Cisco’s purchase last week of application performance management vendor AppDynamics for $3.7 billion in cash and assumed equity awards could signal that the APM sector in general is a potential M&A target, according to industry analysts.The APM market, which Gartner last summer said grew to $2.7B billion in 2015, is fragmented, and has been for some time. That means that consolidation may be overdue, with Cisco’s AppDynamics buy marking the start of the race.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco’s AppDynamics purchase: A big price tag that could have big dividends + New Office 365 subscriptions for consumers plunged 62% in 2016To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Keeping companies safe from attackers is no longer just a technical issue of having the right defensive technologies in place. To me, this is practicing IT security, which is still needed but doesn’t address what happens after the attackers infiltrate your organization (and they will, despite your best efforts to keep them out).I’m trying to draw attention to this topic to get security teams, businesses executives and corporate boards to realize that IT security will not help them once attackers infiltrate a target. Once this happens, cybersecurity is required. + Also on Network World: Recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent +
In cybersecurity, the defenders acknowledge that highly motivated and creative adversaries are launching sophisticated attacks. There’s also the realization that when software is used as a weapon, building a stronger or taller wall may not necessarily keep out the bad guys. To them, more defensive measures provide them with additional opportunities to find weak spots and gain access to a network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“All technology positions are migrating towards having to be hands-on,” Christopher Barron, CIO at Zander Rose LLC, told the audience at the December 2016 CIO Perspectives event in Houston. “That classic perception of a strategic CIO as being someone who always sits away, who tells other people what to do [is going away] …. All the leadership positions in IT, even if you are strategic, you’re going to have to be hands-on. Your customers will demand that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The internet of things (IoT) presents an opportunity for enterprises to rewrite the rules of their industry. The potential upside is massive: According to research firm Gartner, there will be nearly 20 billion devices on the IoT by 2020, and IoT product and service suppliers will generate $300 billion+ in revenue.By bringing together sensors, connectivity, cloud storage, processing, analytics and machine learning, IoT may well transform countless industries, from healthcare to manufacturing to utilities, transit, government and more. But IoT is still in its early days. Creating and executing an IoT strategy for your organization is no mean feat, says John Rossman, author of The Amazon Way on IoT: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World's Leading Internet of Things Strategies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has championed the causes of marriage equality and environmental sustainability in recent years, so its employees looked to the company’s leadership in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. The order, which restricts immigration from seven countries and outright bans refugees from Syria, was handed down late Friday and led to protests in several U.S. cities and at airports where refugees were being detained.“Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in an email to the company’s employees, later published by Re/code. “I’ve heard from many of you who are deeply concerned about the executive order issued yesterday restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. I share your concerns. It is not a policy we support.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox kicked off its 2017 product launches with a pair of major announcements Monday aimed at improving users’ productivity at work. The cloud storage company announced the general availability of its Paper document collaboration service, along with the closed beta of a Smart Sync feature that gives users easy access to every file shared with them in Dropbox.
Paper , first announced in 2015 , gives users a shared workspace to work with one another on documents. It’s designed to be the product people use for collaborative tasks like brainstorming and taking meeting notes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel may have cut ties with Android on smartphones and tablets, but the company's partnership with Google on Android for the internet of things is growing stronger.Google's Android Things, a slimmed down version of Android for smart devices, will be coming to Intel's Joule 570x computer board.The combination will allow makers to cook up Android-based gadgets or smart devices for use in home, retail, or industrial settings.The Intel board adds a lot of processing and graphics muscle to projects. With 4K graphics capabilities, the 570x is good for devices with screens or computer vision, like robots and drones. Intel demonstrated a bartending robot that used the board at its annual trade show last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trying to filter out phishing emails is tough work, even for organizations trying to find a better way through automation, according to a new study from security software company GreatHorn.The company makes software that seeks out phishing attempts and can autonomously block them, but even its customers don’t switch on all the features, according to GreatHorn’s study of how customers dealt with just over half a million spear phishing attempts.The most common autonomous action, taken a third of the time against suspicious emails, was to alert an admin when a policy was violated and let them decide what to do. This option is also chosen in order to create a record of potential threats, the company says. Another 6% of emails trigger alerts to the recipients so they can be on the lookout for similar attempts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has helped form a consortium to develop blockchain that could secure Internet of Things applications and more while new study by IBM shows why the technology could become invaluable for businesses worldwide.Reports from Reuters and a press release from the group said that Cisco has teamed up with Bank of New York Mellon, Foxconn, Gemalto and blockchain startups Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), BitSE and Chronicled to form a blockchain consortium that said it will develop a shared blockchain protocol for aimed at IoT products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
About 70 percent of the cameras hooked up to the police's closed-circuit TV (CCTV) system in Washington, D.C., were reportedly unable to record footage for several days before President Trump's inauguration due to a ransomware attack.The attack affected 123 of the 187 network video recorders that form the city's CCTV system, the Washington Post reported Saturday. Each of these devices is used to store video footage captured by up to four cameras installed in public spaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wireless long distance control of your PC, Android TV box, or Raspberry Pi 3. The iPazzPort features a 92 key wireless QWERTY keyboard with touchpad supporting multi-touch function, mouse left and right buttons, and easy copy/paste. Backlight can be turned on & off, and its Li-ion battery provides long play and stand-by times in between charges. Its typical list price of $30 has been reduced 40% to just $18. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WhatsApp's privacy policy change allowing Facebook to target advertising at its users has landed the company in a German court.The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBZ) has filed suit against WhatsApp in the Berlin regional court, alleging that the company collects and stores data illegally and passes it on to Facebook, the federation said Monday.Facebook acquired WhatsApp in October 2014, but it wasn't until August 2016 that WhatsApp said it would modify its privacy policy to allow it to share lists of users' contacts with Facebook. The move made it possible to match WhatsApp accounts with Facebook ones where users had registered a phone number, giving the parent company more data with which to make new friend suggestions and another way to target advertising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you are dependent upon an embedded medical device, should the device that helps keep you alive also be allowed to incriminate you in a crime? After all, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects a person from being forced to incriminate themselves.Nonetheless, that’s what happened after a house fire in Middletown, Ohio.WCPO Cincinnati caught video of the actual fire, as well delivered news that the owner’s cat died in the fire. As a pet owner, it would be hard to believe that a person would set a fire and leave their pet to die in that fire. The fire in question occurred back in September 2016; the fire department was just starting an investigation to determine the cause of the blaze.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A little over a week ago, HPE announced its agreement to purchase SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. Predictably, tech industry followers erupted into an uproar of opinion about stock price implications and how it would impact support for SimpliVity customers.Less than a week later, HPE announced another purchase: Cloud Cruiser, a 7-year-old startup that provides consumption-based infrastructure analytics. Interestingly, this transaction received much less attention.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, welcome you to the world of Fallout 4 – their most ambitious game ever, and the next generation of open-world gaming. As the sole survivor of Vault 111, you enter a world destroyed by nuclear war. Every second is a fight for survival, and every choice is yours. Only you can rebuild and determine the fate of the Wasteland. Currently Amazon has the PC and XBOX ONE versions discounted by 50% and the PS4 is 43% off. Check out these deals on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While new U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent proclamations related to immigration have centered on his plans for a Mexican border wall and bans on Syrian refugees, the IT outsourcing industry is anticipating details on his strategy for reforming the H-1B visa program.Trump railed against the shifting of U.S. jobs overseas during his campaign and called for raising the minimum salary for H-1B holders to $100,000 per year, from the current threshold of $60,000 per year.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 8 ways to jumpstart your career
A purported draft of an executive order recently published called for an investigation into the impact of such nonimmigrant visa programs on American workers and directed the Department of Homeland Security to "consider ways to make the process for allocating H-1B visas more efficient and ensure that beneficiaries of the program are the best and the brightest.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. tech industry has warned that a temporary entry suspension on certain foreign nationals introduced on Friday by the administration of President Donald Trump will impact these companies' operations that are dependent on foreign workers.The Internet Association, which has a number of tech companies including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft as its members, said that Trump’s executive order limiting immigration and movement into the U.S. has troubling implications as its member companies and firms in many other industries include legal immigrant employees who are covered by the orders and will not be able to return back to their jobs and families in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four years after the introduction of Office 365 for consumers, Microsoft last week said subscriptions to the productivity software had reached nearly 25 million.Subscribers, however, were harder to find last year than in 2015, according to the numbers Microsoft reported: Additions to Office 365's rolls were down 62% in 2016 compared to the year before.During an earnings call with Wall Street analysts last week, CEO Satya Nadella touted revenue increases for the Office products aimed at consumers -- which include Office 365 -- and of the latter said that the company had, "continued to see an increase in ... subscriber base."That it did.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's 2017. You shouldn't have to worry about whether that old budget spreadsheet will open on your tablet or whether the document in your inbox will look right on your phone. In this day and age, having office apps that work seamlessly and consistently across devices should be a given. Everything should, as the cool kids say, "just work."Yet here we are, in an era where mobile devices are as critical to productivity as desktop computers -- and our virtual office tools are still anything but universal. Features that function smoothly on one product or platform don't always work the same on another. For business users in particular, that can be a serious problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here