Doug Kass (bio)

Blue Coat Systems Inc., a provider of network management technology, said it has appointed Martin Borman its president and chief executive, taking the role vacated by Brian NeSmith, who the company named its chief product officer, effective September 1, 2010.

Borman, who most recently served in a similar capacity at Avocent Corp., a maker of switching systems, will also be named to Blue Coat's board of directors, officials said.

NeSmith, who held Blue Coat's top executive position since 1999 when he took the company public, will be tasked with product strategy, direction and development, and will report to Borman. He will retain his seat on the company's board.

Dave Hanna, Blue Coat's chairman, said that Borman is a "proven executive with an impressive track record of leading technology companies to their next level."

NeSmith said that the executive changes will "allow me to work more closely with our product teams as we create the next generation of cutting edge solutions making networks faster and more secure."

He said that Borman "has the right combination of experience and business acumen to lead Blue Coat."

Prior to his post at Avocent, Borman spent 30 years at IBM Corp., where he served as vice president, worldwide sales, IBM software, and general manager, global business partners.

Borman is said to have a comprehensive understanding of the channel.

"Blue Coat has an enviable customer base, a strong product portfolio, and an excellent reputation for technology innovation," Borman said.



 

Dell Inc. said that it is nearly halfway to its goal to eliminate 20 million lbs. of packaging materials by 2012, to be replaced by bamboo, a renewable material that customers can conveniently and responsibly dispose.

According to the company's annual Corporate Responsibility Report, which it has produced every year since 1998, save 1999 and 2001, its efforts in the areas of social responsibility, philanthropy and the environment have increased based on 77 measurable indicators.

For example, the company said that it contributed 1.4 percent of pre-tax profit to corporate giving and the Dell Foundation, exceeding its 1 percent commitment level.

Dell also said that since 2006 it has collected 484 million lbs. of computing equipment, under its free, responsible recycling program.

The computer maker also said that it has reduced by 10 percent the indirect emissions associated with its energy use.

In 2010, the company spent more than $1 billion with minority- and women-owned suppliers, earning it a place in the Billion Dollar Roundtable.

In addition, Dell said that its giving programs had an impact on more than 1 million children last year, including those participating in its YouthConnect education program that partners non-governmental and non-profit organization to help kids learn about technology. 

Nimbula Inc., a Menlo Park, CA-based cloud operating system provider founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, both of whom were part of the EC2 public cloud service development team, said it has landed $15 million in second round venture capital funding.

Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital led the funding. Accel's Ping Li will join Nimbula's board of directors. Pinkham is Nimbula's chief executive and Biljon its vice president of products.

The company launched in 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia and VMware Inc.

Nimbula said it will use the funding to drive market adoption of its Director product offering for the management of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and to further its investments in hybrid cloud computing technologies.

The Director product currently is in beta testing with six large, international customers in the financial services, health care and technology industries. The product is slated to launch sometime this fall, officials said.

"We want to help customers see beyond the false dichotomy of public versus private clouds by delivering a powerful solution that enables them to embrace cloud computing without the risk," Pinkham said recently at the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing.

"Our solutions allow customers the opportunity to combine the operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today's most advanced data centers," he said.

Nimbula's management team includes Martin Buhr, vice president, sales and business development, and Reza Malekzadeh, vice president marketing. Buhr previously led sales and business development for EC2 while Malekzadeh served for eight years at VMware.

Cisco Systems Inc. is urging its channel partners to consider opening a fan page on Facebook, calling the popular social media site a "critical business tool," through which solution providers can "reach all of your customers with one portal."

With a wide variety of communication vehicles available to partners, including email, newsletters and Twitter, the benefits of creating a Facebook fan page easily may be overlooked, Cisco said.

In a blog post, the vendor offered a how-to tutorial to walk channel partners through the process to create a Facebook page.

"By aggregating all of your news, images, videos and blog entries in one place, a Facebook fan page lets your customers (and even other Cisco partners) visit one spot for all of your company's latest information," wrote Cisco's Kalpana Ettenson, a contributor to the vendor's channels blog.

"The best part is that it also lets them interact," Ettenson said.

Cisco offered that a Facebook fan page presents a compelling opportunity because allows channel partners to provide company information in one place, enables group discussions, extends reach, facilitates feedback, and, of course, the price is right.

The vendor suggested that channel partners check out some advice from Mari Smith, a Facebook expert, and also view some fan pages already set up by Cisco partners, including 2e2, Business Communications Inc., Dimension Data, Net Optics and Probil.

IBM Corp. has added some 2,000 new consultants to its Business Analytics group so far this year, bringing to about 6,000 its total number of specialists working under an umbrella headed by Fred Balboni, the vendor's global leader for Business Analytics, the company confirmed.

An IBM spokesperson said that the vendor has hired about 1,000 dedicated business analytics people in each of the first two quarters of this year and expects to continue hiring.

In the past decade, IBM has spent some $12 billion on developing its business analytics technology profile and the vendor has made clear its intention to build a substantial business going forward around predictive data analysis.

The vendor recently invited seven technology bloggers to a business analytics event in which three of its executives, Rod Smith, vice president, Emerging Technologies, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, Software Solutions Group and Balboni offered IBM's ideas and plans for its analytics business.

Evangelos Simoudis, a managing director at Trident Capital, a Palo Alto, CA-based venture capital and private equity firm, recently blogged about IBM's business analytics and his presentation at the event.

He wrote that IBM intends to add 3,000 business analytics consultants to its current roster of 4,000 such experts, and that it plans to build the business through more acquisitions and internal product development, according to executive presentations.

IBM also will continue to apply its business analytics technology and business processes in collaborative efforts with major cities around the world to streamline and improve their operations, Simoudis wrote.

Of particular note, IBM said that its customers are starting to ask for Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop-based data warehousing and analytics solutions to figure out if large amounts of data can be handled and analyzed at lower cost.

The Apache Hadoop framework supports distributed applications under a free software license.

In his presentation, Simoudis said that venture capital firms are investing in business analytics because cloud computing is creating new applications with embedded analytic technology, the growth of big data is testing the scalability of current data warehousing solutions, and the growing need to analyze mobile and social data.

He said that from the VC community's perspective, IBM's business analytics acquisitions have served to further validate the segment.

Microsoft Corp. recently said that Avis Budget, the parent company of Avis Rent a Car and Budget Rent a Car, will use the software giant's TellMe speech cloud platform as part of its new customer care solution.

Microsoft announced at the SpeechTek industry conference held in New York that Avis Budget will use the vendor's speech recognition software in a phased upgrade of its customer service.

Microsoft received Speech Technology Magazine's 2010 Speech Engine winner award at the conference, given to the year's best speech recognition engine.

Zig Serafin, Microsoft Tellme's general manager, predicted that "2010 is the year speech hits the mainstream."

He said that "speech is changing the way we interact with technology in our homes, in our cars, on our mobile devices and on our PCs."

Thomas Gartland, Avis Budget executive vice president, sales and marketing, said that the Tellme platform will help the rental company "deliver immediate improvements to our customer experience, while also keeping long-term technology costs in check."

Avis Budget said that the next steps in its upgraded customer service will be to add new reservation booking capabilities and expand integration to customer data systems using the speech recognition platform.

Officials said that the Tellme platform will enable Avis Budget to accelerate the time to market for additional services to customers and reduce the strain on its internal system.







 

Dell Inc.'s shareholders issued a stern, and unusual, rebuke to Michael Dell, the computer maker's chairman and chief executive, as some 27 percent withheld support for his re-election to the company's board of directors at its annual meeting on August 12, according to a report in the New York Times and an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) submitted on August 17.

While Michael Dell was re-elected to the board with more than 1.13 million votes, the company's shareholders withheld about 378 of the 1.5 million total votes, and he received the lowest affirming vote total of all the nominees, according to the 8-K filing.

Holders of 1.96 billion shares of outstanding common stock were eligible to vote in the proceeding, documents show.

SEC documents indicated that shareholders withheld 24 percent of votes for Thomas Luce, 17 percent from William Gray, 18 percent from Donald Carty and 17 percent from Sam Nunn, all of whom were elected to the board.

Last month, Dell paid $100 million to settle a dispute with the SEC over its failure to accurately account for substantial payments made to the company by Intel Corp. from 2002 - 2006 for exclusively using the chip maker's products in its machines.

As part of that settlement, while not admitting complicity or guilt, Michael Dell agreed to pay a $4 million fine.

At the time, Nunn, as presiding director of Dell's board, issued a statement supporting Michael Dell and the settlement, saying it was in the "best interests of the company, its customers and its shareholders."

McAfee Inc.said in a new security report that it compiled 10 million new malware entries in the first six months of 2010, or more than 50,000 a day, and pointed to portable storage, fake antivirus, AutoRun malware, personal data-stealing Trojans and social media-related as the primary targets.

With the incidence-level seemingly at an all-time high, notable examples are everywhere.

Last week, Symantec Corp. warned of a new spam email circulating the Internet that contains a particularly malicious Trojan constructed to steal personal information such as banking details and may be customized to hijack other information.

Today, Sophos Plc cautioned about a new Facebook scam involving fake "Dislike" buttons that, when clicked on, launch an application to access the user's profile information and replicate itself to other Facebook users.

With the Trojan identified by Symantec, payload-carrying emails arrive with a 119 KB-sized .zip attachment, referencing a birthday, photographs, resume or other seemingly legitimate purpose, according to the blog entry on Symantec's web site.

"We caution users not to open or click on the links or attachments of emails such as these and be suspicious of unsolicited email that contains attachments or links," wrote Samir Patil, a Symantec employee.

McAfee is advocating that the security industry become far more active to combat cyber criminals. In a special report, entitled Security Takes the Offensive, McAfee issues a call to arms, arguing, for example, that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which accredits registrants that sell domains to cyber criminals, should take a stronger stance against cyber crime.

The security vendor asserts that security professionals, users and administrators should share intelligence information with their trusted security vendor.

Proactive law enforcement and collective action by the security community can help corral cyber criminals, McAfee said.

Authorities have arrested an Apple Computer Inc. manager named in both a 23-count federal grand indictment and a separate civil lawsuit for wire fraud, money laundering and taking kickbacks from Asian suppliers of iPhone and iPad accessories according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.

The Mercury's report said that Paul Shin Devine, an Apple global supply manager, was arrested by the U.S. Marshal's Service and charged with providing inside information to Asian manufacturers of iPhone and iPad accessories that enabled them to drive favorable contracts with Apple.

In exchange, Divine received payments from the suppliers, the report said.

Divine is accused of using his position at Apple to gain private information which he passed on to the Asian suppliers and Andrew Ang, of Singapore, who also was named in the indictment.

The manufacturers were not named in the indictment, the Mercury reported.

In a separate civil lawsuit filed against Divine, Apple claimed that he received in excess of $1 million in payments from kickbacks over an extended period of time, the report said.

According to the report, a joint investigation of the FBI and IRS uncovered the scheme.

Apple issued a statement in which it affirmed its policy of "zero tolerance for dishonest behavior inside or outside the company."

Hewlett-Packard Co. said that a settlement reached last week with the U.S. Department of Justice over a kickback scheme among technology companies working on government contracts that cost the vendor 2 cents per share against Q3 earnings has been included in its preliminary results for the period announced late last week.

The DOJ sued HP in 2007, alleging the company, along with Sun Microsystems Inc. and Accenture PLC, defrauded the government by making underhanded payments to partners on government technology contracts and submitting falsified claims bloated by illicit rebates.

While HP did not reveal an exact accounting of the DOJ settlement, reports pegged it at some $50 million.

Last Friday, HP said that it expects to post about $30.7 billion in revenue for its third fiscal quarter 2010, an 11 percent bump year-over-year, and per-share earnings of $.75, a 12 percent increase over the similar period last year.

The company said that the preliminary results for the period included the 2 cents per share settlement charge.

In 2007, the government joined so-called whistleblower suits filed against HP in 2004 by Norman Rille and Neal Roberts, former Accenture employees, under the False Claims Act. The Act, which dates to 1863, allows private citizens to sue on behalf of the government and share in any recovery.

Rille and Roberts claimed that HP, Sun and Accenture arranged the kickbacks that duped the government.

In announcing the settlement, HP issued a statement in which it denied any wrongdoing.

"HP denies engaging in any illegal conduct in connection with these matters. HP has agreed to a settlement with the Department of Justice, without any admission of wrongdoing, in order to resolve the allegations in full," officials said.

HP said that the settlement is subject to approval of the Department of Justice, appropriate agencies and the Court.

The company has scheduled an August 19 conference call to discuss final Q3 results with analysts.