News for December 8

TheRegister: EMC and NetApp disk revenues outstrip market

by Chris Mellor

EMC and NetApp are growing disk storage revenues faster than any other supplier, with IBM the biggest loser, according to IDC's third quarter disk storage tracker report. Dark horse Sun could be catching the leading pack up.

In the IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker report, external disk storage systems factory revenues showed an 8.8 per cent year-over-year growth totalling $4.9bn in the third quarter of 2008. In the meantime the total disk storage systems market only grew 1.1 per cent, to $6.6bn in revenues, because of weakening server systems sales, IDC supposes.

Within the external disk storage market any suppliers whose revenues grew less than 8.8 per cent is under-performing the market. Here are the winners and losers:

1. EMC - 23 per cent share ... 16.2 per cent growth

2. IBM - 12.7 per cent share ... -0.3 per cent decline

2. HP - 12.5 per cent share ... 3.3 per cent growth

4. Dell - 9.1 per cent share .. 8.6 per cent growth

5. NetApp - 8.2 per cent share ... 13.8 per cent growth

5. Hitachi - 8 per cent share ... 2.4 per cent growth.

Within the total disk storage systems market, where 1.1 per cent is the market growth bench mark, the revenue share numbers look like this:

1. HP - 19.8 per cent share ... -0.5 per cent decline

2. EMC - 16.9 per cent share ... 16.2 per cent growth

3. IBM - 15.2 per cent share ... -18.1 per cent decline

4. Dell - 10.4 per cent share ... -8.7 per cent decline

5. Hitachi - 6.0 per cent share ... 2.3 per cent growth

5. NetApp - 6.0 per cent share ... 13.8 per cent growth

Although Sun is listed by IDC in the 'Others' category, it grew disk storage system sales 25 per cent in its second consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with 16.1 per cent growth in external disk systems. The company sold more disk storage for Unix servers than any other supplier has done, it claimed, for the past 20 consecutive quarters. If the new Open Storage products take off then it could start approaching Hitachi and NetApp. That would be a noteworthy feat.

InfoWorld: SugarCRM adds hooks to cloud data services

by Chris Kanaracus

Commercial open-source CRM (customer relationship management) vendor SugarCRM said Monday it will give customers the ability to plug in feeds from third-party data sources like the business social-networking site LinkedIn.

The new "Cloud Connectors" feature is part of the vendor's new SugarCRM 5.2 release, which will be available worldwide this month.

While users could obviously tap such third-party services separately, SugarCRM created the new integration capability because it keeps users in a CRM context, as well as makes the process more convenient and efficient, said Martin Schneider, director of product marketing.

If you're logging into third-party sites "while you're on the phone with someone, you're going to be hemming and hawing and you're not going to have it at your fingertips," he said. "The idea is to drive adoption and keep people in one space, but also give them unfettered access to bringing content into the CRM system."

Windows, which SugarCRM is calling "Cloud Views," will pop up with relevant information, such as which of a user's LinkedIn connections work at a certain company. Users can also import this information into SugarCRM.

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The Cloud Connectors are made possible by a new data services framework that Schneider characterized as "a toolkit for developers or really astute users to bring in any type of data source."

CNet: Security industry moves forward on data security

by Jon Oltsik

While no one can predict what will happen to the economy over the next 12 to 18 months, you can bet your bottom dollar that threats to confidential data will increase substantially in that time frame. Why? Malicious code threats are growing exponentially while the cyberunderground becomes ever more sophisticated.

Fortunately, industry players are starting to team up to lower the cost, complexity, and integration effort needed for data-centric security. Last week, EMC's RSA and Microsoft got together to announce that the software giant will integrate RSA's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) into the Windows infrastructure in order to discover and classify data (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and so on). Microsoft will also tightly integrate DLP with its Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) Server. Not to be outdone, security bigwig McAfee on Monday announced that it will integrate its DLP data discovery and policy management solutions with a leading ERM solution from Liquid Machines.

Why the activity?

1. DLP solutions need to become more mainstream
While every company that conducts business over the Web needs DLP capabilities, software solutions require customization, sophisticated skills, and lots of dough. Microsoft's data classification integration into Windows should help alleviate this by providing baked-in DLP basics.

2. DLP and ERM are complementary
DLP technology assumes you don't know where sensitive data is so you want to find it, classify it, and keep it confidential. ERM, on the other hand, assumes you know exactly where the data lives and you want granular protection at the user and file level. These announcements demonstrate that the debate between DLP and ERM was misguided--large organizations need both solutions to safeguard known and unknown sensitive data across the network.

3. Entitlement management is the next challenge
While we figured out how to centralize user authentication pretty well, we still leave entitlement management (i.e., user privileges) to each individual application. This method doesn't scale, is full of security vulnerabilities, and is nearly impossible to audit. Liquid Machines, McAfee, Microsoft, and RSA get this as do others like Cisco Systems (through its Securent acquisition) and Rohati. Clearly, these vendors are positioning themselves for this next moneymaking opportunity.

So what's next? While other DLP vendors will form their own cozy relationships, my hope is that the industry comes together in a group hug and defines some meta data standards for classification, policy definition, and enforcement. I know this isn't likely but it would sure go a long way to help us all protect our sensitive data.