Hectic Eclectic

Good news...

 

Can't say anything to anyone yet - but was told I've won something this week, not to say and not my usual either.  Here's hoping it all goes swimmingly...

Having spent some time at LCTY2010 in Edinburgh...

At times reduced to a Barcode...

I may still just agree that Lotus Knows...

At the event there were some great speakers, for me the Highlights being (I've retitled)

Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce

John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid

and

Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5

So there was a lot to see...

Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit).  Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.

If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working.  That is about 1% of a working day.  So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101.  With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010.  So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment....  think you should be considering this stuff?  I do.

For a £20k average salary

1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a. 

For a £40k average salary

500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.

or

1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.

Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right?  Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.

Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone.  Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.

Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles.  Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified.  If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine

IBM wins Best Security Company in 2010 SC Awards

IBM scooped the Best Security Company at Secure Computing 2010 Awards.  Click these here links for a full list of finalists and winners.   IMHO this is cos IBM has been going all aquisitive on us and snapped up, it would appear strategically (well done guys), all sorts of niche solutions over the past four or five years.  Noteably for those of us at Seric Towers are of course Watchfire (2007) and Ounce Labs (2009) and we do see a fair bit of ISS (2006) out there in cyberville.  Throw these bad boys into the already reasonably juicy mix and rub some GBS on it and IBM have a good story to tell those enterprise boys.  Good enough to win the Security Company of the Year from SC at the largest awards in the Security Industry Calendar.

Here are some of the factoids about what IBM is doing to get just such an accolade

• 7,000,000,000+ security events managed daily
• 48,000+ vulnerabilities tracked in the IBM X-Force research and development database
• 15,000 researchers, developers and subject matter experts on security initiatives
• 4,000+ customers managed in security operations centres around the world
• 3,000+ security & risk management patents
• 40+ years of proven success with security and virtualisation

Why am I telling you this - well this would be the shameless plug section of the blog, we do this stuff!  We supply and support the IBM's Rational AppScan Suite - covering black and whitebox application scanning.  If you want secure code out there that won't leave you with egg (a fine) on your face (balance sheet) get in touch!  Look, I even have a snazzy graphic for this stuff on my blog - yes, I spotted it should read PROTECTED

There are are 10 different siblings in the AppScan Family.  You can compare the members of the AppScan clan here - though it is a particularly bad page as the row headings don't change with teh product changes and products look devoid of features when they are in fact irrelevant.  Anyway - pick three and compare like-for-like, find what you like and then call us 0141 561 1161  - we'd like that  ;-)