...with corporate data. "Search technology is critical to overall business and should be part of an IT infrastructure, just like databases," says John Felahi, vice president of product management at Fast Search & Transfer ASA in Oslo. The company's Fast Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) software indexes information that's stored in multiple languages and in numerous operating environments and data formats. Felahi says Version 5, due this week, adds support for Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint files and has improved context-search capabilities. "For example," he says, "it knows 'the' in 'The Who' is part of the name." Most search engines, he claims, will drop the 'the' and botch the search. The Fast ESP upgrade also adds the ability to search through videos and Web services applications. Pricing starts at about US$120,000.
Broadband services via power lines...
...could spark new IT initiatives. Although consumers will be the most obvious beneficiaries of the nascent market for broadband over power lines (BPL), "CIOs will get advantages, too," says Jim Dondero, vice president of marketing at Current Communications Group LLC in Germantown, Md. Dondero claims that branch offices and home-based workers served by BPL technology will get faster upload and download performance than cable- modem users do. Later this year, for example, Current Communications will offer a two-way, 5MB/sec. BPL service. That will make videoconferencing viable for remote users, Dondero says. He adds that BPL deployments will be attractive to utilities because of the technology's expected benefits, such as its ability to help determine the health of power lines.
Wade Malcolm, vice president of power and delivery markets at the Electric Power Research Institute Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., agrees that BPL could be used to predict, detect and manage power outages. But, he cautions, the tools being deployed now "are in their relative infancy." In addition, the views of BPL's value among utilities "are quite diverse," he says. One adopter is TXU Electric Delivery, a subsidiary of Dallas-based TXU Corp. that is beginning a 10-year deal with Current Communications to offer BPL services to its 2 million customers. Dondero hopes that will set off light bulbs over the heads of other utility executives.
Restrict your servers to running...
...approved apps only. Next week, SecureWave SA in Luxembourg will release its Sanctuary Application Control Server software, which limits the applications that can execute on your Windows servers to a white list of approved programs. "It assures that no malware can penetrate from hell," says Dennis Szerszen, vice president of marketing and corporate development at SecureWave. Sanctuary doesn't eliminate viruses or worms that may get on your servers, he points out -- it just won't let them create havoc. But you can authorize update services from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other software vendors to run on your servers, and you can delegate control to local systems administrators, who can override the policies you set. Pricing starts at $1,800.
The cell phone's ubiquity makes...
...it ideal for two-factor authentication. That's the thinking behind Diversinet Corp.'s plan to update its MobiSecure service by month's end. Wally Kowal, vice president of marketing at the Toronto-based security vendor, says large organizations -- such as banks that want to improve security for online customers, or global enterprises that need to tighten access to applications -- have found that handing out discrete hardware tokens to end users is problematic. Smart cards, USB fobs and the like "just don't work for consumers or many workers," Kowal claims, noting that those items are easily misplaced and sometimes cumbersome to use. But almost everyone has a cell phone and is comfortable using it. Kowal says software running on cell phones and in Diversinet's data center are synchronized so the Mobi-Secure service always knows the correct one-time password needed for two-factor authentication. MobiSecure can handle applications with millions of users, at pricing as low as $1 per end user annually, Kowal says.
Use your IP networks to back up...
...Macintoshes, Solaris 10 systems and Oracle 10g databases. Toronto-based Asigra Inc. is supporting those technologies in Version 6 of its Tele-vaulting software, which already works with Windows, Linux and other systems. Eran Farajun, Asigra's executive vice president, says the agentless software uses a single instance of a program running on a remote LAN to back up devices to a central disk-based storage system over the Internet or IP-based WANs. Available today, the software starts at $11,250 and allows up to 1 petabyte of disk-to-disk backup with a single license.