By David Rubinstein
With the sample size of participating companies having tripled in one year, the folks behind the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) have found that most have an internal group responsible for security, and that 15 activities to ensure security are almost universally done.
The BSIMM project began in March 2009 as a joint effort between Cigital and Fortify Software to record what organizations are doing to build security into their software and organizations. Starting with input from nine companies, the number of participating organizations has grown to 30, according to Gary McGraw, CTO at security consulting firm Cigital. He said the larger sample size allowed the group to statistically validate the model, and that the levels for measuring security are sound.
McGraw explained that the BSIMM team observed 109 activities that the 30 organizations do to secure their software, and those activities are broken down into 12 “large-scale conceptual buckets,” he said, such as training or code review. Then the activities within those buckets are further divided into three levels: The things that most of the organizations do are at the first level, while level 3 is for “the rocket science, things that are rarely done but are very cool,” he added.
Organizations can download BSIMM2 to compare their own activities to what other groups are doing and plan their security strategy going forward, explained Brian Chess, cofounder and chief scientist at Fortify Software, which makes vulnerability detection software and provides security services.
Chess said that the companies studied all do good hosting and network security. “They all have firewalls, that’s no great revelation,” he said. “But there are 14 other activities that almost all the companies universally do.”
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From SDTimes, By Katie Serignese
To open its platform to a wider pool of developers, particularly Web developers, Symbian announced in late April the availability of its new Web application development tools.
The open-source tools are built on top of the Eclipse JavaScript Debug Toolkit project and add mobile-specific capabilities to enable the transition from desktop development to mobile development. The capabilities include mobile application previewing, debugging, project creation and mobile API support.
With these new tools, any Web developer can apply existing skills in CSS, HTML and JavaScript to create an application for the open-source mobile platform, Symbian 3.
The non-profit organization took this approach to ease the creation of apps and widen the pool of developers for them, said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances at Symbian. He also noted that there are a lot more Web developers out there than native developers.
Despite still being the most widely used operating system in terms of the sheer numbers of phones using it, Symbian has fallen behind in popularity since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems, said Theresa Lanowitz, CEO of technology analyst firm Voke.
Lanowitz added, however, that she thought “[Symbian] always had a good road map” as far as development, but it lacks a connection with customers.
Another way Symbian is trying to tap into the reservoir of Web developers is by offering JavaScript APIs as a way to create more-robust applications. This will give developers a means to create more-capable applications with access to contacts, an accelerometer, a GPS and a camera, among other features.
The tools can be used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, and will supplement the Nokia-owned Qt framework that already supports application development for the Symbian 3 platform.
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From SDTimes, By Alex Handy
Writing applications for cloud environments is a different affair that writing for in-house hosting. At the All About the Cloud summit in San Francisco this week, the focus was on what changes developers need to make to their applications to enable their optimal use in the Cloud. Perhaps the most interesting revelation offered during the event was that of the direct correlation between billing and the quality of source code.
Treb Ryan, CEO and founder of OpSource, said in a keynote talk that Cloud hosting offers “the best margins I have seen in the hosting business.” He added that Amazon has largely played down the profitability of Cloud hosting, and he suggested they have done so to scare off potential competition. OpSource has been offering hosting for software-as-a-service applications for more than five years and has relatively recently entered the Cloud hosting business.
Ryan said that applications hosted in the Cloud are under a performance microscope. If they send too many requests to the database, that will be reflected by a higher bill at the end of the month. He said that developers writing applications for deployment in the Cloud need to realize that “bad code costs me twice as much as good code. I can cut my op costs in half” by optimizing the code.
Thus, said Ryan, developers can see a direct correlation between the code they've worked on all month and the reduction in their Cloud hosting bill. That's something developers haven't really been able to do since the days of mainframes and time-sharing.
Elsewhere at the All About the Cloud summit, attendees and speakers discussed the remaining problems of the Cloud. Integrating Cloud applications with on-site systems was one of the first and most painful points discussed.
Paul Daugherty, chief technologies architect at Accenture, said, “We are at an inflection point where integration becomes more critical. Increasingly we're seeing a big increase in data sources used. Initially integration was about two different applications, but now it's getting into the 10s and 20s.
"There was an interesting piece of research Gartner did: They looked at companies using SaaS applications. One of the less obvious data points out of their sample respondents was that 14% or 15% adopted SaaS, then reversed back out onto on-premise. The No. 1 reason for that is cost of integration, and cost required was too great."
Another remaining Cloud issue is security, said Ryan. “We're still addressing security. The idea that the vast majority of Cloud environments have the same user name and password for all users is ridiculous."
He added that most Cloud providers do not currently offer a way to tie multiple accounts together, and thus whole companies sometimes use the same login and password for their Cloud environments. Instead, Ryan would prefer accounts that could be used by each user, but could also be tied together for collaboration on the same virtual machines within the Cloud.
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From Inforworld News, Microsoft to align BizTalk Server with Azure's AppFabric,Microsoft plans to make its Business Process Management (BPM) software, BizTalk Server, work very closely with the just-announced AppFabric .Net application server within several years.Arriving in beta next year, AppFabric will let developers deploy and manage their .Net applications, whether they're running on-site in Windows Server boxes or in the cloud on Redmond's coming Windows Azure cloud platform. That technology was formerly code-named "Dublin."AppFabric also provides a cache for accelerating performance.These features all differ from BizTalk Server, which lets companies integrate their .Net apps with non-.Net applications and data streams.AppFabric "is not a full integration server, a la BizTalk," Mark Berman, a director of product planning for Windows Server AppFabric, said in an interview during the Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The details of how BizTalk will eventually work together with AppFabric "are to be determined," Berman said.Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to release a minor upgrade to BizTalk Server next year.BizTalk Server 2009 R2 will include interface and back-end improvements to make it easier for .Net programmers to connect their apps to other platforms. These include improvements to the graphical process mapper, the ability to manage performance parameters, out-of-box support for event filtering and delivery and the ability to use PowerShell to access management tasks.Microsoft released the first version of BizTalk Server 2009 this spring. BizTalk Server is now used by 10,000 companies, said Anil Nori, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, including 80 percent of the Global 1000.Microsoft in the past talked about BizTalk Server and technology codenamed Oslo in the same breath.Oslo has mostly been deconstructed in the past two years, with features dispersed to other Microsoft products, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management at Microsoft. It remains a software modeling platform that was renamed SQL Server Modeling earlier this month and offered in Community Technology Preview. 
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The cloud computing services market is expected to balloon to $222.5 billion over the next five years, according to a new report released by Global Industry Analysts. The new report indicates that the market for cloud computing services will reach that $222.5 billion market by 2015, fueled by end users modernizing their networking infrastructure, further proliferation of the Internet and the tumultuous economy. Those factors combine to create a perfect storm in which companies will upgrade their networks to cut costs and boost performance, the report indicates. "Against a background where companies are coerced into recalibrating their communication applications and network infrastructure into cost-effectively supporting distributed IT applications, the importance of cloud computing comes to the fore," Global Industry Analysts noted in the report. "As companies modernize their enterprise networking infrastructure, driven by the need to remain competitive, and retain critical survival capabilities, such as, agility and flexibility in a fast changing marketplace, it is opportunities galore for technologies like cloud computing and virtualization, among others. Simplicity in implementation and low costs are prime factors driving adoption of clouds by large and small enterprises alike." Solution providers stand to gain from the predicted cloud computing services market explosion, as a large chunk of the $222.5 billion will move through the channel. Global Industry Analysts noted that the cloud computing services charge will be lead by marquee cloud vendors including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and many others. Additional factors driving the staggering growth in cloud computing services include the increased number of vendors and offerings, the push toward more virtualization and green IT efforts and the slumping economy as revenue starved companies prowl for IT solutions that are cost-effective, require minimum to zero investment and low management of computing resources. The Global Industry Analysts report comes on the heels of a report from market research firm Sand Hill Group that indicates IT budgets for the cloud are growing. The Sand Hill survey found that 70 percent of respondents currently spend less than 3 percent of their IT budgets in the cloud, while by 2013 80 percent expect to spend between 7 percent and 30 percent. The recent numbers are a strong indicator of the growth of cloud computing. The $222.5 billion market for cloud computing services is a major jump from the roughly $70 billion IDC forecasted that cloud computing services would generate come 2015, as it is expected to grow about 26 percent annually. IDC said 2009's cloud computing services market hit $17.4 billion and will hit $44.2 billion in 2013. 
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By Andrew R Hickey, ChannelWeb
Dell sharpened its enterprise cloud computing strategy, launching a host of new products and services—including new cloud-specific servers—to deliver turnkey cloud solutions and start "taking the guesswork out" of cloud computing.
At its massive Solutions for the Virtual Era product launch in San Francisco, Dell revealed a host of new products and services. As part of the launch, Dell pulled the curtain off of its new turnkey cloud solutions play. The offerings piggyback on the roughly three years of experience Dell has amassed with cloud offerings in its Data Center Solutions group.
The Round Rock, US-based company said it is offering new integrated solution stacks, services and hardware to ease the deployment and management of cloud environments.
In a blog post outlining Dell's new cloud solutions, Dell cloud evangelist Barton George said the company's new solutions feature tested and supported cloud solution stacks tying together hardware, software and services that ease customers' ability to deploy and manage cloud environments.
First to market will be Dell's cloud platform for Web applications. Working with cloud software provider Joyent, Dell will offer a turnkey private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution comprising pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services—all sold and supported by Dell. The PaaS offering will thwart key challenges of Web app development and deployment like unpredictable traffic and fear of under-provisioning and migration. Dell said the solution is aimed at enterprise application developers looking to develop applications in the cloud to be deployed in the cloud, George wrote.
Dell also added new ISV partners to the mix to help lead customers through deployments. George said the cloud Partner Program will be available to cloud ISVs, through which Dell will offer cloud solutions and blueprints optimized and validated for Dell's cloud platforms. At first, Dell will work with three partners: Aster Data, which will provide Web analytics; Canonical, which offers an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud; and Greenplum, a self-service data warehousing vendor.
Dell said it will continue to work with VMware and Microsoft on the Evolutionary cloud side, and Microsoft and Dell will work together on joint solutions on the Windows Azure platform with Dell offering services and Microsoft investing in Dell hardware for the Azure infrastructure, Dell said.
Dell also launched a new line of hyperscale-inspired PowerEdge C servers, which includes the PowerEdge C1100, C2100 and C6100 targeting HPC, data analytics, gaming, social networking and, of course, cloud computing. The servers are based on Dell-created designs that are in use by large Web companies and cloud providers. The C1100 is a high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server; the C2100 is a high performance data analytics, cloud computing platform and cloud storage server; and the C6100 is a four-node cloud- and cluster-optimized, shared infrastructure server.
Lastly, Dell unveiled a suite of professional cloud servers geared toward helping customers prepare for and implement cloud computing solutions. Dell's Integrated Solution Services will deliver cloud lifecycle management and also include cloud readiness assessment services, and additional services around cloud design, deployment, management and maintenance.
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By David Worthington
SAP announced yesterday that it will acquire venerable database company Sybase to bolster its mobile development practice. The deal is valued at approximately US$5.8 billion in cash.
Sybase's board of directors unanimously approved the transaction, which is a 44% premium over its three-month average stock price of about $36 per share. The transaction will close in the third quarter. The agreement was signed by SAP's American subsidiary and underwritten by Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank.
Sybase will operate as a standalone unit of SAP called “Sybase, an SAP Company.” Its management team will be kept in place, and SAP intends to appoint Sybase's CEO John Chen to its board.
Datamonitor analyst Warren Wilson said in a statement, "The acquisition may also signal a shift in SAP’s long-standing strategy of growth through internal development rather than acquisition—a wise shift, in our view, given the rapid pace of IT innovation overall and the market’s positive response to arch-rival Oracle’s acquisition-based strategy."
The acquisition also broadens Sybase's capacity to develop new solutions for analytics. It will gain access to SAP's in-memory database technology, significantly increasing the performance of its analytics and complex event processing software, as well as enabling it to build those capabilities into its transactional products, Wilson stated.
"The move also furthers SAP’s strategy of supporting customers’ heterogeneous IT environments, because Sybase’s anytime/anywhere/any application approach has resulted in a platform that is versatile enough to connect and mobilize a wide variety of applications and data, both SAP and non-SAP," said Wilson.
Sybase, founded in 1984 as Systemware, began as a database software maker competing with firms like IBM, Informix and Oracle. The company’s main product, called SQL Server, was originally offered for Unix.
Sybase worked with Microsoft to port SQL Server to OS/2 and Windows NT. Both companies marketed and expanded the Windows version; Microsoft SQL Server grew into a dominant player in the database industry, while Sybase SQL Server fell behind.
The companies have since taken their database product lines in different directions; Sybase now calls its database Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Since the late 1990s, Sybase has reinvented itself as a provider of tools for building applications and delivering data to mobile devices.
In 2006, Sybase acquired Mobile 365, a mobile messaging company that handles over 1.5 billion messages per day, ranging from alerts and promotions to transactions, according to Datamonitor. Mobile 365 has relationships with more than 850 mobile providers covering more than 4 million subscribers.
In buying Sybase, SAP has substantially strengthened its hand in mobile applications, Wilson said. Sybase's platform provides versatile deployment options for mobile applications across BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.
The combination of SAP and Sybase is a "transformative event" for the software industry, "revolutionizing" how transactional and analytic applications are built, Sybase's Chen said in a statement. Allowing customers to run their business from many devices will drive enterprise productivity, he added.
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Cloud computing has taken off as a trend in enterprise IT, but analysts say proper governance is necessary for companies to realize the full benefits of on-demand systems.
New, relatively unmanaged and untamed technologies always draw the same analogy: the wild, Wild West. That's what was said about the Internet 15 years ago and several subsets of computing technology, which tend to be unregulated when they first emerge. So is the same situation with the Cloud.
As firms move from hosted, dedicated servers to the looser virtualized environment of Cloud computing, that old wild, wild west feeling is starting to come back, and if people are going to feel comfortable using cloud services, they must be rules and governance set down for proper administration. So says IT research firm Ovum in a report by Enterprise IT Planet.
Cloud computing has already established itself as the next disruptive technology in the enterprise, but IT governance in the next few years will be vital as companies feel their way through the transition away from on-site software applications to cloud-based options, independent research firm Ovum said in its latest report.
The benefits of the Cloud -- lower costs, a smaller data-center footprint and immediate access to multiple applications for a distributed, international workforce with minimal fuss -- are also some things that can expose companies to degrees of risk that simply weren't possible during the heyday of locally deployed software installations.
Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.
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