Application Protection, a Distributed Approach

Source: WSTA written by Peter Glock, Head of Solution Development & Marketing, Orange Business
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The ability to talk to someone at a distance has been taken for granted by large businesses since the widespread adoption of the telephone. Market forces are reshaping the ways we communicate with each other, bringing a new set of security challenges.

Conferences on collaboration driven by technology vendors often assume that all organizations have or are in the process of converging all applications onto one IP network that connects users to a unified communications system that enables visibility of co-workers (or maybe even customers and partners) availability and communications via IM, email, and/or voice at the click of a mouse.

The reality is that many are just starting to plan for these changes, especially outside of head office locations. Indeed, many still manage voice and data communications budgets and operations in different parts of their business.

One of the potential barriers to realizing the benefits of a converged network is how to provide security and appropriate service levels for all the applications, now that they are no longer separated.

Application firewalling has been around for a while but has largely been used to protect specific applications that are exposed to the public Internet but are confined to a few protected locations.

Now that many applications will be carried on a corporate intranet, the network itself has to become application-aware and provide appropriate performance and security for each application at all points. A problem with one application must not be allowed to take down the others as has happened with malware outbreaks in the past.

The threats facing a network application like Voice over IP are:

1. Infrastructure- and application-based attacks

2. Denial of service (DoS) attacks

3. Eavesdropping

4. Toll fraud

5. Protocol-specific threats (SIP, H.323, and MGCP)

This implies that the application needs protecting across the network and at all end points. There are similar threats for most network applications. Defensive approaches that should be examined include:

The Fortress
Consolidating applications into a small number of data centers, providing high performance gateways at the center through which all communications flow and policy are enforced. Effectively, the infrastructure outside the data center is treated as semi-trusted or untrusted. This can have significant cost impact on the network but leads to consistent policy enforcement and lower security infrastructure operating costs.

The United Nations
This approach uses federated policy with codes of connection that are enforced by each entity, and audited by a central team. Operational risks are difficult to manage across disparate teams. It is usually adopted by decentralized organizations as they find it inappropriate to push central control on their subsidiaries, many of whom may be not under direct control, i.e., joint ventures and partners.

Distributed Security
This strategy involves building security enforcement points at various points around the network, pushing a central security policy to all points. The availability of unified defense technology facilitates implementation at a much lower cost than the typical fortress gateway.

For organizations that have adopted the fortress or United Nations approach, now is the time to examine distributed security.

Peter Glock is Head of Solution Development & Marketing at Orange Business Services. He was one of the founders of the managed security business back in the last millennium. Please contact Alan Simpkins, Solutions Manager, IT Services, Orange Business Services;
email: alan.simpkins@orange-ftgroup.com;
web: www.orange-business.com.

Juniper Takes 'Control' of High-Speed Networking

New control-plane architecture set to help carriers with time to market on new services.

High-performance carrier networks are about more than just moving high volumes of data; they're also about control of the services and protocols the data relies upon.
Yet, for the most part, data and control have been combined in routing platforms often resulting in a performance trade-off. Juniper Networks is taking a different tact with its new JCS 1200 Control Plane Scaling platform.

The idea with the JCS 1200 is to separate data from the control plane, which in allows the control plane to scale independently. Juniper claims that for control-intensive services the separation of the control plane from the data plane provides greater service scalability for service providers.

"We are the ones taking the bold move of a separate control platform," Alan Sardella, Juniper's senior product marketing manager for high-end systems, told InternetNews.com.
"The main competitive advantage that it gives us and our customers is that you don't diminish control plane capacity as you add forwarding capacity."

Sardella explained that a typical router is made up of two primary components, a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is the packet-forwarding engine, and it is responsible for moving packets in and out of the router and into the destinations of the network.

The control plane is responsible for running protocols as well as creating and managing the forwarding tables. "It provides the intelligence to the router," Sardella said. According to Sardella, the control plane also provides direction to the data plane and to where packets need to be forwarded.

On the data-plane side, last June Juniper announced its T1600 Terabit router.

Sardella commented that the T1600 provides lots of capacity on the data side but in some cases the control plane can be a bottleneck. The JCS 1200 is designed to relieve that bottleneck, allowing the control plane to scale without having an impact on data-plane capacity.

Sardella argued that without a separate control plane architecture, as services are added, an impact on the data plane could occur. He noted that services such as MPLS (define) can sometimes require a lot of control resources and as such are well served by a separate control plane.

That said, Sardella added that many existing T1600 customers already have plenty of control-plane capacity.

"All networks are designed a little differently, and we're seeing some cases where this (JDS 1200) will give us more flexibility if we can do some separation," Sardella said.

"We're not saying the T1600 doesn't have enough capacity for most cases, but this is for select cases where the service provider needs something extra."

Global IT Job Market Starts off Strong in 2008

Any worries that a slowing economy might mean a loss of IT jobs seem unfounded — at least for now.

In the United States, IT employment capped off a year of 7.9 percent growth with a record 3.8 billion jobs in December 2007, reports vnunet.com. Concerns over a possible recession haven’t yet dampened demand for IT pros, says the CEO of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), which tracks IT employment.

It’s a similar story elsewhere around the world.

According to ENN, 68 percent of high-tech companies in Ireland expect to add jobs in 2008, up from 63 percent last year, with software engineers especially in demand. The country’s tech industry thus far remains relatively impervious to a shaky economy and a loss of IT manufacturing jobs to low-cost locales such as Eastern Europe, India and China, says a network director with Eurocom Worldwide.

Due to a tight job market, IT salaries in Australia are “inflated,” says the managing director of a recruitment company in an Australian IT article. He says business analysts earn up to $900 (U.S. $829) a day, after struggling to find work just a few years ago.

In addition to business analysts, Australian companies are seeking project managers, application developers, architects, storage and security pros, and help desk staffers.

In India’s West Bengal state, IT employment is expected to grow from 55,000 to 75,000 in 2008, according to the Business Standard, with IBM, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro and Genpact among the companies expected to add staff.

Entry-level IT salaries in India could rise nearly 40 percent this year, due to increased hiring by multinational giants such as IBM, says the story. Such companies will expand their staffs by 65 percent.

Network Appliance: Cash IS King

Network Appliance (NTAP) is a data storage company that takes standard hardware (disk drives), adds proprietary software and creates a high value technology. They devised and commercialized a type of storage called Network Attached Storage that dramatically lowered the cost of data storage systems for businesses. Their main competitor is EMC (EMC) who dominates the market for a higher end storage product called SAN. Over time (15 years), NetApp has rounded out their product line and has transitioned from a role as the scrappy underdog to an industry incumbent.

They are the growth leader in an industry with natural growth. Their customers include companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) and the Federal government.

The leadership team has been more or less intact since their IPO over ten years ago. They have executed, executed and then executed again.

Some people owned the stock on and off again for almost as long for a variety of reasons, not all of which include rigorous investment analysis. Bought in 1998, sold some on meteoric rise to dot-com bubble top, sold the rest on the way down, bought some after the crash, sold some last year. They were always uncomfortable as NetApp was a true growth stock - little revenue but the promise of riches "some day". Most of the investors think of themselves as a passive investor first, value investor second and growth investor almost never. Fortunately, the company is now at a place where they can evaluate it using their “value” hat.

Wall Street has been and is obsessed with this company's margins and precise revenue growth rates. The company has repeatedly told Wall Street to go to h*** and has done whatever they thought was in the best interest of the company over the longer term. If that meant hiring a lot of sales people who wouldn't produce sales for a quarter or two, so be it. Time and time again, the wisdom of the company's decisions has been proven.

When a valuation hangs on a 20% growth rate, a couple % up or down can make a huge difference in the current price.

The reality is that company sales and profits will almost surely continue to grow. The natural growth in storage helps. A big pickup in demand overseas should more than make up for what will be a tough period selling into the financials, their second largest vertical. They have developed new sales channels that continue to widen the sales effort. They have products at many different levels so in countries that are growing they can capture move up buyers and in hurting industries they can get the move down buyer.

At this point in time, however, talk about whether growth will be 25% or 15% (great or merely really good) is missing the forest for the trees. The stock is so cheap that the company could have no growth over the next 5 years and it wouldn't matter.

Cheap is never a word they thought they would utter in the same breath as NetApp. But it's true.

Wall Street has been so busy being prissy about a point of margin here or there and the generous stock options offered to employees that it has failed to notice that the company has become a cash cow.

Over time, because of the intersection of accounting policies and a change of sales mix behind its revenue, NetApp is recognizing less and less of its income upfront and in combination with its explosive growth, the story of its profitability is not in its net income numbers but in its free cashflow results.

GAAP income numbers include all sorts of accounting adjustments like depreciation and amortization. Sometimes these allow companies to dramatically overstate true profitability (e.g. Enron) and sometimes these underestimate earnings.

For most companies, the number that shareholders should care about is a metric called "free cashflow". This tells you how much money, after making necessary capital expenditure, is available to either payout to shareholders or make new investments. Cash IS king.

And when it comes to cash, NetApp is a member of the royal court.

























Looking at P/E, NetApp is still a growth stock and the growth metrics matter. Using free cashflow as the valuation metric tells another story. Using the numbers the company gave today, $233 million, and currently depressed share prices, Network Appliance is trading at just over 8x free cashflow. This is a valuation for a distressed company, not an industry leader growing like hotcakes.

How can this be?

The story is mostly in the shift of the company towards more revenue from software and service contracts. This is great business, but accounting rules require most of the revenue to be reserved and recognized over a couple of years.

This has meant that the published revenue numbers are not meaningful by themselves, particularly if you are interested in the growth rate of the business, which is all that Wall Street has cared about since the beginning of time for this company.

You have to do some manipulation to figure out what are revenues from newly booked business. You start with published revenues, subtract out revenues released from reserves and add back new deferrals. The situation gets particularly confusing since the new lines of business are more subject to deferral than the older lines. According to the calculations I have done, GAAP revenues broken down by product line dramatically underestimate the role of the more profitable service and software sales within the business.

And if you are concerned about margin numbers, forget about it. With deferred revenue, most of the costs are booked upfront so this wreaks havoc with profitability ratios.



In this graph, shown the traditional profitability ratio of net income as a percentage of revenues versus an adjusted number where they use free cashflow instead of net income and they adjust up revenue for increases in deferred revenue. Using the adjusted metric, net margins are over 20%, instead of 10%. In addition, instead of falling off, margins have improved.

NetApp’s management has clearly tried to refocus attention on cashflow metrics and be clear that projections for growth in GAAP revenue numbers offer little insight into the true state of the business, without that much success.

Okay, NetApp is cheap. Why should that change?

Insider stock sales have noticeably come to a halt and the company has been buying back huge amounts of its own shares (8% of shares over the last 9 months!). More of the deferred revenue will start to show up in revenue numbers and the size of deferred revenue should start to stabilize.

Market sentiment could change fairly soon about the company, or it could not. In the meantime, though, the most likely scenario is that the company keeps making money, keeps growing and keeps buying back stock. From that perspective, having the analyst community take some time to come around might be a positive.

There are risks. There are the typical risks with any individual company – strategic snafus, top management departures, loss of market share. There are the risks of economic downturn. In a stock market meltdown, anything could happen.

There are risks specific to NetApp. Most obviously, they are in the middle of a very public food fight with Sun over patents and technology [NetApp’s side of the story / Sun's version].

US financial companies are a big piece of NetApp’s revenues and this sector will be weak for sometime. The company was very upfront that it expects orders to be quite weak from this portion of the market, as they were last quarter. Still, according to company estimates, financials are only 12-13% of NetApp’s business. Last quarter, which included credit crunch time, revenues from NetApp’s top enterprise customers fell 4%. You could have orders from the banks fall by 50% and overall growth rates of adjusted revenues would still be in the 20%+ range because growth overseas and a broadening of their sales base in North America through sales partnerships should more than compensate for any amount of weakness in Wall Street’s budgets.

And remember, NetApp is a value company, not a growth company, so who cares if revenue growth is “only” 20%?

On balance, the potential rewards of buying a company of NetApp’s quality at the current valuation would seem to outweigh the risks.

Data from company SEC filings and Morningstar.com. Data and calculations are believed but not guaranteed to be accurate. TTM as of November 2007.

Riverbed CEO: 'We Can Be One of the Survivors'

Jerry Kennelly, chief executive and co-founder of networking equipment maker Riverbed Networks (RVBD) stopped by the Barron’s offices today after three days of meetings with investors. He offered two takeaways: the company is not for sale, and making his sales forecast this year shouldn’t be hard.

Given that Riverbed shares spiked 9% yesterday, as Eric noted, I asked if RiverBed was for sale, to which Kennelly said, “None of use wants to work for Cisco [Systems (CSCO)] or one of the giants,” portraying Riverbed’s staff as a a tight-knit band of humble software engineers spending all day on their laptops at Starbucks (SBUX). Not exactly the Cisco culture, in other words. Kennelley argues Riverbed “can be one of the real big survivors in tech over time” and so he’d like to go the distance.

He attributes the bounce in the stock to a couple things he’s talked with investors about this week. First, he sees it as no big deal for the company to make sales of $375 million this year, as the company implied last week. As he sees it, “In the last quarter of 2006, we were at a $140 million annual revenue run rate, but we ended up delivering $236 million [in sales] in 2007. So, if we were at a revenue run rate of $300 million in this most recent quarter, we think it’s reasonable to expect we can deliver $375 million this year.” RiverBed did $76 million in the fourth quarter ended in December. And the uses for Riverbed’s gear are newer than for Cisco’s, which means, he thinks, CIOs will cut back on Cisco’s equipment before they cut back on Riverbed’s.

Second, the company has plans to spread its technology further as the year goes on. Today, Riverbed gear is used mainly for speeding up how fast branch offices can fetch data from computers at headquarters. New versions of the company’s switch could improve how efficiently data is moved between central computers within and between corporate data centers, conceivably broadening Riverbed’s addressable market. Kennelly is holding off on details of the product until its formal introduction.

Top 10 trends at the Mobile World Congress

There was a mobile phone for every taste and need on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

There's something to interest almost everyone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week:

For the lost
GPS is built in to an increasing number of mobile phones. Nokia is still the most aggressive vendor. This year it plans to sell 35 million phones with GPS. The Finnish phone giant is not alone: its competitors are also embracing navigation, so don't be surprised if in a few years GPS is as common in phones as cameras are today.

Trendsetters: HTC P3470 and Samsung G810

For shutterbugs
Phone makers also continue to develop cameras. Among the features that popped up during this year's show are face-detection, image stabilization and the ability to take better pictures in the dark. Phone cameras with a 5-megapixel resolution are also becoming more common, although you still only get a digital zoom.

Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C902 and Samsung F480

For Linux
Apple isn't the only company redrawing the mobile phone map. Linux is nothing new in mobile phones, but the launch of Google's Android has given it a lot of extra attention. On the show floor several chip manufacturers showed prototypes. The first real phones should be ready before the end of the year. One benefit with Android is the reduction in the time it takes to develop a new phone, according to Texas Instruments.

Trendsetters: ARM and Texas Instruments

For cineasts
If the mobile phone makers are to be believed, we should also use our next phone to watch movies. Two things that get us there: bigger screens in a widescreen format and larger storage capacity.

Trendsetters: Nokia N96 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

For globetrotters
Geotagging is a feature that combines built-in support for navigation and photography. When you take a picture your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps, and see where you've been.

Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C702 and Nokia 6220 Classic

For CIOs
With Sony Ericsson on board, four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. The last holdout is Nokia and it still has no plans. One interesting thing about a few of the Windows Mobile phones launched at the Mobile World Congress is that they fit just as well at home as at work.

Trendsetters: Samsung i200 and LG KS20

For speed freaks
Phones with support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) are arriving at a steady pace. A few phones now support 7.2Mbps -- but to get the most out of that bandwidth you need a laptop. A few phones also support HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), an abbreviation that in the real world means faster upload speeds.

Trendsetters: Toshiba Portege G810 and LG KF700

For speed freaks II
To get more bandwidth to your phone you can also use Wi-Fi. Support for this technology is also becoming more common. One of the advantages with Wi-Fi is that you can sometime sbrowse the Internet for free. Good luck doing that on a mobile network.

Trendsetters: Motorola Moto Z6w and Sony Ericsson G900

For your car
So how do you listen to your MP3 player without using headphones? One solution is to use the FM transmitter integrated in some new phones, and listen on your car radio. A small step for technology, but a big one for usability according to Nokia.

Trendsetters: Nokia N78 and Sony Ericsson W980

For the touchy
Touch-based user interfaces are fast becoming the norm in mobile phones -- although buttons will still not disappear. The goal is, if all goes well, to make phones easier to use. Only the imagination of the phone makers limits what can be done.

Trendsetters: HTC Advantage and Samsung Soul

Battle lines drawn; Huawei on the offensive

Chinese vendor's strategy focuses on its emerging-market niche

Source: MarketWatch

As the global economic picture darkens, so too does the outlook for Western telecom-equipment vendors. But the economic and industry troubles may spell opportunity for emerging-market rivals such as Huawei Technologies.

Weaker spending from North America and Western Europe has eroded the sales and earnings picture for top players including Ericsson AB and Alcatel-Lucent, as belts are tightened in advance of a possible U.S. recession. Ericsson shares, for example, have lost half their value since a shock profit warning in October.

Against this backdrop, Chinese vendors such as Huawei are on the offensive, ready to capture key markets and perhaps even claim the assets of struggling rivals. The company's strong presence in emerging markets, where network demand is not expected to slow, means it could weather a recession better than its Western rivals.

Among the top Western players, Ericsson AB has had the most trouble of late.
A month after its third-quarter profit warning, the Swedish company cut its sales outlook. When business didn't improve in the fourth-quarter, it was forced to lower its forecast for mobile-equipment spending in 2008 and announce heavy layoffs.

Despite its recent stumble, Ericsson maintains that the long-term outlook for the industry is unchanged. Some observers agree, arguing that sharp increases in data traffic will eventually force operators to add capacity.

But as the U.S. toys with recession, a marked improvement looks increasingly unlikely this year, prompting several analysts to lower their forecasts.

Tim Boddy, of Goldman Sachs, recently cut his view on the sector to cautious from attractive, saying it's more sensitive to the economy than the market thinks. He warned that a slowdown in the U.S. and Europe will translate into lower equipment spending.

Ericsson's failure to launch a cost-cutting plan of the depth now underway at rival Alcatel-Lucent (FR:013000: news, chart, profile) (ALU:alcatel-lucent ALU 6.12, +0.11, +1.8%) has also worried observers, who fear for its operating margin.

Alcatel-Lucent, which didn't manage a profit in 2007, is shedding a fifth of its 80,000 employees by 2009. Top executives have also been jumping ship. CEO Patricia Russo has lost five of her top deputies in the past year, including well-respected former chief operating officer Mike Quigley. Alcatel Lucent shares slumped 55% in 2007.

But it's not just a decline in equipment orders from the West that threatens Ericsson (SE:ERICB: news, chart, profile) (ERIC:ERIC 21.22, +0.77, +3.8%) and Alcatel-Lucent's profitability this year. The rise of China's Huawei Technologies is just as troubling, analysts said.

Huawei to the fore
For many years, Huawei, which is China's largest telecoms network-equipment maker, maintained a low profile. All that changed when it joined forces late last year with private-equity firm Bain Capital Partners in a $2.2 billion bid for 3Com (COMS:
3Com Corporation COMS 3.91, -0.06, -1.5%).

Huawei established its first research and development center in 1995, but only started competing seriously on the international scene in early 2000. Long dismissed as a mere regional player, its strength in emerging markets means it can no longer be ignored.
Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg last month said the industry must acknowledge that Huawei has become an established player, and isn't simply looking for a foothold.
Huawei, too, is working to raise its profile.

Although the privately run firm, based just outside of Hong Kong in Shenzhen, is not obliged to declare its financial results, it has started providing some information to support its internationalization. The figures show just how fast it has been growing. In 2006, its global revenue rose 42% to $8.5 billion.

Its international profit has soared, with 65%, or roughly $7.2 billion, of contract revenue generated overseas last year. Recent orders have come from MegaFon and Vimpelcom in Russia, Deutsche Telekom's (DT:deutsche telekom ag DT 19.37, +0.08, +0.4%) T-Mobile in five European countries and Vivo in Brazil. See related story from Barcelona.

And its chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, a former soldier who fashions himself after the larger-than-life Communist leader Mao Zedong, was listed by Time Magazine in 2005 as among its 100 most influential people.

Huawei's home market, meanwhile, is exploding.
China has the world's largest mobile subscription base, at over 520 million, and is on the verge of overtaking the U.S. to become the world's largest broadband-subscriber market. Chinese operators are expected to spend $31 billion on telecom equipment this year.

Huawei: a trigger for consolidation
At home and abroad, Huawei's aggressive pricing, helped by a low-cost manufacturing base, has allowed it to capture market share from bigger rivals, particularly in fast-growing emerging markets.

Powerful new antiphishing weapon DKIM emerges

DKIM standard attracts Cisco, Google, PayPal and more.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware.

There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

The new weapon is called DKIM, an emerging e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail, allows an organization to cryptographically sign outgoing e-mail to verify that it sent the message.

DKIM addresses one of the Internet's biggest threats: e-mail fraud. As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, according to a report released in late January by the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA). AOTA analyzed more than 100 million e-mails from Fortune 500 brands sent over a five-month period.



"It's a critical need that IT professionals look at e-mail authentication as a competitive advantage to protect their brands and their customers from these exploits as well as to protect their employees from spoofed or forged e-mail coming into their networks," says Craig Spiezle, chairman of AOTA.

DKIM proponents say the standard is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail.

"DKIM increases the trust with which people can regard their e-mail," says Jim Fenton, a distinguished engineer with Cisco and one of the authors of the standard. "DKIM isn't going to put an end to phishing, but I'm confident that DKIM is going to make it harder for phishing attacks to occur."

Under development since 2004, DKIM is finally reaching a critical mass. It's expected to be widely deployed this year, particularly in financial services and e-commerce firms. Early adopters include Bank of America, American Greetings and Cisco.



"My guess is that probably half of the Fortune 1000 will be DKIM signing in 2008," predicts Greg Olson, director of product management at Sendmail, which started shipping a DKIM-compliant e-mail appliance in November.



"I do feel that 2008 is the year when things are going to come together for DKIM," says Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology for IronPort, an e-mail appliance vendor that supports DKIM. "We have the Internet standard. We have a tremendous amount of vendor support . . . DKIM is solid as a rock."

How DKIM Works
DKIM allows an organization to insert a cryptographic signature in outbound e-mail and associate that signature with its domain name. The signature travels with the e-mail regardless of its path across the Internet. The recipient of the e-mail can use the signature to validate that the message came from the organization’s domain name.

"Right now, a receiver of a message has no confidence that the message they are receiving is from whom it claims to be from," Olson explains. "DKIM is a way to permit a receiver of a message to validate that a message is, in fact, from whom it claims to be from."

DKIM won’t eliminate e-mail fraud altogether, but it will help companies that are targets of phishing scams to give their customers a way of ensuring they sent a particular message.

"If the receiver has confidence that an e-mail that claims to be from Bank of America is from Bank of America, then they are not going to worry that someone is trying to steal their Social Security number," Olson says.

DKIM is a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo, (read a Q&A with a Yahoo executive on DKIM and beyond) and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco. These companies along with other messaging vendors and ISPs are working with the IETF's DKIM working group on technical specifications, which are almost done.

"DKIM is a stable specification," Fenton says. "The DKIM base specification, which is how you sign a message and how you verify the signature, is very well defined. It’s not a moving target."

The IETF's DKIM working group is still tweaking the Sender Signing Practices, which is a document that will describe how senders can provide information in their DKIM records for recipients to use in deciding what steps to take with messages received from the sender.

"If I sign all my mail and you get a message that purports to come from me that's not signed, then you can assume that message is not from me," Olson explains. "That policy would be in the DNS record associated with the sender. The SSP is in its 10th draft right now. . . . I hope it will be done soon."

Network vendors say DKIM is ready for deployment. In November, 20 ISPs and messaging vendors conducted an interoperability test of their DKIM deployments.

Vendors that participated in the DKIM interoperability test say the standard works, and that no technical stumbling blocks were discovered.

"We did find some cases where the RFCs need some clarification," Olson says. "But the test showed that multiple people working independently have been able to interoperate with DKIM."

DKIM-compliant software and appliances are available today from Sendmail, IronPort, Alt-N Technologies, Message Systems, Port25 Solutions, StrongMail Systems and others.

"It's pretty easy for a corporation to go out and deploy DKIM because there are enough commercial products that have DKIM support," Fenton says.

DKIM usage booms
DKIM adoption is accelerating, especially among banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies.



"I think there will be rapid adoption of DKIM," says Charles Stiles, director of worldwide business development for Goodmail, a certified e-mail service that will support DKIM in May. "The standard is proving to be very successful. The best and brightest people in the world worked on it. It offers up a foolproof, spoof-proof way to authenticate messages."



BITS, a group of 100 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, last year recommended that its members adopt DKIM by October 2008. BITS also recommended two other standards for securing e-mail: Transport Layer Security (TLS), which encrypts e-mail messages between servers; and either Sender ID Framework (SIDF) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate that a received e-mail originates from an authorized mail server within a particular domain.

"What BITS is doing here, with all of its members speaking in one voice with such a massive impact, gives people confidence in DKIM," Peterson says. "It's unlike anything we've seen" in terms of driving DKIM adoption.

ISPs are adopting DKIM because they want to protect their customers against spam and phishing scams. E-mail senders are tying to protect their brands, identities and customers from phishing scams.

PayPal and eBay have teamed up with Yahoo to battle phishing attacks with DKIM. PayPal and eBay are signing their e-mails with DKIM, and Yahoo Mail will block e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal that haven’t been signed through DKIM.

"EBay and PayPal have always attracted fraudsters, phishers and all that. Our customers see too much e-mail that isn’t coming from us," says Mike Vergara, director of account protection at PayPal, which is owned by eBay (Read our Q&A with Vergara). "DKIM takes a good industrywide standards approach. We need to add strong authentication to our e-mails so customers can have confidence that it did come from us. And we need to get ISPs to leverage that so we can say to them: If it didn’t come from us, please don’t deliver it."

PayPal is deploying DKIM after already rolling out Sender Policy Framework (SPF), a complementary Microsoft-backed standard that is an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SPF allows software to reject e-mail coming out of forged "from" addresses.

Vergara says the hardest part about deploying DKIM was documenting PayPal’s e-mail infrastructure to determine all the systems and domains that send e-mail to customers.

"There's no one postmaster at eBay or PayPal. It took a lot of time to figure out all the e-mails we were sending -- transactional e-mails, marketing e-mails, customer support e-mails -- and where they were coming from around the world," Vergara says. "Getting our hands around that took us 12 months. Rolling out e-mail appliances and upgrading them to DKIM took a couple of weeks."

Vergara says DKIM works. He says Yahoo has blocked hundreds of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of messages per day that supposedly came from eBay or PayPal but weren’t legitimate because they weren’t DKIM signed.

Now PayPal is in discussion with other ISPs to convince them to block messages from either PayPal or eBay that aren't signed with DKIM.

"We can't solve this e-mail fraud problem on our own," Vergara says. "We are trying to light a fire under the ISPs to help us solve this problem for the people who use our services."

DKIM has its limitations. A minority of companies is signing their outbound messages with DKIM, and fewer still are checking for DKIM signatures on inbound mail. But backers of the technology hope this problem will be eliminated as ISPs and banks deploy DKIM.

"If I sign all my messages to protect my brand, but the person receiving it or their ISP aren't checking, it all looks the same to the recipient," Peterson says. "I feel pretty confident that a year from now 30% of all companies will be signing their messages. Yahoo and Gmail have adopted it. Bank of America and PayPal have been very vocal supporters. Hope springs eternal. I do feel that we're at the tipping point for DKIM."

Cisco & others sued by intellectual-property company...

Network-1 Security Solutions, an acquirer and licensor of intellectual property, this week said it has initiated patent litigation against several data-network equipment manufacturers, including Cisco, Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks and 3Com.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, for infringement of Patent No. 6,218,930, or the "Remote Power Patent." This patent, titled "Apparatus and Method for Remotely Powering Access Equipment Over a 10/100 Switched Ethernet Network," relates to several technologies used in equipment that complies with the IEEE 802.3af Power Over Ethernet (PoE) standard. The Remote Power Patent was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 17, 2001 and expires on March 11, 2020.

Also named as defendants in the suit are Cisco's Linksys division, Enterasys Networks, Netgear and Adtran.

Network-1 seeks monetary damages based on reasonable royalties, as well as treble damages for the defendants' "continued willful infringement" of the patent.

"We have made repeated efforts, at considerable expense, to license the Remote Power Patent on reasonable terms to companies manufacturing, selling, and using equipment taking advantage of Power-over-Ethernet technology," said Corey Horowitz, Chairman and CEO of Network-1, in a statement.

"We prefer licensing the Remote Power Patent to the PoE industry without the distraction and cost of litigation, but will take whatever action is necessary to protect our intellectual property rights and maximize shareholder value," Horowitz continued. "Unfortunately, many technology companies employ a multifaceted strategy which depends on expensive litigation, delay tactics, adverse public relations, and intense lobbying in order to avoid licensing intellectual property from small companies and inventors, leaving us with no choice but to respond with litigation."

Cisco said it has received and is studying the complaint. "In the matter of patent litigation in general, cases such as this illustrate the reasons why a broad coalition of industries are asking Congress to reform many elements of the current patent system, which has created uncertainty and undue risk for true innovators," the company said in a statement.

Large technology companies are lobbying Congress to pass a patent reform bill that makes it harder for companies with no intention of creating products to buy up patents and file multimillion-dollar infringement lawsuits against other companies 3Com, Adtran, Enterasys, Extreme and Foundry declined comment. Netgear did not respond by press time.

In August 2005, Network-1 initiated patent litigation against D-Link Systems and D-Link Corp. relating to the Remote Power Patent. After two years of litigation, Network-1 and D-Link entered into a full-term license agreement covering D-Link's sale of all its PoE products at a royalty rate of 3.25% of net sales, subject to adjustment.

In addition, in November 2005, Network-1 and PowerDsine settled all outstanding litigation and entered into a settlement agreement relating to the Remote Power Patent.

Motorola, Nortel in wireless infrastructure talks...

Source: IDG

Nortel Networks on Monday declined to comment on a news report that the company is negotiating with Motorola to combine wireless infrastructure units.

"Nortel doesn't comment on rumors and speculation," a Nortel spokesman said.

The two companies are talking as a way to cut costs in a network equipment market that is consolidating and facing stiff competition, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The deal with Nortel would be separate from Motorola's announcement last month that it was considering spinning off its mobile handset business, the Journal reported. Motorola on Jan. 31 announced it was looking at separating the lagging handset division from the rest of its business.

A Motorola spokeswoman wasn't immediately available for comment Monday.

A combined wireless infrastructure unit would have sales around US$10 billion, the Journal reported. Talks between Motorola and Nortel have been going on for about a month, the news report said, and under one scenario, Nortel would own a majority of the joint venture.

Both companies have faced challenges recently. Motorola last month reported a loss of $49 million for 2007, due largely to declining handset sales.

But fourth-quarter 2007 sales were up in the Home and Networks Mobility group, which makes set-top boxes and wireless infrastructure. The group saw sales rise 11 percent to $2.7 billion from the fourth quarter of 2006.

Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged seven former Nortel executives with participating in a 2003 accounting fraud by manipulating reserves to manage Nortel's earnings.

Last February, Nortel announced it would lay off 2,900 employees and move another 1,000 jobs to low-cost locations throughout 2007 and 2008.

Patches keep coming as Apple fixes OS X security bugs

Source: IDG News Service

The bug fixes kept coming Monday, as Apple shipped critical security updates for its Mac OS X operating system.

The latest security updates fix a 11 of bugs in the Mac Operating system, including eight bugs in the recently released Mac OS X 10.5, known as "Leopard." Apple released the security fixes in conjunction with an 10.5.2 update to Leopard, which includes dozens of other updates.

Some of the security flaws are extremely serious, and could be exploited by hackers to run unauthorized software on a victim's computer, although Apple did not report any incidents of this occurring (Compare Patch and Vulnerability Management products).

The patches include fixes for Safari, Mail, Launch Services, the Mac OS Directory Services, Open Directory and Parental Controls. There are also patches for several Unix components that ship with Apple's software, including a recently patched flaw in the Samba file-and-print software.

"The Samba bug was expected, since all the open-source distributions released fixes a while ago," said Andrew Storms, nCircle's director of security operations, via instant message.

It's been a busy time for software developers working on some widely used software products.

Apple's patches come a day before Microsoft is set to issue a massive set of updates itself. Last week, the software vendor said it expected to release 12 security updates for a variety of products including critical updates for Windows, Internet Explorer and Office.

Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid

Source: Wallstreet Journal

Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn't account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft Monday, spelling out its position.

Complete Coverage: See interactive stock timelines for Yahoo and Microsoft, past articles and more.
Yahoo's board believes that Microsoft's is trying to take advantage of the recent weakness in the company's share price to "steal" the company. The decision to reject the offer signals that Yahoo's board is digging in its heels for what could be a long takeover battle. The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share, the person said.

It's unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to pay such a premium, which would increase the value of its original cash and stock bid by more than $12 billion. The rejection comes as Yahoo's board has been considering various other scenarios, including a search advertising partnership Google Inc. Yahoo's directors are still considering that and other options that would safeguard the company's independence, people close the company say.








Yahoo's board appears to be betting that Microsoft doesn't want to "go hostile" and try to acquire the company against the wishes of management and the board. Such a course could cause deep resentment among the rank-and-file engineers whose cooperation is crucial to the company's success. A hostile takeover could also make it more difficult to get the deal past regulators if Yahoo management tries to convince authorities that the deal is anticompetitive.

Yahoo has taken "poison pill" provisions to prevent an unwanted takeover. Microsoft would likely have to oust the board in order to overturn them.

The Visible Enterprise

Collaboration and data-sharing to keep your enterprise running smartly

Award-Winning Intranets Make Liberal Use of Web 2.0
Source: ItBusinessEdge

Many companies are still struggling to determine when and where it makes sense to employ Web 2.0 technologies at work. Yet at least one application — the company intranet — appears to be a fairly obvious candidate to me.

While intranets have promised to help employees communicate and collaborate, they have largely failed to deliver, as I pointed out in a recent blog. And improved communication and collaboration are two of the primary selling points of many Web 2.0 technologies.

So it’s not surprising that the winners of Nielsen Norman Group’s (NNG’s) annual Ten Best Designed Intranets competition make liberal use of such Web 2.0 features as advanced personalization. For instance, according to internetnews.com, sales folks logging in to Coldwell Banker’s intranet see individual sales targets, their current progress and leads that are being tracked.

Products with a Web 2.0 twist were popular with award winners, including Microsoft’s SharePoint, the Google Search Appliance and Red Hat Linux.

Basics are important, too — and can be a challenge even for award winners. NNG lauds one winner, the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries in Australia, for its clear and usable design. “They just did a very good job with colors and borders. You can tell what’s a link and what to click on to go somewhere,” NNG’s director of research tells internetnews.com.

Later in the article, she notes that several of the winning intranets have links that don’t lead anywhere, but instead “drop a user off a cliff.”

The intranet also seems like a logical place to use multimedia content and other features more commonly found on the Internet. “SAP TV” is a collection of videos on the homepage of SAP’s intranet. Says NNG’s research director:

If you have YouTube on your Dell desktop at home, you start to wonder why you can’t see video of the big company event at another office or the politician meeting the CEO.

Seven hot acronyms IT pros are talking about

IT professionals adore acronyms and shorthand. That’s one of the reasons why normal people think IT pros are speaking a foreign language when we talk amongst ourselves. If you want to keep up with trends in IT management for 2008, familiarize yourself with this list of hot acronyms that your fellow IT pros are talking about.

7. BPM
Business Process Management is all about using technology to make business processes more efficient and less time consuming, and thus completing the same processes with fewer resources. In other words, it’s about streamlining operations to save money. Many IT departments and IT service agents — such as IBM — are focusing on BPM as a way to transform the image of IT from a cost center to a value center.

6. CMDB
A Configuration Management Database collects configuration data about the various pieces of an IT infrastructure and stores them in a unified repository that can be systematically analyzed and managed. In this system, the various pieces of data are called “configuration items” (CIs) and the goal is track changes to the CIs and to ultimately auto-discover new items. CMDB is a critical component of the ITIL framework, and it can be an extremely valuable asset for standardizing IT management.
























5. BI
Business Intelligence is a fancy name for the high-powered reports and dashboards that smart companies use to track the performance of their businesses. For example, my colleague Larry Dignan of ZDNet likes to say, “BI is the way you get ROI out of ERP.” What he’s getting at is that BI is what gives full value for the hard work of implementing an ERP or data warehousing project, because BI allows you to mine the data to better understand the trajectory of your company.

4. MDM
Master Data Management is the new buzzword for unifying data sources to provide a single, reliable source of information about customers, products, employees, and other assets. This may sound similar to data warehousing (DW), but it’s actually bigger. While DW is mostly about unifying backend log files and tracking data in order to produce reports, MDM is about unifying critical business data that are typically live and dynamic, such as customer and product data.

3. TCO
Total cost of ownership is a phrase coined by the Gartner Group in 1987, and it has developed into a useful formula for arriving at the full costs involved in deploying and managing technology tools. TCO calculations provide assistance with product selection, because they are a valuable part of estimating return on investment (ROI). With tech budgets tightening in 2008, TCO and ROI will become even more critical in helping IT departments decide how to best spend their constrained budgets.

2. SOA
Service Oriented Architecture has a few distinguishing characteristics, but it’s the same type of cloud computing that has been referred to as “Web services” and “Software as a Service” over the past decade. The difference with SOA is that it goes a step beyond cloud computing by breaking down software services into standard building blocks that can be re-used, distributed, and fed into other sites, programs, and projects.

1. ITIL
Information Technology Infrastructure Library has evolved into a set of standards and best practices for organizing and running an IT department. Originally developed by the British government with inspiration from IBM, ITIL is now an international phenomenon and a hot commodity in the United States, where ITIL-trained professionals are in strong demand. ITILv3 was published in April 2007, and one of the most important revisions was a stronger alignment between IT and business — another critical theme for IT in 2008.

Are these the hottest acronyms in IT right now? What other acronyms do you think should be on the list?

Severed internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea

Work begins to repair severed net.

Source BBC News

Ships are now in place off the coast of Egypt to start repairs.
Work has begun to repair two damaged internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea that were severed last week.



Flag Telecom, one of the firms responsible for the cables, says it will take about a week to be fixed.

The break in cables has caused disruption to net services in the Middle East and India. The cause is still not known.

Repairs will involve a team of about 50 people, including navigation experts and cable engineers, said Flag Telecom.

The ship that will repair the first severed cable is already in place, with repairs underway, while the second vessel is expected to begin work on Tuesday.

Bespoke ships

"It will be a highly technical job and should take a week to complete," a spokesperson for Flag Telecom told the BBC News website.

The cause of the damage has not been officially confirmed but there have been reports that the breaks were related to a tanker dragging its anchor along the sea bed.


However, the Egyptian communications ministry has denied any ships were in the area at the time of the break.

The first job in such a situation was to find the exact location of the damaged cable, said Mark Harper, manager of cable system support at Cable and Wireless.

The firm is not involved in the repair operation, but has carried out similar work in the past.

Often the location of a break can be found by cable engineers back on shore. The areas affected by the outage will give key clues as to what part of the cable is broken.







To get a more precise location, cable engineers can send light pulses along the fibres in the cable using a device known as a Optical Time Domain Reflectometer.
















When the pulses hit the broken part of the cable they will bounce back and by measuring the time it takes for them to return, engineers can ascertain the location of the damage to within tens of metres.

The next stage is to employ a specially fitted cable ship, which will have onboard remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

Fishing

If the ROV is able to locate the cable it can cut out the non-working sections and pull the cable back onto the ship.

Alternatively a device onboard known as a grapnel can hook the cable from the sea floor and drag it on to the ship.

"The first option is preferable because it means you can recover the cable very close to the end whereas a grapnel is less precise," said Mr Harper.

Grapnels have been in use for hundreds of years, and so were part of the equipment employed when the first telegraph cables were laid.

The damaged cable can be repaired on the ship at which point a technician will splice new cable to the existing pieces.

Once repaired it can be lowered back to the seabed.

Two cable operators were involved in this most recent outage.

FLAG Telecoms, which has responsibility for the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG), a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable and SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 project - which links South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.

Disruption also occurred in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, reported the Associated Press.

In Dubai, at least two internet service providers (ISPs) were affected.

In December 2006, seven of the eight cables connected to Taiwan were damaged by an earthquake, disrupting communications in much of Asia.

These cables took several months to fully repair.

Natural disasters are one of several causes of cable outages.

In this case, an errant anchor has been blamed and Mr Harper believes there is "still a partial conflict between the needs of shipping and of telecoms".

But it is not the biggest problem facing cable operators.

"Fishing is still the biggest issue. Historically in Europe trawler fishing has been a problem although in the last 15 years most cables have been buried in the seabed to overcome this," said Mr Harper.

Gartner’s Top 10 IT predictions for 2008 and beyond

Open source, Apple, green technology and 3-D printing highlighted
Source: Network World,

Open source, Apple computers, green technology, the rise of users and the proliferation of three-dimensional printing are among the hot trends IT shops should look out for in the next few years, according to Gartner. (Fellow industry watcher Forrester Research also issued predictions this week.)

The analyst firm on Thursday highlighted 10 key predictions of developments that will affect IT and business users in 2008 and beyond. Here’s a detailed look at the list, culled from more than 100 predictions Gartner has made based on its research:
























*Apple will double its market share for computers in the United States and Western Europe by 2011. “Apple’s gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple’s success,” Gartner says. A focus on interoperability between the iPod, iMac and other devices is one of the keys for Apple.











*By 2012, half of all workers will use devices other than their laptops when they travel. “Even though notebooks continue to shrink in size and weight, traveling workers lament the weight and inconvenience of carrying them on their trips,” Gartner states. “Vendors are developing solutions to address these concerns: new classes of Internet-centric pocketable devices at the sub-$400 level; and server and Web-based applications that can be accessed from anywhere.”

*80% of commercial software will contain open source code by 2012, providing “significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment.”






*Software-as-a-service will account for at least one-third of business application spending by 2012. “Endorsed and promoted by all leading business applications vendors (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft) and many Web technology leaders (Google, Amazon), the SaaS model of deployment and distribution of software services will enjoy steady growth in mainstream use during the next five years,” Gartner writes.

*IT infrastructure will follow the software-as-a-service wave, with early technology adopters purchasing 40% of their infrastructure as a service by 2011. “Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure

*Environmental concerns will affect many more IT buying decisions. “By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods,” Gartner says.






* By 2010, three-quarters of IT shops won’t buy PC hardware unless it meets standards for lower carbon emissions and “full life-cycle energy” usage. Technology providers are only now beginning to analyze their products’ full life-cycle energy usage, but within two years enterprises will be able to use the information to inform purchasing decisions, Gartner predicts.

* By 2011, large global enterprises will require suppliers to prove their “green credentials” via an audited process. Already, “Timberland has launched a “Green Index” environmental rating for its shoes and boots [and] Home Depot is working on evaluation and audit criteria for assessing supplier submissions for its new EcoOptions product line.”

* By 2010, the preferences of users will dictate as many as half of the purchasing decisions made by IT. Because Internet browsers have made computing more approachable, “IT organizations are addressing user concerns through planning for a global class of computing that incorporates user decisions in risk analysis and innovation of business strategy,” Gartner says.






* 3-D printers will spread through homes and businesses. This emerging “technology lets users send a file of a 3-D design to a printer-like device that will carve the design out of a block of resin,” Gartner says. “A manufacturer can make scale models of new product designs without the expense of model makers. Or consumers can have models of the avatars they use online.”
These printers will be available for less than $10,000 this year, a hefty sum, but Gartner predicts that by 2011 the number of 3-D printers in homes and businesses will be 100 times greater than it was in 2006.

Garmin's Ready to Rumble With New 'iPhone Killer'

Source: TechNewsWorld

Garmin had no choice but to announce the Nuvifone, said Julien Blin, a research analyst in the wireless and mobile communications group at IDC. "There's been a lot of competition in the U.S., especially from TomTom, and they're afraid of losin.

If you think the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone is cool, wait till you see the Nuvifone that Garmin (Nasdaq: GRMN) announced last January 08 in New York.

It combines GPS (Global Positioning System), mobile phone, still and video camera, and MP3 and video player functionality with Internet access capability.

Or it will, anyway, if Garmin can stick to its announced launch schedule and deliver Nuvifone to the market by the third quarter of this year.

For the Lost Ones

Assume for the moment that the Nuvifone is available, so I can speak in the present tense.



The Nuvifone has a 3.5-inch screen with three primary icons -- "Call," "Search" and "View Map" -- all of which are self-explanatory. Wanna make a call? Tap the "Call" icon. And so on.

You can never get lost. The Nuvifone not only comes preloaded with maps of the U.S. or Europe or both, plus a built-in database with millions of points of interest -- think coffee houses, banks, ATMs, police stations and so on -- but also remembers where you last parked the car before you took it out of the dashboard mount and walked off with it.

If you miss a turn while driving, it recalculates your route and utters little voice prompts as you drive along, giving you turn-by-turn directions. Makes me long to have my mother-in-law in the back seat once more.

If you've lost your bearings, touch the screen and your exact latitude and longitude coordinates will be immediately displayed, together with the nearest street address and intersection, and the closest hospitals, police stations and gas stations.



More Functions

The Nuvifone includes Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) local search capability; responses to a search are sorted based on your current location and relevance, and are accompanied by Web-based ratings.

It also has a Web browser that you operate using the touchscreen, and e-mail , text and instant-messaging capabilities.

When you dock the Nuvifone on the vehicle mount, it automatically turns on the GPS, activates the navigation menu and enables hands-free calling.

Users get access to Garmin Online, a proprietary service offering constantly updated news, and real-time information on traffic, fuel and stock prices, sports scores, local events and weather forecasts.



For the Traveler

The Nuvifone has a still camera and video camera built-in. When you take a photo, it automatically gets tagged with the exact latitude and longitude of the location where you snapped the shot.

You can save the image or e-mail it to someone else; either way, the coordinates will let you return to the exact spot where you took the photo.

You also get access to millions of geo-located photographs of scenery and landmarks on Google's Panoramic picture-sharing suite.

What's travel without music? You get a built-in media player with MP3 and MPEG4/AAC capabilities in the Nuvifone.

Technical Stuff

The Nuvifone uses Garmin's proprietary operating system.

It supports HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), also known as "3.5G," which promises download speeds on a mobile phone of up to 8-10 Mbps.

It has Quad-band GSM (global system for mobile communications), which means it supports all four major GSM frequency bands, so you can roam in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The Nuvifone also has WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, as well as UMTS, or universal mobile telecommunications service -- a 3G broadband, packet-based technology based on the GSM standard, which transmits text, digitized voice, video and multimedia at up to 2 Mbps.

Due Dates

The Nuvifone is slated for release in the third quarter of 2008.

Pricing and information about sales partners will be announced later on.

New? What's new?

Mobile phones with GSM capabilities and Quad-band GSM have been available for quite awhile.

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless has the VZ Navigator service, which offers audible turn-by-turn directions to nearly 14 million points of interest in the U.S., including landmarks, restaurants and ATMs.

Sound naggingly familiar?

Price: US$9.99 for monthly access; $2.99 per day, good for 24 hours.

VZ Navigator is available on cell phones as well as BlackBerry devices.

Helio earlier this month introduced a slider phone called "Mysto," based on the Samsung U600, which will offer free GPS capability with Google Maps integration. The Mysto will be priced at $150; for another $3 monthly, users can get Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Tellme service, which lets them search for local information through voice input.

As for Quad-band GSM, two of the many phones out there with this capability include the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) MotoRizr Z3 and Nokia's (NYSE: NOK) N81 8GB Quad Band GSM slider cell phone.

Follow the Money

Garmin had no choice but to announce the Nuvifone, Julien Blin, a research analyst in the wireless and mobile communications group at IDC, told TechNewsWorld.

"There's been a lot of competition in the U.S., especially from TomTom (another GPS device maker), and they're afraid of losing market share," Blin said. "Garmin's stock went down -- and, not surprisingly, it went up again yesterday after the announcement, because people wanted to know what they're going to do to fight back."

On January 22, Morgan Stanley was "somewhat positive" on Garmin, according to the blog Seeking Alpha, after data showed it increased its U.S. market share from 29 percent in November 2007 to 42 percent in December. The data "should help to alleviate some near-term investor concerns about Garmin's U.S. market share," Morgan Stanley reportedly said.

In the main, Garmin's regaining of market share in December was likely due to spot shortages at TomTom, according to the blog post.

Competition Heats Up

While the Nuvifone is known right now as the "iPhone-killer," the shoe may be on the other foot soon enough.

"Maybe by the third quarter, Apple will come up with a 3G iPhone," Blin said. "Also, the iPhone will have a WiFi location-based feature using Skyhook Wireless, which means Garmin will have to add some new features."

Garmin may seek to do this through acquisitions, Blin said.

Meanwhile, there are rumors afoot that Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) and Google may be partnering on a new GSM phone based on the Android platform with advanced capabilities to rival the iPhone.

That's why Dell hired away Ron Garriques, Motorola's head of handsets, a Mobile Mentalism blog post suggests.

The Android Factor

The rumored Dell/Google phone will use the Android open platform. Google is expected to announce the phone either at the 3GSM Mobile World Congress, which will be held in Barcelona, Spain February 11-14, or in the third quarter of this year, Blin said, "to go head to head with Garmin."

Android was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, an alliance of more than 30 leading technology and mobile companies.

It is a fully integrated mobile software stack consisting of an operating system, middleware, a user-friendly interface and applications.

The first phones based on Android should be out by the second half of this year, the Alliance said.

Pricing and Other Factors

All this activity is likely to precipitate a price war, Blin predicted, which will be good for the consumer.

Apple might cut the iPhone retail price to $50, he said, adding that it "will be important for Garmin to come up with the right price."

AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile will likely pick up the Nuvifone "because they both use GSM," added Blin.

So, is the Nuvifone ever going to surface, or is it a ploy by Garmin to stay afloat? Chances are, it's for real. The big questions now are, can Garmin deliver on time, and can it make the Nuvifone affordable?