November 05, 2007 -- Starting this month, Skype Ltd., the voice-over-IP division of eBay Inc., and MySpace, News Corp.’s popular social networking site, will begin a service that will let the 110million MySpace members who have Skype accounts call one another with the click of a button in an online profile. That news raised a red flag for Don Montgomery, vice president of marketing at Akonix Systems Inc. in San Diego. He says IT has to be wary of young workers bringing social networking activities to the office. Why? Because Skype opens ports to the Internet with an encrypted data stream, so IT can’t know what the traffic is. And it may not just contain idle chatter by bored kids in their first jobs. Montgomery points to various Skype-specific malware programs that do everything from stealing passwords to turning PCs into spam bots. He says it’s vital for companies to develop and effectively communicate policies about technologies like Skype and “then enforce the policy with some measure of technology” — including Akonix’s own security appliances, natch — that can identify and shut down things such as the Skype protocol.
Don MontgomeryKM Could KO Compliance With the first baby boomers trundling off to retirement, companies are using knowledge management (KM) systems to capture their wisdom for the future generations of workers, says analyst Jim Murphy at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. That will help spur 16% growth in KM technology in 2008 compared with this year, he forecasts. One technology that companies are evaluating is internal social networking — in part, Murphy says, because younger workers expect to use it on the job. But compliance and privacy issues might arise as a result, he says. “Kids are not taught about compliance and privacy in school,” he warns. They are “looser” with information than is considered good business practice and are apt to post information that ought not to be public to a social network, internal or external, Murphy notes. Perhaps discretion should be core to the wisdom that departing boomers bequeath.
Oracle Users Embrace Open-Source Systems At next week’s gathering of Oracle aficionados at OpenWorld in San Francisco, Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle User Group in Chicago, will present some interesting data about open-source usage culled from the group’s annual survey of its 21,000-plus members. He says one thing is certain: Open source continues to gather momentum among members. About 13% of the survey respondents said that in 2007, the “majority” of their companies’ applications were running atop open-source tools such as Linux, Apache and JBoss, vs. 9% last year. However, while a vast majority of Oracle sites also ran apps that use open-source databases such as MySQL, Postgres and Oracle Express, Kaplan points out that “they’re tiny by comparison.” That is, 81% of those open-source databases were a puny 1GB to 50GB in size and mostly used in noncritical environments, whereas Oracle databases average between 500GB and 1TB and are vital to a company’s business. Although Kaplan expects open source to continue to make inroads into Oracle sites, he doesn’t foresee them displacing mission-critical Oracle deployments. “They’re three to five years ahead of open source” in technology, Kaplan concludes. He cites Oracle 11g’s ability to compress data within a database and its Database Vault and Audit Vault tools that support compliance initiatives.
Don MontgomeryKM Could KO Compliance With the first baby boomers trundling off to retirement, companies are using knowledge management (KM) systems to capture their wisdom for the future generations of workers, says analyst Jim Murphy at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. That will help spur 16% growth in KM technology in 2008 compared with this year, he forecasts. One technology that companies are evaluating is internal social networking — in part, Murphy says, because younger workers expect to use it on the job. But compliance and privacy issues might arise as a result, he says. “Kids are not taught about compliance and privacy in school,” he warns. They are “looser” with information than is considered good business practice and are apt to post information that ought not to be public to a social network, internal or external, Murphy notes. Perhaps discretion should be core to the wisdom that departing boomers bequeath.
Oracle Users Embrace Open-Source Systems At next week’s gathering of Oracle aficionados at OpenWorld in San Francisco, Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle User Group in Chicago, will present some interesting data about open-source usage culled from the group’s annual survey of its 21,000-plus members. He says one thing is certain: Open source continues to gather momentum among members. About 13% of the survey respondents said that in 2007, the “majority” of their companies’ applications were running atop open-source tools such as Linux, Apache and JBoss, vs. 9% last year. However, while a vast majority of Oracle sites also ran apps that use open-source databases such as MySQL, Postgres and Oracle Express, Kaplan points out that “they’re tiny by comparison.” That is, 81% of those open-source databases were a puny 1GB to 50GB in size and mostly used in noncritical environments, whereas Oracle databases average between 500GB and 1TB and are vital to a company’s business. Although Kaplan expects open source to continue to make inroads into Oracle sites, he doesn’t foresee them displacing mission-critical Oracle deployments. “They’re three to five years ahead of open source” in technology, Kaplan concludes. He cites Oracle 11g’s ability to compress data within a database and its Database Vault and Audit Vault tools that support compliance initiatives.
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