News

Forrester says the tech downturn is now ‘unofficially over’.

The research firm says the global technology industry will see an 8.1 percent increase in IT spending in 2010, with software and computer hardware leading the charge, and IT consulting services following.

After declining 8.2 percent last year, U.S. IT spending will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion, according to Forrester’s latest research report. Global tech spending, which dropped 8.9 percent in 2009, will rise to more than $1.6 trillion in 2010.

Forrester is particularly optimistic about IT spending of businesses and governments in the United States, with Forrester Research VP and principal analyst Andrew Bartels predicting a the tech recovery that will be stronger than the overall economic recovery, with technology spending growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010.

In Western and Central Europe, tech purchases are forecast to rise by 11.2 percent, boosted by the dollar’s decline against the euro. Forrester Research expects IT purchases in Canada to grow by 9.9 percent, Asia Pacific by 7.8 percent, and Latin America by 7.7 percent.

(Via TechCrunch)

SoftLayer Technologies today began offering the VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) two-factor authentication system as an additional layer of security protecting customer account access.

SoftLayer is an infrastructure as a service provider, and allows customers to manage their entire IT environment via a proprietary Customer Portal. With VIP, customers can now require a second level of authentication to log into the Portal.

The VIP system requires a unique security code (in addition to a user name and password) to access an online account. Each time a user wants to access their account, they create a new security code via a VIP “credential”—a VIP Security Card, VIP Security Token, or the new VIP Access for Mobile application for iPhone or Blackberry. Requiring the security code significantly increases security; user names and passwords can be guessed or otherwise discovered, but users alone have access to their VIP credential and can generate a valid code. VIP is available free of charge for one user for all SoftLayer customer accounts, and only $3/month for each additional active user.

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), global provider of embedded virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband Internet devices, today announced it has completed calendar year 2009 with revenues up from 2008, despite the worldwide economic recession.

Over the past twelve months, deployment of OKL4 doubled from 250 million mobile handsets to more than 500 million mobile devices. OKL4 now ships on mobile smartphones such as the HTC G1 and G2, the HTC Hero, the Motorola Droid and the Motorola Cliq, the Palm Pre, and the Toshiba TG01OK, as well as the world’s first commercially-available, fully virtualized smartphone, the Motorola Evoke QA4.

In 2009, OK Labs also secured more than US $7.6 million in funding from venture capital firms Chrysalis Ventures and Neo Technology Ventures, as well as from Citrix Systems.

Partnership with Citrix – Mobile-to-Enterprise (M2E) Virtualization

Citrix Systems is both a strategic investor and a key partner for OK Labs, working with the company to provide solutions for delivering enterprise applications to mobile devices with mobile-to-enterprise virtualization (M2E). The companies’ combined technologies, including Citrix application delivery infrastructure and the OKL4 mobile virtualization solution, promise easily deployed and securely managed access to enterprise and desktop applications from wireless devices. M2E virtualization enables end users to leverage a single device, bridging corporate and personal worlds without risk of compromising company data, applications, or networks.

Together, Citrix and OK Labs provide a secure and robust end-to-end application delivery platform for the entire mobile/Internet ecosystem – from mobile semiconductor suppliers to intelligent device OEMs to mobile network operators (MNOs), and global carriers – to meet the needs of mobile workers at small/medium businesses and global enterprises.

Partnership with ST-Ericsson – Extending Reach to the Global Mobile Marketplace

After a rigorous selection process, ST-Ericsson, the world’s third largest mobile semiconductor supplier, selected OK Labs as its virtualization partner. The companies are working in tandem to build a combined OK Labs / ST-Ericsson platform in 2010.

OK Labs already supports and comprises a key part of mobile chip reference designs from the world’s largest mobile chipset manufacturer, Qualcomm, resulting in deployment of OKL4 in more than 500 million handsets. With the selection of OK Labs by ST-Ericsson, OKL4 will enable an even greater portion of the global mobile marketplace, complementing the large and growing fleet of CDMA devices with TD-SCDMA, HSDPA and other 3.5G and emerging 4G wireless technologies, which are delivered by the world’s leading suppliers – Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson.

New Product Offerings

In the second quarter, OK Labs introduced OK:Android and OK:Symbian, off-the-shelf paravirtualized versions of these popular and widely deployed smartphone OS platforms, supplementing OK Labs offerings for Linux and numerous RTOSes (real-time OSes). Both the Android and Symbian offerings employ OK Labs Secure HyperCell™ Technology to run these platforms as guest OSes in secure cells on top of the OKL4 Microvisor. This architecture gives handset OEMs a faster path to developing and delivering new designs and lower-cost devices, and assures new levels of mobile wireless robustness and security.

OK Labs also launched the industry’s first mobile Virtualization Integration Practice (VIP). VIP Services offers a set of consulting and training services that help customers to define requirements, validate design approaches, and support mobile phone product development.

Formal Verification of Microkernel Technology

Earlier this year, OK Labs and its research partner NICTA announced completion of groundbreaking research and development, providing formal mathematical proof of correctness of the microkernel technology underlying OKL4. Completed on behalf of OK Labs by researchers at NICTA and the University of New South Wales, the project centered on assuring extremely high levels of reliability and security in mission-critical domains. By mathematically proving the correctness of the underlying kernel, the team paved the way for validating and deploying mobile virtualization in business and mission-critical applications in mobile telephony, business intelligence, and mobile financial transactions.

This research earned OK Labs CTO Dr. Gernot Heiser and his colleagues a coveted “Best Paper” award at the twenty-second ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). As a commercialization partner for NICTA, OK Labs will be able to bring the results of the formal verification project to market in future generations of its mobile virtualization products.

With a very brief statement, F5 Networks this morning announced that it received notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the investigation concerning the company’s historical stock option practices has been completed and that no enforcement action has been recommended.

Ok then.

RingCube Technologies, a provider of managed virtual workspaces, today announced that it has joined the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance partner program.

Under the McAfee program, RingCube has integrated its vDesk workspace virtualization solution with McAfee Encrypted USB drives, enabling enterprise customers to increase the mobility of their workforce while lowering the cost of desktop management and support.

vDesk creates a virtual workspace on the McAfee Encrypted USB drive that contains the user’s desktop environment including applications, data and settings. When the user connects the USB drive to any PC, they instantly have access to their corporate desktop environment for remote access, for disaster recovery, or for temporary access by consultants, contractors and outsourcers.

vDesk works with McAfee Encrypted USB drives to ensure that vDesk virtual workspaces are isolated from host PCs, that all data is encrypted, and that only authorized users can access the encrypted workspace. vDesk provides network and file system isolation policies, granular host security policy enforcement and integration with active directory for user authorization. As part of host security scanning, vDesk can verify that McAfee VirusScan Enterprise or McAfee Total Protection Suite is updated and actively protecting the virtual workspace prior to allowing any user access. McAfee’s Encrypted USB drives ensure that RingCube’s workspaces are protected by 2-factor biometric user authentication and the strongest AES 256-bit hardware encryption to prevent data leakage and unauthorized access.

Layered Technologies, a worldwide provider of on-demand IT infrastructure, has developed a new virtual private data center (VPDC) platform with levels of managed services, security and flexibility via a proprietary API that were previously unavailable in an integrated offering.

The new platform is a hybrid cloud computing infrastructure that gives customers a virtualized environment on dedicated servers within Layered Tech data centers, as well as levels of flexibility on how to securely access their VPDC, whether by dedicated lines, VPN or Internet.

Because Layered Tech’s new VPDC offering is technology-agnostic, customers can choose the virtualization platform that best suits their needs, including 3Tera’s AppLogic, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Layered Tech’s automated server provisioning system will also enable enterprise customers to design, order and deploy a secure virtualized environment within an hour, instead of the weeks or months it can take to provision a similar solution within many companies’ on-premise data centers.

And, Layered Tech’s new VPDC platform provides a customer API, which makes more than 100 applications immediately available to the customer’s developers; those developers then have access to the API for customizing additional applications of their choice.

Layered Tech’s new integrated virtualized platform gives customers the reliability of dedicated servers with the high availability, processing power and scalability of virtual machines to meet constantly changing business needs. The customer API, created by Layered Tech and based on industry standard protocols (SOAP and XML-RPC), provides easy connectivity and enables customers to perform activities such as customizing proprietary applications, monitoring and managing resources, reviewing analytics, and more via computer or mobile device.

And because Layered Tech wraps its new VPDC platform with tiered managed services that are based on its DEFCON service bundles, customers can choose from a range of support options, rather than the all-or-nothing approach from other hosting providers. Support ranges from the highest root-level access down to the lowest self-managed option with varying levels in between, which lets customers focus on managing their businesses, not their VPDC.