Jason Yow

Some industry observers still like to kick dents in the mainframe saying it's not the corporate platform of the future but the Big Iron seemingly takes the licks and keeps on ticking. Only IBM mainframe users were included in the survey population, IDC noted. Case in point: According to a study out today of 300 end users by researchers at IDC nearly one-half of said they plan to increase annual spending on mainframe hardware and software over the next five years. Network World Extra: How to really bury a mainframe Many mainframe users reported that they can plan another wave of investments in the System z platform over the next 2–5 years, citing the system's high availability, reliability, and security for mission-critical applications as major drivers, IDC stated. "Customers continue to collect dividends on their System z investments, which makes future investments much more palatable, even in difficult economic times," said Tim Grieser, program vice president, Enterprise System Management Software in a release.

IBM has engaged in some price cutting to make some of these processors more palatable though. The study says IBM's strategy of building specialty processors for the mainframe, such as the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) for ERP and CRM transactions and z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) processors for Java and XML transactions are key to ongoing success of the platform. According to a Network World article IBM has cut in half prices for some specialty Linux processors. Another source said the price changed from $90,000 to $47,500 for IFLs running on the System z Business Class mainframe. IBM acknowledged "new pricing" for the IFL processors, but did not offer specific numbers.

And IBM's mainframes haven't been immune to the economic downturn. Still all is by no means rosy in mainframeland. This summer IBM reported that System z mainframe server revenue decreased 39% year-over-year in the second quarter, while overall company revenue declined 13%. IDC however says the mainframe will benefit down the road from these new processors which will require additional mainframe-related database and storage facilities to handle new workloads. Another recent study raised an ever-increasing issue – retiring mainframers. However, while today individuals still train to become commercial pilots, the number of IT professionals going into the mainframe arena is fast disappearing.

One study by system vendor Shoden found that 96% of respondents working for financial businesses said that they are concerned to some degree that with cloud computing and SaaS they will not be able to retain the necessary skills to operate and maintain legacy environments such as IBM mainframe or AS/400. The study said in the manufacturing sector, 88% of IT decision makers admitting to being concerned, while across all the markets polled, the average comes in at a staggering 83%. The retail, distribution and transport sectors come in just a little lower at 80%. The study went on to state that mainframe technology is as old as the Boeing 747 and, like the iconic aircraft, it is still the default workhorse for many of its original adopters. A similar study funded by CA found that Financial Services organizations are leading the drive to tackle the shortage of mainframe skills in Europe where 60% of financial service firms use the mainframe for administering their critical data. In the CA study it found 57% of financial services organizations said an easy-to-use Web-enabled GUI would help close the skills gap.

Fund Formed for Chinese Start-ups BEIJING - Kai-Fu Lee, who resigned as president of Google Inc.'s China operation earlier this month, has founded an angel investment fund and plans to help out three to five new Chinese high-tech companies annually. Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube Inc., is also an investor in Innovation Works. The fund, dubbed Innovation Works, launched with some $115 million (U.S.) provided by several IT vendors, including Taipei-based Foxconn Electronics Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The new company said the funds will be used to train young entrepreneurs and help them build Internet, mobile Internet and cloud computing companies. - Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service Telecom Firms Plan Joint Venture LONDON - Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom SA plan to form a joint venture that would oversee their respective U.K. mobile communications networks - T-Mobile U.K. and Orange U.K. The combined company would have about 28.4 million customers, or 37% of U.K. mobile subscribers, leapfrogging current market leader O2 U.K. Ltd., which reported 20.7 million customers at the end of June, the companies said.

Ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros said he will rule on the complaint later this month. - Agam Shah, IDG News Service The venture is expected to realize overall savings of more than £3.5 billion ($5.7 billion U.S.) by, among other things, closing some stores and "optimizing" the companies' customer service staffs. - Peter Sayer, IDG News Service Briefly Noted The European Union has confirmed that its ombudsman received a complaint from Intel Corp. in July alleging that "procedural errors" were made by the European Commission during an antitrust investigation that led to a record fine of €1.06 billion ($1.44 billion U.S.) against the chip maker.

Nortel enterprise customers will be able to buy the company's current line of products for 12 to 18 months after Avaya officially takes ownership of Nortel's enterprise division that it won at auction for $900 million. Support for Nortel gear will continue throughout that transition, an Avaya spokesperson says. Slideshow: The rise and fall of Nortel    After that period, Avaya says it will have a migration path laid out that customers can follow to bring themselves into Avaya's official product line.

Because the two companies' products overlap, some analysts think the deal was more about customers than it was technology. Regardless of the migration path, Avaya says it will honor three- to five-year product support for all customers. Task forces from both companies will be tapped to figure out what products make the most sense to keep and which ones need to be merged. The company says the product road map for the expanded Avaya will be ready 30 days after the deal is officially closed. The contracts in question extended to Verizon customers through its services business. Avaya says it will honor all Nortel's service contracts including those that Verizon claimed in a legal filing would be canceled.

Verizon sought last week to get Avaya removed from the auction for Nortel's enterprise division. The customers will receive service," an Avaya spokesperson says. The last-minute appeal claimed Avaya intended to toss out the contracts and that would result in national security issues because some of the gear was supplied to critical governmental agencies. "We intend to fulfill the contract that is the subject of their filing. Long term Avaya says it will rely on its Aura Session Manager platform to unify customers' Session Initiation Protocol-based communications gear into a single system. Because Avaya Aura is compatible with Nortel's open architecture, customers will be able to build multi-vendor environments without requiring a swap-out to all-Avaya equipment.

Aura already supports Nortel gear as well as products from major VoIP vendors Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, ShoreTel and Siemens. As for R&D, Avaya says the Nortel and Avaya resources are complementary enough to help the combined company bring new products to market more quickly.

Avid Technology has introduced new versions of its Media Composer, Symphony, and NewsCutter professional editing software, and Interplay, its production asset management system. Overall, these updates let users mix and match different frame rates and resolutions in a timeline within the same project, expand native support for file-based media with additional formats, and extend workgroup capabilities to Wide Area Networks.

Media Composer 4.0, Symphony 4.0, and NewsCutter 8.0 software offer an array of new features, according to the company. These include:

• Improved Stereoscopic 3-D editing to let customers view 3-D material side by side in addition to over and under. This ensures greater editing accuracy and a wider choice of monitors for viewing.
• Monitoring HD and SD cross-and-down converted formats from 1080p24 masters, which lets customers using Mojo DX or Nitris DX hardware view HD material on an SD monitor.
• Panasonic AVC-I encoding support, which allows customers to deliver final masters in Panasonic's AVC-I format while working natively in the Avid editing system from start to finish.
• Mac support for Pro Tools Video Satellite, which lets customers work on a Mac or PC when using Media Composer as a video satellite with Pro Tools systems.
• Mix and match capabilities let customers use media sources of different frame rates and resolutions (SD and HD) in the same timeline, eliminating external transcoding and time-consuming frame-rate conversions.
• Avid Media Access (AMA) enhancements offer native support for the popular Ikegami GFCAM 100 mb/s format. Customers can now directly access GFCAM media, including full metadata, and begin work immediately without transcoding, copying, or re-wrapping the material.
• New production suite updates include new versions of Boris Continuum Complete, Sorenson Squeeze, and SmartSound SonicFire Pro.

Interplay 2.0 lets broadcasters and post facilities work remotely. Lower bandwidth streaming proxies let Interplay workgroup members work with media anytime from anywhere, using a Mac or PC with a 1Mb/s Internet connection. Highlights of the new asset management software include the following:

• WAN workflow with Interplay Access that lets journalists, producers, and editors remotely search and work with media assets across multiple workgroups. A new streamlined interface allows users to browse, log and shot list media in three viewing modes, via a single screen, and toggle between views.
• Final Cut Pro workflow support offers check-in and check-out of FCP media with project links as well as media and metadata conversion of FCP-to-Avid and Avid-to-FCP projects.
• Interplay Delivery improvement offers a one-step transfer of materials such as subclips and shot lists.
• Interplay Transcode, with new mixdown capability, lets users mixdown full audio and video sequences while transcoding to a specified output format, simplifying processes such as archiving or publishing to mobile, Web, or digital signage formats.

Interplay 2.0 will be available on September 16. Media Composer 4.0, Symphony 4.0, and NewsCutter 8.0 systems will be available on September 30. Media Composer is $295 for educational institutions and students. Beginning September 30, students with academic versions of Media Composer (versions 3.5 through 4.0 purchased on or after March 1, 2009) will qualify for complementary upgrades for four years from the date of activation.

BMC on Monday said it has bought MQSoftware, maker of middleware that helps companies monitor the performance of IBM's WebSphere MQ software, as well as other platforms. Terms were not disclosed.

BMC competes with Novell, CA, IBM and a range of smaller vendors in the market for BSM (business service management) software, which is meant to help companies manage their IT infrastructure effectively and align it in support of business processes.

By purchasing MQSoftware, BMC wants a stronger play in companies that are working on SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects.

WebSphere MQ is a messaging platform that allows various applications and systems to communicate with each other. It thereby plays a key role in SOA implementations, which seek to create composite applications consisting of multiple, sometimes shared sources.

MQSoftware sells products for managing WebSphere MQ implementations and analyzing the flow of transactions through the systems.

The company has more than 1,000 customers, and some 92 percent of large IT organizations are using WebSphere MQ, according to a statement.

While BMC's announcement emphasized MQSoftware's close alignment with WebSphere MQ, the vendor also makes other products, such as for monitoring Tibco's Enterprise Message Service platform, which competes with WebSphere MQ.

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MQSoftware's Web site indicates its portfolio will be rebranded as BMC Middleware Management.

However, the MQSoftware tools will be offered on BMC's price lists in stand-alone form, and "customers will not be forced to buy more products," a spokeswoman said via e-mail.

"However, BMC also may create solution bundles that combine MQSoftware products and existing BMC products in groupings that address customer IT issues, such as for cross-platform management of middleware," she added.

In a research note published Monday, Gartner analyst Milind Govekar said the deal should benefit customers of both companies.

"Gartner client feedback indicates that customers regard BMC's Mainview and Performance Manager (formerly Patrol) tools as less than strong when it comes to IBM WebSphere suite management," he wrote. Purchasing MQSoftware gives BMC "credible and proven technology to defend and grow its installed base in this area."

Meanwhile, MQSoftware has been trying to increase its revenue and customer count in recent years, but has encountered reluctance from large enterprises who "perceived it as risky to do business with a relatively small company," Govekar added. "When MQSoftware becomes part of BMC ... this should help alleviate some of those fears."

The IT director of a nonprofit organ procurement center for more than 200 hospitals in Texas was sentenced last week to two years in prison for intentionally deleting numerous organ donation records and other data after being fired from her job.

Danielle Duann, 51 was also sentenced to three years of supervised release upon completion of her term and ordered to pay more thanb $94,000 in restitution to her former employer, LifeGift Organ Donation Center. Duann in April had pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer.

Court documents filed in connection with the case describe what's becoming an increasingly familiar tale of companies victimized by insiders.

Duann was hired by LifeGift in 2003 and put in charge of overseeing the company's entire IT infrastructure and fired in November 2005 for reasons not specified in court documents. At the time of her termination, Duann was informed in writing that all her access rights had been revoked. The company also took steps to lock all administrator accounts to which Duann was known to have access.

Despite such steps, Duann still managed to access LifeGift's network from her home on the same evening she was fired, via a VPN account that she appears to have previously set up without anyone's knowledge.

Once inside the network, Duann used an administrator account belonging to another LifeGift employee to log into several servers, including the company's organ donor database server and main accounting server, multiple times. Over the next several hours, she then deleted donor records, accounting invoice files, database and software applications, backup files and the software tokens needed to run some applications.

In a bid to cover her tracks, Duann manually deleted all logs of her VPN sessions with the company's network. She also disabled the activity logging functions on the database and accounting servers - making it impossible for LifeGift to identity all of the individual files and applications she deleted, the court documents said.

Duann's sabotage, however, was discovered the next morning by an employee of a network services company that had just been hired by LifeGift to provide backup and disaster recovery services for the non-profit. The employee noticed someone deleting files in real-time from a VPN connection, which he quickly terminated. The VPN connection logs and IP address was later traced back to Duann's home Internet connection. A subsequent search of Duann's home and computer systems by the FBI uncovered more evidence that linked her to the sabotage.

Like countless similar incidents, this one highlights the challenges that companies face when it comes to protecting data and systems from malicious insiders. In this case, the sabotage occurred even though LifeGift appears to have taken most of the measures that security experts recommend when employees leave the company or are fired.

For instance, the company immediately revoked Duann's access privileges after terminating her and disabled all administrator accounts to which she had had previous access. The fact that Duann still managed to access the company's servers just hours later, highlights how difficult it can sometimes be to stop insiders who plan to do harm.

The U.S. White House is determined to follow through on its efforts to make cybersecurity a top priority, despite earlier government efforts that have fallen flat, a top official said Wednesday.

A 60-day review of the nation's cybersecurity stance, completed recently by White House cybersecurity experts, has a list of specific goals, said Christopher Painter, cybersecurity director at the U.S. National Security Council.

"It's not the report, it's where we go after the report," Painter said during a speech at the Gartner Information Security Summit at National Harbor, Maryland. "The action plans ... are concrete steps we can take."

The cybersecurity policy review, unveiled in late May, includes a list of short-term and long-term action plans aimed at improving the cybersecurity of the U.S. government and private Internet users. Among the short-term goals for the U.S. government announced by President Barack Obama: appoint a White House cybersecurity coordinator; develop metrics for measuring improvements in cybersecurity; create a public education campaign; develop a cyberincident response plan.

Painter, who's worked on cybersecurity issues since the early '90s, said Obama's speech May 29 was the first time a national leader has devoted an entire talk to cybersecurity. Obama's emphasis on cybersecurity should demonstrate the seriousness of this effort, Painter said.

But Gary McGraw, CTO at software security and quality consulting firm Cigital, noted that past presidential administrations have also issued cybersecurity reports, and little improvement has come from them.

"We're very good at putting out these reasonable pieces of review," he said. "We're not very good at actualizing those, turning them into action, actually doing something."

Parts of the Obama report look "awfully familiar" to old government reports, including former President George W. Bush's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released in 2003, McGraw said. "The main thing I'd like the government to do is get past talking about talking about cybersecurity," he said. "We've seen a number of reviews, a number of blue-ribbon panels ... around talking about cybersecurity. But we haven't really seen any tangible movement in the government space outside the intelligence community and the [Department of Defense]."

McGraw, speaking by video to the Gartner summit, said he's cautiously optimistic that some of the report's focus on reducing software vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats will have a positive impact on U.S. cybersecurity. He also applauded Obama's emphasis on privacy and civil liberties.

But he questioned one of the main focuses of the Obama report, that the White House needs a cybersecurity coordinator. The coordinator may have limited access to Obama and little budgetary authority, McGraw said.

"It looks to me like cheerleader role," he said. "We don't really need a cheerleader, although I suppose having a cheerleader is better than having nothing at all."

Painter defended the Obama administration's efforts and suggested that many U.S. companies and residents are "ready for a change" in cybersecurity policies. The report sets out many priorities, but they're all important, he added. "All those [priorities] are fairly ambitious things we need to get done, but we need to get them done now," he said.

Cybercriminals are becoming more organized, international and targeted in their attacks, he added.

Cyberthreats have evolved into "incredibly severe attacks," he said. "We have insiders ... we have nation-state threats, a whole spectrum of threats from a bunch of guys."