Dell pushes harder on encryption, anti-malware for client devices

PCs, Android devices get security based on Dell's Credant acquisition, partnership with Invincea

Dell today said it's ready with new anti-malware defense and encryption offerings for businesses using its PCs, laptops and Android-based mobile devices.

The improved security is available via the company's Protected Workspace program for business computing.

Based on its acquisition of encryption and data protection vendor Credant Technologies at the end of last year, Dell can provide pre-installed file protection capabilities for desktops, laptops and Android devices it sells, giving business customers a way to manage encryption capabilities from a central console.

Dell's Latitude 10 tablet with Windows 8 Pro

In addition, Dell announced it has entered into a partnership with Invincea, which has what it calls a "secure virtual container" technology that protects against malware-based attacks, such as spear-phishing. Dell is baking in a customized version of the Invincea technology as a standard image on Dell's entire line of commercial end-user products, including its Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision tablets and PCs.

Brett Hansen, executive director of Dell client security, says other security protections include ControlVault for hardware-based storage of passwords and credentials, smart-card processing and biometric fingerprint processing.

The Invincea-based technology now available from Dell is intended to protect the end user against malware-based attacks arising from infected email attachments or browsing infected websites. There is no console yet that might combine management of both the Invincea anti-malware defense and the Credant hard disk encryption capability, though Hansen says Dell is working on it.

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6 highest/lowest paid IT jobs

Technology staffing firm Mondo predicts a spike in demand for HTML5 developers in 2014

C-level titles top the list of highest paid IT jobs, and technical support positions dominate the low end of the pay scale, according to new salary data from technology staffing firm Mondo.

CIO is the highest paid IT role, with a salary range of $195,000 to $230,000, followed by: CTO ($145,000 - $208,000); CSO ($145,000 - $208,000); IT security manager with 10+ years of experience ($145,000 - $177,000); software architect ($144,000 - $170,000); and application architect with 10+ years of experience ($136,000 - $185,000).

Looking ahead to 2014, Mondo predicts a spike in demand for HTML5 developers with salaries to range from $97,000 to $135,000.

Starting salaries for tech pros in the U.S. are on the rise, says Michael Kirven, founder and CEO of Mondo. “The trends that I’m seeing today are very, very optimistic,” Kirven says. Midway through 2013, “the rate of IT hiring and the rate of IT salaries is accelerating” compared to the first half of the year, he says.

There’s strong demand for tech pros with expertise in areas such as mobile, big data, cloud computing, and user experience, and that demand is in turn driving salary increases. (See related story: Tech talent wars spill into marketing)

“Everybody wants big data business analysts. Not database developers or programmers, but business analysts, people who can look at a big data architecture and help translate how that would be valuable to the business,” Kirven says.

Another role that’s in high demand is user interface analyst, with expertise in optimizing the user experience. “Everybody wants those skill sets -- marketing departments, IT departments, you name it, across every single vertical,” Kirven says.

Mondo singled out a number of jobs that saw big pay gains, percentage-wise, in 2013. The largest increase in base compensation went to seasoned IT security managers (from $90,000 in 2012 to $145,000 in 2013) and systems analysts (from $65,000 to $83,000).

Other big gains went to: data analysts (base salaries increased 18.3% from $60,000 to $71,000); Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) engineers (18% increase from $100,000 to $118,000); senior help desk staffers (15.4% increase from $65,000 to $75,000 for candidates with 7-10 years of experience); technical writers (14.3% increase from $70,000 to $80,000); and Android developers (8.3% increase from $120,000 to $130,000).

At the other end of the spectrum, Mondo identified IT roles with the lowest salaries: help desk staffer with 1-3 years of experience ($40,000 - $65,000); hardware technician ($43,000 - $70,000); help desk staffer with 3-5 years of experience ($55,000 - $74,000); desktop virtualization specialist ($55,000 - $70,000); desktop support analyst ($70,000 - $90,000); and system administrator with 1-5 years of experience ($71,000 - $120,000).

In a separate study, Robert Half Technology (RHT) reports that 12% of U.S. CIOs plan to expand their IT teams in the third quarter of 2013 (compared to 14% in the previous quarter). In addition, 56% plan to hire for open IT roles, 26% expect to put hiring plans on hold, and 6% plan to reduce their IT staff in the third quarter.

RHT also asked about CIOs’ confidence levels: 85% reported that they’re somewhat or very confident about their companies' prospects for growth in the third quarter, and 63% feel somewhat or very confident in their firms' third-quarter investment in IT projects.

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Tune in: Microsoft to live stream BUILD keynote on Wednesday

Clues to rumored reorg may be dropped by which execs show, no-shows

Microsoft will webcast the opening keynote of its BUILD developers conference Wednesday starting at 9 a.m. PT (noon ET).

The company has not yet revealed the keynote speakers, but with the conference's emphasis on Windows 8.1, it is likely that the Windows division's top two executives, Tami Reller, the group's CFO, and Julie Larson-Green, head of development, will be in the spotlight.

BUILD 2013 runs Wednesday through Friday, and will be held at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

Tickets for the third BUILD conference went on sale in April and sold out within 24 hours. Like 2012's BUILD, prices for this year's edition went for between $1,595 and $2,095.

As it did last year, Microsoft will live stream the keynotes -- a second will take place Thursday, also at 9 a.m. ET, noon ET -- on its Channel 9 website. Other parts of the conference, including some of the developer sessions, will be webcast as well.

With rumors of a major reorganization at Microsoft now in play, analysts will be watching to see which executives take the stage Wednesday for clues about how the software giant will restructure divisions and shuffle management to back up CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that the company now focuses on services and devices.

It's unlikely Microsoft wants to repeat the events of last year, when Steven Sinofsky, then the head of Windows, appeared on stage at the Windows 8 launch but was ousted from the company less than three weeks later.

Also Wednesday, Microsoft will debut a public preview of Windows 8.1 on its Windows Store. The free upgrade for Windows 8 and Windows RT is to ship in final form later this year. Microsoft may announce a delivery date at BUILD.

Wednesday's BUILD keynote will be available for viewing from Microsoft's news home page and the BUILD website starting at 9 a.m. PT, noon ET.

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Gauging Windows Phone's chances against the iPhone

Latest report says Windows Phone will be neck-and-neck with iPhone by 2017.

Some time back, IDC predicted that Windows Phone would overtake iPhone to be the dominant platform in the smartphone business. This was met with a round of snickering and outright laughter. IDC gave Microsoft and Nokia until 2015, so they have two years to go, but right now, it doesn't look like it will happen, does it?

And, according to this report from Canalys, it won't happen. Canalys predicts that by 2017, the iPhone will have a 14.1% market share, while Windows Phone is right behind it with a 12.7% share. As of last year, the iPhone had a 19.5% market share, and Windows Phone a 2.4% market share.

Nothing changes with the Android market, which at this point should be called the Samsung market. It had 67.7% market share last year and will be at 67.1% in 2017.

Jessica Kwee, analyst with Canalys, said in the report that "Apple's growth will be curtailed by the fact that momentum in the smartphone market is coming from the low end, and Apple is absent from this segment."

Conversely, Microsoft and its partners, particularly Huawei, will deliver lower-end phones at more competitive pricing. Over the long term, the low-cost Chinese manufacturers will be what pushes Windows Phone into double digits.

"Longer-term it is the Chinese vendors that are best placed to challenge Samsung's market dominance. Microsoft already has a relationship with Huawei and ZTE in the phone space, and Lenovo is a major partner in the PC space. These partners will be needed to help deliver the scale that Microsoft needs," Kwee wrote.

I can agree on the Apple side of the analysis. Apple has always been a premium product maker for an affluent audience, and there is no intention of changing that. The game changer will be if Windows Phone ever lands OEMs that will push into the high end. It had LG and Samsung, then lost both. Nokia is going a great job, better than I expected, but it is essentially going it alone.

Then again, that's how most of the smartphone market is operating if you think about it. The iOS market is Apple only. BlackBerry has talked of licensing its OS; so far, no takers. Nokia is pretty much the Windows Phone market with a little on the low-end via HTC, and Samsung is almost half of the total Android market.

There are other variables I don't think Canalys took into consideration. What will Samsung do when it ships its Tizen OS? That will surely change the landscape. What if Windows Phone gains momentum and some of these also-ran Android phone companies decide they have a better chance with WP than against Samsung?

That's why market predictions, like the weather in New England, are impossible to predict beyond one day.

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TechEd: Microsoft preps system software for cloud usage

TechEd's first day unveils the Azure-friendly Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, Visual Studio 2013 and SQL Server 2014

Microsoft is updating a number of its IT infrastructure and development tools to work more seamlessly with its Azure hosted cloud services, including Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Brad Anderson, Microsoft
Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Server and System Center.

"You can think of all these products as being Azure-powered. We're bringing the experience, code and design from Azure to our on-premise products," said Brad Anderson, who is Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Server and System Center.

At the Microsoft TechEd conference this week in New Orleans, Anderson will announce the pending releases of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, Visual Studio 2013 and SQL Server 2014, as well as an update of Microsoft's Intune computer management service. Each of these products will be available in preview form later this month, and all will be available as commercial releases by the end of the year, except for SQL Server 2014, which will be released early in 2014.

All these releases share a familiar theme: They all work with Azure, or Azure-like cloud services from Microsoft partners, streamlining the process for organizations to shift their workloads between their own data centers and cloud services. Using these latest releases, organizations can back up their in-house Windows Server applications or SQL Server databases in Azure. Or they could use Azure for failover operations, where the cloud service could take over operations should the primary data-center servers fail for some reason, Anderson said in an interview before the conference opened.

"We have focused on enabling organizations to embrace the hybrid cloud, breaking down the barriers to seamlessly stretch your data center out to a service provider, or out to Azure," Anderson said. "Rather than purchasing licenses from other vendors, you can now take advantage of what is in SQL Server and Windows Server to get these capabilities, which are covered in your existing licenses."

The Windows Server 2012 R2 update will provide capabilities to copy applications and data on the server to Microsoft Azure, or to other service providers' Azure implementations. The OS will also facilitate a way to replicate Hyper-V virtual machines on Azure. Also helping with cloud deployments is Windows Server 2012 R2's new capabilities in storage tiering, which allows administrators to establish different levels of storage. This feature could be handy in using storage more cost-effectively, by providing an easy way to store the most essential data on the fastest storage devices, while squirrelling away the less consulted data on less expensive disks.

Microsoft is also updating its System Center IT management software for Azure use. The new version will allow organizations to establish policies for running Windows Server and Hyper-V virtual machines both in the cloud and on premises. Organizations can use the software to set their policies for backing up and conducting failover operations on large numbers of servers.

The new version of the software will be the first to offer management support for Android and Apple iOS devices, Anderson said. Administrators can manage the settings for features such as VPNs (virtual private networks), logins, wireless settings and other functionality required by the enterprise.

Along with Windows Server 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 will also have hooks into Azure, Anderson said. SQL Server databases can be backed up to Azure. This new version of the database will be the first to offer in-memory capabilities, developed under the code-name Hekaton.

On the development side, Azure offers some new features for the upcoming Visual Studio 2013 release. For instance, Visual Studio will offer the ability to load test a new application on Azure. "As you are building your application, you can place a heavy load on it, by using Azure," Anderson said.

In addition to the software updates, the company will also announce new services and features in its Windows Azure hosted computing offering. It will offer a preview of Windows Azure BizTalk Services, an online version of Microsoft BizTalk enterprise service bus (ESB). The company has also unveiled new per-minute billing for virtual machines.

The purpose of Microsoft's TechEd is to educate administrators and IT professionals about Microsoft's back office and enterprise software products. During his keynote on Monday, Anderson plans to reveal some adoption statistics for Microsoft's enterprise products.

For instance, Microsoft's server and tools division now is a US$19 billion business, and has been growing at 10 percent for the past four quarters. More than 75 percent of enterprise applications now run on Microsoft Windows Server. Anderson touted that the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is growing at "three times that of VMware."

The SQL Server user base is growing 1.7 times as fast as Oracle's flagship database. By Microsoft's calculations, SQL Server is the most widely used database in the world, possessing a 47 percent share of all SQL databases. And System Center sales have been growing as well -- sales were up 35 percent in the last quarter, Anderson said.

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Gartner security report: McAfee up, Trend Micro down

Symantec, with modest growth, still at top with 19.6% of overall share in $19.1 billion worldwide market

A Gartner report about the security software market out today shows that No. 2 ranked McAfee enjoyed the most overall growth last year, Trend Micro slipped but stayed No. 3, and Symantec held onto its top spot with 19.6% of the $19.1 billion market.

Gartner’s report looked at 12 market segments that included endpoint security products for both the enterprise and consumer markets; data-loss prevention; Web and e-mail security tools; user provisioning; Web access management; and security information and event management (SIEM), among others. The three “giants” of the market, as Gartner puts it, remain Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, with 35% combined market share.

Signature-based endpoint security on its way out
McAfee, which was acquired by Intel in 2011, showed the highest overall year-to-year growth, with revenues rising from $1.22 billion to $1.68 billion in 2012, a 37% increase that Gartner says can be attributed to organic growth but also partly to accounting rules that allowed Intel a write-down. Symantec revenues rose 2.6% from $3.65 billion in 2011 to $3.75 billion. Trend Micro, which has had traditional strength in the Japanese market, saw revenue drop from $1.2 billion in 2011 to 1.17 billion, a 2.7% decline.
Security vendors

The Gartner report, authored by analysts Ruggero Contu and Matthew Cheung, noted that Trend’s diversification efforts into the cloud and virtualization platform security last year seem to be starting to pay off, however, and its DLP product was growing at 19%.
In Gartner’s view, the so-called “second tier” of large vendors is said to be IBM, EMC, Cisco and CA Technologies, which compete in certain segments “though security is only a part of their overall corporate interests.”

Microsoft, for instance, jumped from the No. 12 spot in 2011 to No. 10 with 2% of the overall market share. Cisco, though, slipped a spot to No. 8 with security revenues falling from $487 million to $479 million, a 1.7% drop.

In Gartner’s view, there’s a “third tier” composed of “specialist vendors with midsize security presence,” and they include Kaspersky, Oracle, Websense, Sophos, Blue Coat Systems and Eset. The remainder is a mix of large IT vendors with “small presence in the security space” or small players specializing in one or two segments.

Gartner cited as a standout CA Technologies, which jumped a spot to No. 7, with $509 million in 2012, up 11.3%. For CA, “DLP and Web access were the fastest-growing segments, growing 24% and 14%, respectively, against poor-performing user provisioning, growing 4%,” Gartner’s report said. Greatest growth for CA was seen in the geographic regions of Europe and Asia/Pacific. Kaspersky also jumped a spot in the Gartner rankings to stand at No.6, with revenues of $628 million for 2.5% growth in 2012, and 3.3% overall market share.

In terms of geographic region, North America, which bought $8.6 billion of this security software last year, provided 8.2% growth overall. But other areas of the world contributed higher growth rates in buying, with Eastern Europe at 14.4%, Latin America at 12.6%, Eurasia at 21.8%, for example.

In the overall $19.1 billion market worldwide, Gartner said enterprise endpoint protection continues to generate positive growth, citing 6.7% growth in consumer security software in 2012 for a total of $4.89 billion in spending worldwide, and enterprise endpoint protection platforms growing 9.2% to reach $3.17 billion.

However, some of the fastest growing segments were DLP, which reached $572.9 million last year, for 25.1% growth year to year. In addition to just software, the Gartner report also sought to include appliance-based versions in some categories, including SIEM appliances and Secure Web Gateway and Secure Email Gateway appliances. SIEM software was healthy at $976.4 million in 2012 for 27.5 percent growth, while SIEM appliances at $384.1 million were said to grow 11.9% year over year.

The overall security software market tracked by Gartner grew from $17.7 billion in 2011 to $19.1 billion in 2012, and no category in the security market segments tracked by Gartner showed decline.

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