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Actis stakes its claim
Last month, privately held Actis announced that it would be launching a telepresence solution which would enable the company to play in the emerging telepresence market, and so compete with the likes of Cisco, HP, Polycom and Altiris.
Actis plans to challenge its competitors by beating them in the price game. “We will play the affordability card by offering solutions at a lower price point than the big players,” says Abhimanyu Gupta, director, Actis. The company will leverage its core skills in system integration, engineering and sourcing accumulated from designing and building high end audio-video environment control solutions. “We will also leverage our direct relationships with the manufacturers of best of breed products for the creation of our telepresence suite,” adds Gupta. Actis’ recent deal with LifeSize, a leading manufacturer of high definition video communication products, is a step in that direction.
Grid for a good cause
Even as you are reading this, thousands of computers the world over are battling deadly viruses. This wouldn’t have been news for IT folks steeped in information security trenches save for one reason: the computers are fighting the other virus—the type which assaults humans—this time.
World Community Grid, an organization devoted to creating a public computing grid for the benefit of humanity, will use the computing power of all computers hooked on to its grid to identify promising drug leads to combat the dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and Yellow fever viruses. These viruses, which are a part of the Flaviviridae family, pose significant health threats throughout the developed and developing world.
The grid, which will be powered by individual volunteers who donate unused computer time, will have the power equivalent to a top supercomputer.
The project is being piloted jointly by IBM, the University of Texas Medical Branch and the University of Chicago.
Oracle Thinks Linux First
Oracle 11g database, Oracle’s first major upgrade to its database line in two years, includes a number of additions that companies will be eager to try. That is, if they’re running Linux.
The company hasn’t said when an upgrade of the Windows-compatible version, widely used by big companies, will be available. Among the new features, Oracle Data Guard lets customers use standby systems for reporting, backup, testing and other non-critical tasks, without jeopardizing the systems’ ability to become the primary system in a disaster. It’s designed to make disaster recovery cheaper and costs $5,000 per processor or $100 per user.
11G also aims to improve performance with some increasingly popular forms of data. It offers faster parsing of XML files by storing them as binary XML. 11G also adds encryption and compression for storing large objects, usually unstructured data such as a medical image, data on a 3-D object, or PowerPoint slides. Oracle also is following the lead of Microsoft’s SQL Server by building more BI capabilities into the database. Users can direct a SQL query to data cubes, a view of data from more than one dimension.
Practicality vs Security
Visa has backed off stiff penalties it previously threatened to levy on retailers that don’t meet its credit card data security standards before the October deadline. Visa originally said merchants that don’t comply with PCI by October 1 wouldn’t be eligible to participate in a tiered fee structure Visa has in place. Now noncompliant merchants will simply be downgraded one tier and have to pay higher fees. In addition, merchants that are compliant by September 30, 2008, may qualify for repayment of lost interchange discounts, as well as up to three months of fines they may have paid for noncompliance.
Visa is simply being practical. “There are still a lot of merchants that aren’t PCI-compliant, and they aren’t going to make the deadline,” says David Taylor, CEO of the PCI Security Vendor Alliance and VP of data security strategies at Protegrity. Recent estimates suggest that more than half of Visa’s top-level merchants still haven’t achieved full compliance.
A portal for Mumbai
India’s commercial capital finally has its own portal dedicated for citizens’ service (http://portal.mcgm.gov.in), courtesy Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), SAP AG, Siemens Information Systems and ABM. A SAP press release claims the portal will help reduce delivery time for services—215 at last count—by as much as 25-50 percent. Services on offer for Mumbai’s over 1.27 crore citizens include among others, birth and death certification, issue of trade and hoarding licenses and record of complaints. Though MCGM project was a major win for SAP, the company chose to announce its role in the project formally well after its inauguration.
High price of breach
The theft of millions of customers’ credit card data continues to wreak havoc on TJX, parent company of T J Maxx, Marshalls, and other retailers. The company absorbed a $118 million charge related to the security breach in its second quarter, ended July 28, costing it 25 cents per share—10 times more than the 2 to 3 cents that company execs estimated it would pay three months ago. This latest charge comes on top of a $12 million, or 3 cents per share, hit TJX took in its first quarter and a fourth-quarter charge of about $5 million. TJX earlier this year revealed that more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers had been stolen from its IT systems over an 18-month period. To date, the breach has cost it $135 million.
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