CenterBeam
Outsourcing Essentials, Summer 2003: The CFO Dance
Robert Levorda, CFO of electronic futures exchange Nasdaq/Liffe, certainly agrees. He says the company outsources three of the four major components of the exchange (technology, trade clearing, and regulation), while maintaining a lean staff of 19. The importance of forging a partnership-like relationship with the outsourcing vendor paid off big-time shortly after the company’s technology outsourcer, CenterBeam Inc., completed its full installation at the Nasdaq/Liffe’s Liberty Plaza headquarters in New York, across the street from the World Trade Center, on Aug. 31, 2001.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Liberty Plaza installation was destroyed. However, CenterBeam officials decided to reinstall the technology at their own expense in Nasdaq/Liffe’s temporary location to put the exchange back on line.
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VARBusiness, 7/16/03: ITAA Urges Lawmakers To Spend On Cyber Security
By Dennis McCafferty
VARBusiness
- 3:18 PM EST Wed., July 16, 2003
A leading information technology industry group is urging federal lawmakers to fund $900 million during the next five years for cyber security research and development , a pending budget decision that many resellers are watching with anticipation.
…
Resellers are in agreement that the funding initiative is well overdue. "The federal government's new focus on cybersecurity has finally brought attention and energy on an area that's been overlooked and underfunded for far too long," says Glenn Ricart, technology officer at CenterBeam, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based reseller with customers in the federal government. "While it's a shame that it's taken events of such tragic proportion to help the federal government to better understand the consequences of poor security management, it's heartening that this is finally being addressed. Good security is good policy, no matter what the political climate is."
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Security
The Register, 7/17/03: Severe Windows security hole patched
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Every version of Windows with the exception of ME (and including the "Trustworthy Computing" engineered Windows Server 2003) has a nasty stuff-up in the RPC (remote procedure call) process, which yields complete system ownership to a third party.
RPC allows a program running on one computer to execute code on a remote system. This can be quite useful, particularly for networked machines sharing a printer over a LAN, say. In the case of Windows, the RPC service listens on port 135 for instruction.
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The Register, 7/17/03: Cisco issues network security brown alert
By John Leyden
Cisco warned last night of a potentially devastating flaw affecting a wide range of routers and switches.
The DoS vulnerability rises from a bug in Cisco's core IOS software and could cause vulnerable devices to stop processing inbound packets on receipt of maliciously constructed IPv4 packets. Normal service would be restored only with a manual reboot.
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Computerworld, 7/16/03: Update: Money seen as biggest obstacle to effective IT security
Companies say they generally don't measure the ROI of security
By JAIKUMAR VIJAYAN
Inadequate funding remains the single largest obstacle to implementing effective IT security measures at most companies, according to the results of a recently completed global survey by Ernst & Young International.
Even so, a majority of the companies surveyed said they rarely or never calculate return on investment when building a case for information security budgets.
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Microsoft
ZDNet, 7/16/03: Microsoft buddies up with new Office
By David Becker
"Open to new ideas. Plays well with others."
Microsoft is getting this unexpectedly good feedback from competitors, as it readies the next version of its Office desktop application package.
The most notable new features in Office 2003 include the ability to save documents in XML (Extensible Markup Language) format in addition to in Office's native file format. This should allow data to be read by other software, such as corporate databases and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
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Optimism
Gartner, 7/17/03: Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Return To Double-Digit Growth for First Time In Nearly Three Years
Worldwide PC Shipments Increased 10 Percent in Second Quarter of 2003
STAMFORD, Conn., July 16, 2003 — Driven in part by highly competitive pricing, worldwide PC shipments totaled 32.8 million units in the second quarter of 2003, a 10 percent increase from the same period last year, according to preliminary results from Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB). The worldwide PC market has not experienced double-digit shipment growth since the third quarter of 2000.
"The PC industry performed better than expected, which suggests that market conditions are improving," said Charles Smulders, vice president of Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "However, sustained improvement will depend on economic conditions and their effect on the business upgrade cycle. Recent Gartner IT Watch survey data confirms U.S. corporate budgets remain tight."
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