In brief

Interwoven ace joins Alfresco
Alfresco Software, the provider of open-source enterprise-content- management technology, has bolstered its positioning in the market with the hiring of industry veteran Kevin Cochrane.
Cochrane joins the organisation from Interwoven, where he was vice president of product management and a key figure in the development of Interwoven’s successful web content-management system (CMS). Alfresco is expected to release its own web CMS later this year.
Cochrane will work closely with Alfresco’s chief technology officer and founder John Newton, who previously co-founded Documentum, which was later acquired by EMC.

UK laggard in data archiving
Identical trans-Atlantic studies have suggested that organisations in the US are more proficient at archiving data than their UK counterparts. Twenty-eight per cent of the UK respondents said they do not archive data, compared to 23 per cent in the US. While 25 per cent of those UK businesses that do archive use some kind of automated tool, this figure rose to 32 per cent across the pond. The findings also show that UK businesses feel the burden of compliance regulations more – despite continued hype about regulation emanating from the US itself. Respondents in both countries demonstrated uncomfortably high levels of confusion around the different roles of back-up and archiving.
The findings are part of ‘The ILM [information-lifecycle management] Audit’ study, which was conducted by Bridgehead Software and canvassed the views of more than 400 IT managers and directors in the UK and US.

MagneticTime promises to revolutionise podcasting
MagneticTime is launching a tool that enables podcast production without the need for voice recording.
Users simply enter their script into a word document, at which point the tool translates the text into a ‘natural sounding’ voice, in MP3 format. The audio can then be posted directly to the internet, or onto any MP3 device (including mobile phones, iPods and PCs).
The product, according to the mobile-audio company, is timelier than traditional podcast recording, which requires the user to read their script into a microphone and then convert the audio to MP3 format.
www.magnetictime.com

EMC and Comverse sign OEM
EMC has announced an OEM agreement with Comverse, a supplier of software and systems for network-based, multimedia communication services.
Under the agreement, EMC’s CLARiiON CX series of networked-storage systems will be integrated with Comverse InSight Open Services Environment.
The combined technology could, says EMC, provide users with a more functional and cost-effective tool for managing, storing and protecting data from multi-media messaging and other value-added services.
www.emc.com