Without a lot of fanfare, Symantec has been making substantial investments to compete with HP, BMC, CA, and IBM as a major player in enterprise management software. While Symantec may be best known for its antivirus software, it has been adding very compelling software offerings that will help it compete head to head with the other enterprise software vendors.

Opalis announced the release of Integration Server v5.4. New features described in the release include a new policy testing console, which validates IT process workflows prior to deployment. This will help to diagnose potential bottlenecks in the automation and is a great feature for run book automation software.

The 5.4 release also advertises deeper integration into an SOA environment, offering new XML processing capabilities that provide manipulation and transformation of content that is delivered from Web service-based SOA solutions.

We've been exchanging some e-mails regarding iPhones in the enterprise, and Stephen Wellman wrote:

Oh, I don't disagree with any of these points. But we're seeing a different attitude toward these risks than we would have in years past. That's what I find interesting.

Plus, if I am not mistaken, close to 90% of mobile devices in most companies were brought in by the employee, and almost all the security risks you outline below apply to these devices, too. Yet, they're still storing company info. Is this a bomb waiting to explode? Probably so. But it's not stopping this trend, which is what is interesting.

Is it even feasible to manage risk from this paradigm anymore? That's the question I want to explore and continue to explore.

Hewlett-Packard announced the release of Automated Operations 1.0, an integrated set of products that automates IT operations across technology and organizational domains.

Optinuity's new Oasis product takes a bit of a different approach to IT process automation. While many of the run book automation vendors focus on the integration of other platforms and automation of process, Oasis combines elements of IT automation, monitoring, and policy management into a single software solution.

The discussion as to whether or not the iPhone is ready to be brought within the walls of the enterprise has heated up again in recent weeks. First, Apple announced the forthcoming release of its software developers' kit, which is slated for release in February. The SDK should lay the necessary groundwork for software developers to create applications for the iPhone in addition to the Web services applications Apple envisioned with the iPhone’s release. Next, Synchronica, Visto, and most recently Sybase iAnywhere released support for secure push e-mail for enterprise e-mail systems such as Exchange. These services all do roughly the same thing: create a secure IMAP relay server that interfaces with Exchange and allows iPhones to retrieve e-mail without the need for running IMAP services on the Exchange server itself. Add forthcoming support by Avaya for fixed-mobile convergence services on the iPhone and the question has to be asked: Is the iPhone primed to be a part of the enterprise?

Zenoss, which develops open source IT management software, released a new version of Zenoss Enterprise that added virtualization and SNMP v3 support. The new version adds several enterprise capabilities for network, server, and application management, including the discovery and monitoring of virtual servers and new application monitors. Also announced are new networking management capabilities, including predictive thresholds and support for SNMPv3.

Yes, actually, two of them.

It's no secret that here on our staff there's a few fans of "Doctor Who," the long-running British sci-fi show. The Doctor is such a cultural phenomenon in the U.K. that families gather around the telly to watch the show pretty religiously. And while it's not as mainstream here in the States, the fan base is still pretty solid -- we suspect some of our readers are fans as well. The show is on seasonal hiatus right now, but that didn't stop the Doctor from making a special appearance on the U.K.'s annual "Children in Need" charity show.

CA has launched a SOA Security Gateway, part of its IAM (Identity and Access Management) r12. The announcement brings CA into head-on competition with vendors including IBM and Cisco, though it doesn't really represent another player in the market, as much of the technology comes from an OEM deal with Web services security vendor Vordel.

The Free Software Foundation published the final draft of AGPL v3 today. Like GPL v3 earlier this year, this is an open-source license intended to fix what its authors see as a loophole in older versions of the GPL – namely that only users who run a program locally are entitled to its source code.

In my last blog I reviewed the rising use of 802.11a, despite pessimistic predictions and less than complete market acceptance of the standard. Organizations deploying Wi-Fi gear several years ago may have compared 802.11g to 802.11a and decided not to purchase dual-radio, 5-GHz capable APs, based on the fact that even though both offer the same data rates, 802.11a support added cost, had slightly less coverage, and there were many less client cards that supported the standard. And 802.11a was not picked up by all enterprise and SOHO vendors and there was much fumbling around. But 802.11n appears to be considerably different: it’s seriously regarded as the next major phase in the enterprise WLAN market offering significantly better performance, extended coverage, greater reliability, and vendor support on all fronts.

Ok, Alan Shimel’s thoughtful response to my blog Host assessment does not make a NAC begs a response. Access control is about controlling access first and foremost. Reporting on a host’s condition doesn’t tell you much about the potential threat of a host, it only seems to. You can’t discern intent based on the bits on a drive, which is what Alan argues for when he says that a dirty machine “is still dirty and it is only a matter of time [until something bad happens]. I would not want it on my network or at least would want to know if it was on the network.”

In discussions with vendors and users regarding possibly migration strategies to 802.11n, the question has come up more than once how to deal with 802.11a. For organizations that never deployed dual-band access points this won’t be a problem, but surveys and anecdotal reports suggest that perhaps up to 50% of enterprises have a dual-mode deployment (802.11b/g at 2.4 GHz and 802.11a at 5 GHz).

If you buy into the idea that converged communications means more than just cheap phone calls or access to the corporate PBX from anywhere, SOA and VoIP ought to be perfect partners. Exposing telephony functions as reusable Web services should make them easier to integrate into other applications, and the same applies to all the other services like IM and video that are supposed to be converging with voice.

That's the thinking behind the SOA strategy Nortel announced this week, as well its partnership with IBM and its use of WebSphere. But how much work still needs to be done to make IP telephony part of SOA, and what kind  of composite apps will be built on top of it?

Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer for StillSecure, makes the argument that "with out the pre-connect posture or health check, you don't have NAC." I’ll go out on a limb and say host assessment plays a small part.

While typically relegated to the world of telecommunication service providers, provisioning systems are becoming more common in large enterprise and government environments. These organizations have large, distributed telecommunication infrastructures and often need the ability to provision equipment quickly using a standard process framework.

Mimicking activity in the physical world, Cisco Guest Server lets employees sponsor guests onto your network rather than lumping all guests into one account or another. This is the first step toward placing access control decisions with the business user, where it ultimately belongs.

MS changes up its hypervisor strategy for Windows Server 2008:

Citrix, VirtualIron, and Oracle. What do these things have in common? Xen, xen, xen...

Reading over the Aberdeen Groups October report “Who’s got the NAC? Best practices in protecting network access”, I was struck by figure 4, Percentage of End-Users with ANC at the End-Point where 70% of best in class organizations, 80% of average organizations, and 69% of laggards planned to have NAC at the endpoint. What are they thinking?

There's been alot of buzz about Android -- Google's open-source mobile phone platform. Now we get to see it in action. In this video, Google's Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK and demo applications on the Android platform.

For those who closely follow 802.11n this is probably obvious, but each of the 802.11n vendors who has product in the field has chosen a school as their first public customer win.

The Wi-Fi Alliance issued a press release today touting the certification of over 4000 devices, of which 140 received 802.11n draft 2.0 certification. While this bodes well for the consumer shopping at their local big box electronics store, those in the enterprise space have a little less to get excited about.

A quick glance at the current list of 802.11n draft 2.0 products show that only two enterprise WLAN vendors are represented: Cisco and Meru. Colubris and Trapeze, both which announced products months ago, are missing. Colubris announced product in May. Trapeze, in a press release around the same time stated that their 802.11n AP is “Wi-Fi certifiable when the Wi-Fi Alliance launches its 802.11n certification program in June”, but that was almost half a year ago.

Two vendors can be given a little reprieve: Aruba and Xirrus. Aruba demonstrated some restraint by announcing their 802.11n products just last week and general availability at the end of November. Even though it hasn't yet been submitted, they are anticipating certification by the end of the year. Xirrus very recently shared some news regarding ongoing beta trials of their 802.11n product, having previously only shared an outline of their upgrade program. Xirrus’ PR representative shared that they are aiming for certification in the first quarter of 2008.

There’s no doubt that the vendors mentioned above, plus 3Com, Extricom, Motorola, and Siemens, will eventually get their product certified, but the Wi-Fi Alliance’s announcement this week is another data point that despite the years of anticipation through the IEEE committee and the months of vendor announcements, 802.11n is still in the very earliest of stages. Its one thing to go ahead with 802.11n product before the IEEE ratifies the standard, but to skip the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification would appear unnecessarily risky. Even if you don't put much stock in the Alliance's certification process, it provides, at a minimum, a small indication of the vendor’s own confidence that their product market ready.

So far, the big news at this week's OracleWorld show has nothing to do with Oracle. It's that IBM is buying Cognos, until this morning the largest independent business intelligence vendor.

IBM says that Cognos will help it address customer demand for data analysis. This is true, but IBM was already doing that through a partnership with Cognos, so the real impact on IBM customers is zero. The acquisition's biggest effect will be to undermine competitors, and not just by temporarily upstaging Larry Ellison.

If you have a network operations center, the folks at Entuity hope that you place them in the eye of the storm. Releasing Eye of the Storm (EYE) 2008, Entuity offers Fault Management, Inventory and Resource Management, Performance Management and Reporting in a single product suite.

It has been a busy seven days on my end, leading to a dearth of blog postings: Interop/Vegas prep, a number of production issues, and a couple of in-depth interviews. Read on for more.

Software AG held its annual Integration World conference in Orlando this week. The name is more appropriate now than ever, as it's still busy integrating its own products with webMethods'.

Though the company's SOA roadmap doesn't call for a full merger of the old webMethods and Software AG lines until mid next year (and that looks likely to slip), it clearly wants people to think that it's ready for more, announcing partnerships with security gateway maker Layer 7 and business intelligence vendor Cognos . Both are important, but they're better news for the partners than for Software AG.

It's not often that vendors alert me of feature gaps from supporting products in their ecosystem. Many times vendors partner with them to build out a feature or functionality that will more effectively leverage their own products.

Networking vendor 3Com has not often been a technology leader and innovator, but more often considered a fast follower. In the enterprise wireless space the hot topic is 802.11n, and 3Com is in pursuit.

For the past 10 years, an eternity in the software market, Managed Objects has been focused on delivering BSM, SLA, and CMDB solutions to its customers. Given its comparatively small size, its message may not be heard over enterprise software vendors such as CA, BMC, and HP.

Touting BSM implementations in 90 days or less, Managed Object says it can work with all of the other management vendors and collect data used in its analysis of the impacts that cause service outages.

I had the opportunity today to speak with Alan Ganek, vice president of Autonomic Computing and CTO of IBM Tivoli. IBM issued a press release covering a flurry of new Autonomic Computing features in their existing products.

HP has just announced its Service Delivery Platform 2.0, a SOA bundle aimed at telcos. The interesting parts are its intended applications, and how similar the telcos are to other enterprises.

Aruba Networks made its first 802.11n product announcement this week by adding new wireless controllers and 802.11n access points, as well as incrementing its controller software.

Although rumored about weeks ago, there wasn't doubt in any customer or competitors' minds that Aruba had 802.11n product under development. Unlike many product announcements from technology companies, where there is a measurable element of innovation and ingenuity, the 802.11n product announcements to date, including this one, are in many ways merely the tangible culmination of several years of IEEE task group work. With standards the ultimate equalizer, vendors have emphasized their architecture, performance, and implementation flexibility as key differentiators. Aruba follows much of the same formula.

Workstation and server-based security tools do little to protect against employees downloading data and storing it on laptops or USB drives that can be lost or stolen.

Federal regulations establish broad requirements that impact IT systems and infrastructures that many IT managers find difficult to translate into real world actions...but that excuse will not save you in court. Almost all IT organizations are impacted by these regulations and you need to understand which ones affect you and what you can do about it.

I had the opportunity to personally speak with Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC software following their earnings call today. There has been a lot of market attention around BSM and the competition in this space has really been heating up.

While a majority of organizations are looking toward BSM solutions in the near team, Beauchamp believes that "one of the primary barriers to implementation success will be cultural." Since BSM involves multiple business silos and technology groups, those organizations will need to find ways to bring those silos together culturally and technologically. Obviously, the tools they select and processes that they utilize are also key factors.

If I hear the word virtualization one more time I think I might get sick to my stomach. However, I just witnessed a stunning demo of VS 2008 here in Redmond by Jeff Woolsey of the Server Virtualization team. If you think virtualization is still a fad, read on about how Microsoft's own internal IT department is using virtualization and saving millions.

IBM today launches Innov8, a 3D virtual reality game intended to teach business types about SOA and BPM. According to IBM, it will both help align business with IT and reduce an alleged skills shortage.

From the trailer, Innov8 looks more interesting than the average corporate marketing. But is a computer game really the best way to attract non-technical people to technology?

This is what happens when Internet engineers have too much time on their hands.

For a long time now, the editors at Network Computing have liked EqualLogic. Its products are easy to manage and perform extremely well, turning in some great performance numbers in our labs. The genius if the EqualLogic design is that as you grow your storage pool, you grow the compute power by adding controllers. It isn't the only company to take this approach, but it's done one of the better jobs on implementation.

Call me a geek, but as my bus pulled into the Microsoft Corporate Campus in Redmond, WA this morning, I couldn't help but feel like a little kid entering Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I'm here in Redmond covering a Windows 2008 Server technical workshop for the media, and while I'll be blogging about Longhorn developments soon, I felt compelled to share a fascinating experience I just had.

This summer, we published the results from our IT Process Automation testing where we looked at RealOps (purchased by BMC), iConclude (purchased by Opsware and then HP), and Opalis.

Recently we wrote about NetIQ's venture into this market with Aegis and Optinuity (who originally declined the request to participate in the testing) at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco a few months ago.

This market continued to be hyper-competitive as vendors grasp for market share and aggressively look to increase their customer base.

We came across another vendor in this area recently, Stratavia.

Microsoft's announcement on Tuesday of "Oslo" sounded impressive:  a planned model-based development platform for SOA and BPM. But there also was some bad news for Microsoft's SOA ambitions. It's SOA-as-Service offering, which it calls an ISB (Internet Service Bus), probably won't be available before 2009.

BEA Systems has some innovative technology and it's an important competitor in the SOA and application server markets. Customers are much better off if it stays independent, but that doesn't look likely.

As I work my way through testing in-line NAC devices from vendors like Consentry, Juniper, and Nevis, I learn not only about how the products work, but also about deployment options and stumbling blocks. Some of those lessons come purely through product testing; some lessons from talking to system engineers who are out deploying their products; and some lessons are a combination of both.

Welcome to NWC's SOA Immersion Center. Here, we'll be analyzing news, technology and products that affect one of the most misunderstood areas in IT. Though we'll look at application integration in general, we have a particular emphasis on Web services and similar messaging architectures.

Apple relaxes licensing language on Leopard Server to permit virtualized instances, VMware Fusion seems to run just fine on Leopard server and client, and the venerable MS Virtual PC still seems to work for those unfortunate souls still running PowerPC hardware. Does this mean everyone is coming to the virtualization party now?