Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

HP intros open network switches

Posted on February 19, 2015 by - News

HPHewlett Packard said it has launched a line of open network switches for the data centre that gives service providers and Web scale organisations more flexibility for coping with cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.

The network switches include options such as choice of hardware and software and branded switches giving access to worldwide local support and services through HP Technology Services.

HP said the products are amongst the first in the category of branded white box switches.

The network switches will be sold to Web scale data centre customers through its partners Acton and Cumulus.

HP’s deal with Cumulus means it will provide Linux OS to cloud based data centres using tools and management from open source and commercial Linux communities.

The first in HP’s line with be two open network switches supporting 10G/40G spine and 10G leaf data centre deployments. The switches come with Cumulus Linux OS.

In the second half of this year, HP will expand the line, hardware and OS software options.

Lenovo installed malware on laptops

Posted on February 19, 2015 by - News

lenovo_hqA security firm made the alarming assertion that Lenovo had pre-installed software on notebooks it sells that makes them more likely to be hacked.

The program called Superfish, which Lenovo installed on computers intended for home use was software that auto-displays adverts.

And according to Reuters, Errata Security, an American company, said Superfish opens up encrypted connections, so letting hackers take over PCs.

Lenovo officials are on holiday for the Chinese New Year and so far have not responded to the allegations.

However, Ken Westin, a senior security analyst at Tripwire had plenty to say on the matter.

“With increasingly security and privacy conscious buyers, laptop and mobile phone manufacturers may well be doing themselves a disservice by seeking outdated advertising based monetisation strategies,” he said.

“If the findings are true and Lenovo is installing their own self-signed certificates, they have not only betrayed their customers’ trust, but also put them at increased risk,” he added.

 

Sony trims its sails

Posted on February 18, 2015 by - News

Sony buildingsThe CEO of Sony said that the company will boost investment in its PlayStation and camera sensors business over the next three years.

But Kazuo Hirai said today that it may well exit the smartphone business and divest itself of its TV unit too.

Sony has already got out of PCs and is engaged in restructuring which have seen thousands of people made redundant.

Hirai told reporters in a briefing that his goal was to make Sony profitable – it expects to turn in an operating loss for its financial year, which ends on the 31st of March.

Earlier this week, Sony released its intelligent glasses – which have no guarantee of making returns following Google’s decision to go back to basics on its own version of the devices.

Video games, camera sensors and entertainment are all areas which are profitable, but Hirai is tacitly saying that Sony isn’t the giant it once was, when whatever it launched set the scene for others to follow.

It’s little surprise that Sony is getting out of smartphones. Samsung and Apple rule the roost but manufacturers in mainland China are selling smartphones at knock down prices with razor thin margins – that’s already had an effect on Samsung’s profits.

 

ARM offers entrepreneurs prizes

Posted on February 18, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.53.01British chip company ARM said it is offering £10,000 in prizes in a contest to create smart devices based on its Cortex-M4 microprocessor.

The competition runs from March to June this year with the goal to create devices in the home automation, measurement, the internet of things or system control.

Registration for the contest starts today and finishes on March 31, 2015. Competitors will receive software development tools, a debug unit, hardware containing the M4 chip and peripheral components.

Competitors can choose from platforms provided by Freescale, Infineon, NXP or ST Microelectronics.

Final prototype designs need to be submitted by the 30th of June 2015, with winners announced in October 2015. There will be five prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000.

Reinhard Kell, director of micro controller tools at ARM said: “New technology invention was previously the domain of those with advanced processor knowledge and access to funding. That has changed now.”

Competitors get a complementary licence for the ARM Keil Microcontroller Development Kit, professional edition.

You can register for the competition by clicking here.

 

IBM makes big data push

Posted on February 18, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue said it has introduced data analytics with the introduction of IBM BigInsights for Apache Hadoop.

The offering provides machine learning, R, and other features that can tackle big data.

IBM claimed that while many think Apache Hadoop is powerful for collecting and storing large sets of variable data, companies are failing to realise its potential.

It’s offering has a broad data science toolset for querying data, visualising, and provide scaleable distributed machine learning.

The offering includes Analyst, which includes IBM’s SQL engine, Data Scientist that provides a machine learning engine that ranges over big data to find patterns.

Enterprise Management includes tools to optimise workflows, and management software to give faster results.

IBM also said it has joined the Open Data Platform (ODP) association which is aiming to provide standardisation over Hadoop and big data technologies.

Man says he didn’t hack 160 million credit cards

Posted on February 18, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 10.53.04A Russian extradited to the US for allegedly hacking into major corporations has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Vladimir Drinkman, who was extradited from the Netherlands, said he didn’t conspire with other people to hack into major financial networks and sell data to other crooks.

Reuters said the attacks, which started in 2005, meant 160 million credit card numbers and hundreds of millions of dollars were extracted from corporations and individual people.

Networks hacked included a Visa licensee, 7-Eleven, JC Penney and Carrefour.

He faces a trial in Newark at the end of his April and if convicted could spend 30 years in jail.

He fought against extradition after being arrested in 2012. Three alleged co-conspirators have so far not been caught, while a fourth Dmitriy Smilianets was also extradited from the Netherlands and is in jail in the USA.

Cloud casts shadow over videoconferencing

Posted on February 18, 2015 by - News

ciscologoCisco, Polycom and Avaya make hardware to let enterprises to video conference, but the arrival of cloud computing means they’re likely to see flat growth.

That’s the conclusion of Eric Abbruzzese, research analyst at ABI Research, whose video conference hardware doesn’t quite cut the ice.

He said: “With the current market focus on cloud computing and hardware virtualisation, dedicated hardware sales will see little growth in all video delivery markets, including videoconferencing telepresence hardware.”

He said hardware revenues are likely to be more or less flat up to 2020 but the Ciscos of this world will have little luck selling kit if products don’t adopt to a virtualisation model.

He said the three firms in question have already begun to move to cloud based systems and using their existing products as a foundation for the cloud services.

Aside from the enterprise, video conferencing for us plebs will show strong growth. Skype, ooVoo and Google Hangouts will all have their place in the sun.

The paperless office is far from dead

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Tiertime 3D printerA report said that European sales of dedicated and multifunction printers (MFP) in Europe fell by 0.8 percent in terms of units in the fourth quarter of last year.

But that’s only a small decline, and IDC said the hardcopy market in Western Europe recovered in 2014 with shipments overall growing.

MFP products represented 82.4 percent of all shipments, colour devices grew year on year by 17.3 percent.

Most of this growth came from MFP A4 products.

And in the fourth quarter of last year, business inlets grew by 51 percent, while high speed colour laser equipment showed “excellent” growth, said IDC.

However, in the UK, things weren’t as bright as other Western Europe countries. IDC said that the UK showed an 8.6 percent overall decline with decreases in sales of both laser and inkjet devices.

Sony starts to sell smart glasses

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

glassesWhile Google is sitting back and having a think about the smart glass project it initiated, it appears that Sony is pressing ahead with its SmartEyeglass, a product that will set you back a not so very cool £600 or so.

The glasses come with a software development kit (SDK) so you can sit down and code away to your hearts content, and supports the Android operating system.

The glass include a three megapixel camera, a microphone, weigh 77 grammes, and include a number of features familiar to smartphone users such as gyroscopes, compass, image and brightness sensors, according to the BBC, which adds they come with a controller, to be worn on the body, with loudspeaker, a touch sensor and a battery.

You’ll also be able to see text on the lenses in green.

The CEO of Apple doesn’t think much of smart glasses, according to the New Yorker. He told that magazine that people wouldn’t want to wear them.

 

Hitachi Data Systems buys oXya

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeThe IT division of Hitachi said it is to buy oxYa.

The company is a provider of services for cloud and SAP products. The acquisition will be complete by the end of March and the 500 employees and the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

HDS did not say how much it paid for the company, which has over 200,000 people using its SAP services.

The company said it will now be able to offer extended portfolio of cloud and managed services for its customers and the acquisition will help HDS to collaborate and deliver and management of large environments.

The reason for the acquisition, according to VP Hicham Abdessamad, was because customers demand “as a service” options that let them keep up with the fast pace of cloud based systems.

He said oxYa offered an expanded set of application-as-a-service offerings for both the hybrid and for public clouds.

 

2015 brings is crunch time for smart watches

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Swiss Watches the BrandApple releases its watches this year and that’s led CCS Insight to propose that this year is make or break time for the relatively new category.

It estimates that shipments of wearables will reach 75 million in 2015, a 158 percent increase compared to last year.

And the Apple watch will account for over a quarter of wearables that ship this year, it believes.

Analysts at the company believe that Apple will sell about 20 million watches by the end of this year. But if Apple is wrong – and the jury is still very much out on the future of such devices, it’s likely to hurt the entire wearables category of technology.

Right now, it’s fitness bands that are driving growth with products from companies like Fitbit and Jawbone.

It thinks that sales of these devices will double in 2015 to 40 million units.

It also says action cameras was the second biggest category in 2014, with six million of them selling in 2014.

 

Internet of things provokes security questions

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsLarge enterprises seeking to get to grips with the internet of things (IoT) will have a whole new series of challenges to meet.

That’s according to Gartner, which said identity and access management (IAM) won’t be able to scale or to manage the complexity that the IOT brings to enterprises.

The problem is that enterprises will need a method to define and manage the identities of entities – by which Gartner means people, services and things, inside one framework.

This Gartner calls the Identity of Things (IDoT) which will have to be able to include all entity identities and also to define relationships between these entities.

It all sounds very complex but it is a problem that chief information officers (CIOs) will have to learn.

Gartner did not say whether such definitions have even been thought of yet, but is holding a conference on March 16-17th in London to hammer out the different problems and approaches.

 

LTE gains grip on the market

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

PhoneBy the end of 2014 over 100 million people were using LTE Advanced networks and that’s set to grow so that by 2018 a billion people will be covered.

That’s according to a report from ABI Research which said a number of developments this year will spur the makeup of 4G networks.

Those include an LTE spectrum auction in India on the 25th of this month. France has recently confirmed the 700MHz frequency band can be used for telco services.

ABI Research said it expects “fierce competition” in the marketplace over the next four years as more LTE and LTE Advanced systems are rolled out.

According to ABI, there were 49 commercially available LTE Advanced networks globally, with Europe leading the way, followed by the Asia Pacific region. However, the USA is top in population coverage at 7.8 percent with AT&T, Spring, Verizon and T-Mobile all in the fray to capture the market.

Tablet shipments set to slump

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

gala_appleApple is likely to hit a pothole for sales of its iPad this year with one report estimating shipments will slump by 40 percent in this calendar quarter.

But it won’t just be Apple that will be hit by the slump, according to a report in Taiwanese wire Digitimes.

All manufacturers are likely to see a fall as shipments of large screen smartphones – so called phablets – start to erode the tablet market.

Digitimes quotes its own intelligence unit saying that shipments of tablets worldwide will be 244 million this year, a drop on last year of something like 11.8 percent.

The tablet market also faces competition from low end notebooks which are to some extent being subsidised by Microsoft and other vendors.

Tablets are not generally seen by people as products that need upgrading. Apple will have to rethink its strategy on the sector as it prepares to launch more iPad models this year.

Infosys pays $200 million for US firm

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

India_flagIndian firm Infosys said today that it has spent $200 million to buy a company that specialises in automation technology.

The Bangalore based company bought Panaya, which is based in New Jersey.

Infosys has been seeking for some years to diversify its business after its initial success came in the outsourcing marketplace.

According to CEO Vishal Sikka, the company wants to leverage the importance of the cloud and AI. Sikka said that buying Panasya was an important step in diversifying its current lines of business.

Panaya sells CloudQuality, automation in the cloud and is intended as an automation method.

Sikka said: “This [acquisition] will help amplify the potential of our people, freeing us from the drudgery of many repetitive tasks, so we may focus more on the important strategic challenges faced by our clients.”

Infosys has over 165,000 employees worldwide and works in 50 countries.