Market briefs

Standardise or miss targets

COMPANIES THAT do not enforce network-standardisation policies risk a widening gap between
their infrastructure and the strategic goals of the business, according to intelligent-networking provider, Intelliden.

The company warns that failure to close this gap could result in an unsafe network and possible non-compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and BS7799 directives. In a recent survey, Intelliden found there
was little understanding of the standardisation issues at board level, although it was high priority for most network managers struggling to enforce configuration standards across a corporate network. One of the most common reasons given for the failure of standardisation policies was the difficulty in controlling, monitoring and accounting for the volume and nature of manual changes to the network.

“Business demands for growth and flexibility have made the network massively complicated,” said Ravi Pather, vice president, EMEA, Intelliden. “It is continually called upon to support additional services and the new technologies they require, and expectations for responsiveness have never been greater. This has ultimately led to the network becoming an unruly combination of countless hardware devices and software technologies from multiple vendors. To ensure compliance, it is crucial that companies enforce a standardisation policy. However, as long as manual configuration of the network continues, standardisation measures are doomed to failure: no network manager can hope to effectively control a complex network with thousands of different device configurations.”

Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and BS7799 legislation, companies have to implement internal controls to govern the creation and storage of financial statements to guarantee that information stands up to audit scrutiny. Standardisation is a critical element of ensuring that the IT infrastructure is capable of supporting such policies and facilitating compliance.
www.intelliden.com

Document-management standards slide

LESS THAN half of UK companies are actively measuring the cost of documents to the organisation, leading to huge hidden costs and stunted efficiency, according to research by IDC and Xerox.

Only 47 per cent of companies are actively monitoring document-management costs, down from 64 per cent in a similar Xerox/Mori study in 2002. This is despite rising investment in document-management technology and legislation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Basel II Accord, which demand high levels of information management and organisation.

Market analyst IDC has warned chief financial officers that they need to pay more attention to the rising cost of document management. Measuring document-management costs accounts for between 5 and 15 per cent of European companies’ revenue, the study claims. “Leaving the cost of documents unmonitored leads to spiralling costs and dents productivity,” said Shaun Pantling, director and general manager of Xerox global services in Europe. “It is therefore worrying to see that fewer UK companies are tracking document costs than two years ago. Organisations must get to grips with this expensive problem. Through closer management of document costs, financial officers will see a significant reduction in overheads and staff will see an improvement in productivity, ultimately aiding the company’s profitability.”

The study revealed that 31 per cent of European organisations waste more than ten per cent of their printed documents because they contain incorrect information or are misused.
www.xerox.com
www.idc.com
www.mori.com

Vamosa secures funding

VAMOSA, A developer of content-migration and content-engineering software, has completed a £1.5m first-round funding package, led by Bank of Scotland Corporate Banking.

Funds will be used to extend Vamosa’s presence within the unstructured data-management market, through corporate expansion plans and building on the company’s automated content-migration solution, Vamosa Content Migrator.
www.vamosa.com
www.bankofscotland.co.uk/corporate/

BT leads EC-funded intelligent-search project

BT’S RESEARCH and technology arm, BT Exact, will lead a European Commission-funded project aimed at enabling search engines to deliver results in the right context.

Working alongside 12 other European partners as part of the Semantic Knowledge Technologies (SEKT) project, BT Exact plans to develop technology that allows users to conduct website searches in context, and refine returns so that only the most useful and relevant information is retrieved.

The project, which SEKT will run on a three-year trial basis, will initially concentrate on legal, media and telecoms libraries.
www.btexact.com
http://sekt.semanticweb.org

EU unveils anti-piracy laws

THE EUROPEAN Parliament has approved controversial anti-piracy laws aimed at cracking down on music and film piracy, and intellectual property infringements.

The EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive attempts to co-ordinate copyright laws across the EU before membership expands to 25 member states. It gives companies the right to bring civil proceedings against individuals, request that bank accounts and assets are frozen, raid homes, and issue subpoenas to ISPs.

Despite assurances that the law will not apply to home users, a number of civil liberties groups fear the legislation could be used to sanction raids on the homes of peer-to-peer (P2P) users who run file-sharing programs like Kazaa and Grokster.

The EU directive has been compared to the contro- versial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used by the American recording industry to pursue prosecutions against hundreds of peer-to-peer users, including a 12-year-old girl who downloaded nursery rhymes and a 70-year- old grandmother.

Also, several Euro MPs were highly critical of the way the bill was rushed through the European Parliament at the first reading, and several highlighted the apparent conflict of interest of the directive’s Rapporteur, French MEP Janelly Fourtour, whose family owns the world’s largest entertainment company, Vivendi-Universal.

EU member states have 18 months to implement their own versions of the directive.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/indprop/piracy/
www.riaa.org
www.kazaa.com
www.grokster.com
www.vivendiuniversal.com

Data-systems supervision forms key priority

ACCORDING TO research from Complinet and Convera, 30 per cent of organisations rank information-systems supervision as a primary compliance concern. The survey, which questioned senior compliance professionals in the retail and wholesale sectors, also showed that money laundering will be a significant worry for 45 per cent of companies in the future.

“This isn’t about simply bolting on a system and then leaving it to its own devices,” said Tim Ames, business-development manager at Convera. “Constant supervision – both of the system and the employees – will be needed to ensure that the regulations achieve what they set out to do.”

The survey suggests that corporate positioning should focus on information retrieval and e-mail management, with senior management, human resources and legal departments as the target audience for internal audits. Protecting information is a big concern for most organisations, with many companies trying to strike a balance between quick and efficient information access, and data security. Organisations trying to meet e-government compliance requirements by 2005 were particularly concerned by this because both the public and government employees need to be able to search the same database, but with varying levels of both access and disclosure.
www.complinet.com
www.convera.com

Microsoft settles DRM patent case with InterTrust

MICROSOFT HAS agreed to pay InterTrust Technologies US$440m to settle a patent lawsuit over digital-rights-management (DRM) technology.

It grants Microsoft a broad licence to use InterTrust’s bulging portfolio of DRM tools, which are designed to protect music, film and other digital media from unauthorised copying and copyright infringement. DRM is the core technology used by the entertainment industry to protect material from piracy and illegal file-sharing.

InterTrust’s patent suit had argued that Microsoft customers might have to pay royalties to InterTrust for the use of DRM features that have been integrated into a wide variety of Microsoft products in the last few years. The multimillion-dollar settlement now means it will not be necessary for Microsoft end-users to obtain permission to use InterTrust solutions embedded in the Microsoft suite, although customers may need individual licences if they wish to combine it with other technologies to create a new product.

As part of the deal, InterTrust has also won the right under Microsoft patents to design and publish InterTrust reference technology specifications about digital rights management and security.

The settlement comes just a few months after Microsoft announced an investment in ContentGuard, another DRM company. With no one organisation owning the intellectual property rights to DRM solutions, Microsoft is keen to ensure the interoperability of DRM tools, and safeguard products in which DRM functionality is already embedded.
www.microsoft.com
www.intertrust.com

Changes at Google

GOOGLE HAS added five new features to its US search engine to move users beyond the realms of simple text queries.

Google.com now allows users to restrict search results to a specific US area code, track flights, check vehicle identification numbers and search universal product codes and US postal service tracking numbers. Google hopes to extend its offering worldwide over the next couple of months.

One of the biggest additions to the search engine is Froogle, a shopping service and price comparison tool beta tested last year. Froogle has now been added to the main search box and displaced the ‘directories’ tab from the front page.

Google is also experimenting with a tool that will enable users to enter personal information, including their interests, to refine searches automatically and intuitively.

In an effort to compete with the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft, Google plans to launch G-Mail, a free e-mail service, offering users 1GB of storage. However, the scheme has sparked the wrath of civil liberties campaigners, who say Google will scan personal e-mails in order to deliver highly targeted advertising to users. Although Google does not deny these claims, it stresses that at no point will humans be used to scan mail, and that private details will not be disclosed to third parties.
www.google.com