is also quite clear that the company understands the value of management and alignment with its customer’s business operations.
Neverfail Addresses Criticality of SharePoint with Availability Software
The Neverfail Group, a global software company providing
both a high-availability solution and disaster recovery software, today
announced the immediate availability of Neverfail for Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007 in its suite of continuous availability solutions.
Neverfail software protects organizations through planned and unplanned
outages, keeping users continuously connected to Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server to access, share, and manage projects and business-critical content.
Among the benefits of Neverfail for SharePoint is its ability to protect and
failover a SharePoint technology server over a wide-area connection. In
addition, Neverfail offers protection for individual SharePoint technology servers
within server farms allowing immediate out-of-the box protection without any
server rebuild. Neverfail proactively monitors the entire health of an
environment built on SharePoint Server, including the physical server hardware,
network infrastructure, and operating system, replicating data between active
and passive servers in real time. Should a problem occur, the Neverfail
solution can take pre-emptive, corrective action to fix the issue without
resorting to a full-system failover. If a failover becomes
necessary, Neverfail keeps users connected and working while a failover occurs
to the secondary server, without requiring an Active Directory update. In
addition to protecting availability of information specifically held within
SharePoint Server, Neverfail protects the related SQL Server, Exchange, IIS,
and file system infrastructure through additional application modules.
Neverfail for SharePoint is available for both 32- and 64-bit deployments of
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2003. Neverfail also offers high-availability and disaster recovery
solutions for Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, and File Server, as well as Neverfail
for BlackBerry and Lotus Domino.
We find this announcement to be interesting on two counts.
First of all it recognizes how important SharePoint is becoming in many
organizations. As we’ve noted in our analysis earlier this year, we are
detecting a trend whereby organizations are relying on SharePoint to be their
official repository of working documents as well as serving as an official
archive for key documents, information, and intellectual property. The fact
that SharePoint has been certified under U.S. Department of Defense Directive 5015.2 is evidence
supporting this trend. For those unfamiliar with the directive, it defines the
basic requirements based on operational, legislative, and legal needs that must
be met by records management application products acquired by the Department of
Defense and its Components, defines requirements for RMAs managing classified
records, and includes requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act,
Privacy Act, and interoperability.
The other noteworthy aspect of the announcement is that it demonstrates how an anchor product from a large vendor such as SharePoint can spawn a supporting industry emulating in the security market those symbiotic relationships we see in the animal kingdom, such as the sucker fish and the shark or the tick bird and the rhino. We are not implying that Microsoft is a shark or a rhino or that Neverfail is the other partner, only stating that symbiotic relationships benefit both players as we feel this one will no doubt benefit Microsoft and Neverfail as well.