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Ramco Systems names R Shankar as EVP for India
| DQC News Bureau |

Ramco Systems Limited, a software company focused on consulting, products, and managed services, has appointed R Shankar as EVP, India, Middle-East and Africa. Until now, Shankar was heading the Middle-East and Africa operations of the company. Shankar is a senior management professional who has been with Ramco Systems for 16 years. He has been handling a variety of leadership roles in sales, marketing, alliances and global customer support.
A widely-traveled professional with an international outlook, including a four-year stint in the US operations of Ramco, Shankar has strong leadership skills and is a respected speaker. He possesses exceptional planning, organizing, team-building and communication skills. Shankar will replace S Sunderaraj, Senior VP, Ramco Systems. Sunderaraj, who has been with Ramco for more than four years, has decided to move on to pursue his career with a start-up organization.

EMC India appoints Head of Global Services
| DQC News Bureau |

EMC India has appointed Sumant Pal as Head of Global Services for India. In this new role, Sumant will be spearheading and driving the opportunity for Global Services to establish its strategic direction for customer implementations, and identify new capabilities and opportunities for EMC's Global Services operations. He will work closely with Manoj Chugh, President-India and SAARC, EMC.
Commenting on the appointment, Chugh said, “EMC truly understands the unique and great challenges CIOs will face with information management, especially with digital information exploding 45-fold by 2020 globally. Our Global Services business is designed to help customers leverage EMC's deep and rich consulting expertise in information infrastructure management, and we are extremely pleased to have Sumant, one of EMC's top leaders in the Asia Pacific and Japan region, lead this critical role.” Pal has been with EMC for over 10 years, where he has made significant contributions at various senior roles in product sales, channels, alliances, pre-sales, consulting sales and services practice leadership.
Prior to this, Pal worked in the US for 20 years which included assignments in Europe, transitioning the Accenture consulting practices to EMC.
EMC's Global Services forms a key part of the company's India operations and plays a pivotal role in EMC Corporation's global market strategy.

Industry

ZyXEL announces the world's first carbon footprint verification on its VDSL2 CPE
| DQC News Bureau |

ZyXEL Communications, broadband access solutions provider, announced that according to the International Carbon Footprint Standard PAS2050, a carbon footprint verification on ZyXEL's VDSL2 CPE, P874, has been achieved and certified. It is not only a critical milestone for carbon footprint management of networking products, but it also gives international recognition and demonstrates ZyXEL's efforts concerning environmental care. The ZyXEL VDSL2 device which supports Chunghwa Telecom's networking deployment also signifies that ZyXEL's carbon footprint verified product is recognized by a leading telco operator.
“We are proud that ZyXEL's product has complied with international carbon footprint standards and that ZyXEL has become the first company in the world, to complete this verification on VDSL2 CPE. We always take the lead in developing innovative and eco-friendly products and features. ZyXEL products not only offer energy efficiency and outstanding performance, but also meet global environmental standards,” said Shun-I Chu, CEO, ZyXEL. The carbon footprint of ZyXEL's VDSL2 CPE refers to the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions, including each stage of the product's lifecycle from raw material, manufacturing, delivering, consumer usage, discarding, and then to recycling. ZyXEL has developed a complete 'Coordinated Information System' that makes carbon emission investigation and management highly practical and remarkably efficient. Through use of the 'Coordinated Information System,' 'Green Product Database,' 'Life Cycle Analysis System,' '3R and Disassembly Report Database' and 'Restriction of Hazardous Substances Management System,' ZyXEL aggressively controls its environmental impact, for the entire lifecycle, of all its products, by continuing and strengthening its commitment and responsibility as a corporate citizen by developing less toxic, waste-reducing, easily recyclable and energy-efficient products.
ZyXEL is dedicated in developing low carbon footprint products with its R&D capabilities. ZyXEL's green product features include power usage adjustment, wireless scheduling, wake on demand, smart fan control and intelligent power over Ethernet, that help consumers to reduce the overall amount of carbon emission when they use their electronic products. While not only complying with the EU directives, ZyXEL also compels its suppliers and itself to meet international customers' environmental-friendly requests. As a responsible global corporate citizen, ZyXEL will be aggressively seeking innovative 'green ways' to develop its products and technologies for a better environment in the future.

McAfee's 'Security Connected' initiative
| DQC News Bureau |

McAfee has recently unveiled its 'Security Connected' initiative, enabling partners, developers and customers to apply a more intelligent, effective and sustainable approach to securing digital information. As part of this initiative, McAfee is announcing the first two of four new connected security platforms, McAfee Endpoint Security 9 and McAfee Security Management 5. With threats sharply on the rise in both quantity and complexity, an uncertain economic environment, and an insatiable desire to deploy new, more competitive computing models, IT organizations can no longer sustain the traditional model of tacking on new security products for every new threat. By connecting mobile with endpoint security, network security, content security, and the cloud, McAfee is coordinating security defenses to enable businesses to be more agile. McAfee offers organizations correlated and comprehensive intelligence, which in turn dramatically reduces risk, enhances their security posture, helps meet compliance regulations, and drives up operational efficiencies.
Security too often is being driven from different silos within businesses. From mobile devices, PCs, and tablets, to mission-critical networks, servers, hosted applications, cloud services, virtual machines, and databases-bring dozens or hundreds of different security technologies and disparate management paradigms with them. More often than not, there is no correlation or integration making security very expensive, inflexible and ineffective to manage and maintain. Today, businesses need integrated intelligent security that provides a global view of threats, vulnerabilities, and the countermeasures to address them. Businesses are moving from securing components to understanding and measuring the security of business as a whole. “The IT landscape is rapidly changing,” said Chris Christiansen, VP-Security Products and Services, IDC. “Virtualization of servers and endpoints, shifting of data and services to the cloud, and the consumerization of IT is creating new holes in the previously protected systems and networks. This is a fundamental shift from even just a few years ago when the bifurcation points between business and personal, outside and inside, and us and them was more visible,” he said.
Enabling Businesses Through Security-By taking a connected approach, McAfee is moving security from a perceived business inhibitor to a true business enabler. “Applying Security Connected principles and vision, IT professionals can more confidently say 'yes' to new applications and approaches. Disjointed point products simply do not work for today's businesses,” said George Kurtz, CTO, McAfee. “Security is now mission-critical and strategic to business. It needs to be connected and correlated, with shared intelligence, and centrally managed. Products still need to be best-of-breed, without trading off quality, and IT needs to be empowered to say 'yes' to data and applications, at any time, on any device, from any
location,” he said.

Microsoft launches free anti-virus for SMBs
| Prasoon Srivastava |

Microsoft India has extended its anti-virus solution, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), for SMBs at no additional cost, on any Microsoft Windows platform. “Till date, MSE was being used by home users. For the first time, we have extended MSE for small and medium businesses up to 10 personal computers. SMBs will not have to pay any additional cost if they are using genuine Microsoft Windows on their PC,” said Pankaj Ukey, Windows Client BG Lead, Microsoft India.
Ukey mentioned that installing MSE on an additional PC by an SMB will be in violation of license condition on which this extension is being made. Microsoft announced this launch in partnership with HP. HP's Envy series notebooks will come with readily installed MSE on them. Users of any other PC or notebook with Windows installed on them will have to download the solution from the Microsoft website. “We have been involved with Microsoft since long. Our home users have been using MSE since the last one-year. Based on our experience and observation, we asked Microsoft to take this partnership further to SMBs. By offering MSE through Envy series we have taken care of the security concerns that are with SMBs. Many people are not aware of security solutions and its use. With this offering we have given them a secure solution,” said Ketan Patel, Country Category Head-Mobility Business Unit, Personal Systems Group, HP. Patel mentioned that in a month's time, HP has run out of stock for its Envy series. “We sold over 3,000 notebooks in a month's time and the demand is huge,” he added. Microsoft will also need to work upon security alerts in local and simple languages as most of SMBs are in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, where communication in regional language is preferred. “We do not develop security solutions ourselves but we do it through our partners. There is a need to come up with security alerts in vernacular and simple language for SMBs. We have taken this up with our partners and hope to see some solution soon,” said Patel.

Products

EMC intros 'Big Data' computing system
| DQC News Bureau |

EMC introduced the new EMC Greenplum data computing appliance, an integrated data warehouse system, using the breakthrough Greenplum massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. It enables organizations to more efficiently make sense of the massive amounts of data they generate from various sources such as always-on networks, Web, consumers, surveillance systems and sensors.
The system was developed and shipped just 75 days following EMC's acquisition of Greenplum and comes at a time when IDC predicts that the amount of data over the next decade will grow 44-fold. The disruptive data warehousing technology from Greenplum is a key enabler of 'Big Data' clouds and self-service analytics, allowing organizations to store, manage and closely analyze terabytes of detailed data for faster business insight, conclusions and revelations. Greenplum is the foundation of EMC's new Data Computing Products Division, which is developing the analytic tools to address the 'Big Data' phenomenon. “As an early Greenplum customer, we are impressed with EMC's integration and expansion of the Greenplum product line,” said Steve Hirsch, Chief Data Officer and Senior VP-Global Data Services, NYSE Euronext. “The new appliance gives us greater flexibility in how we approach our ever-growing needs to apply sophisticated analytics to big data,” added Hirsch.
The new EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is built using Greenplum Database 4.0. Its innovative, parallel-everything architecture delivers data loading performance of 10 terabytes (TB) an hour. “The amount of data that businesses have at their disposal is greater than ever before and new tools are required to gain business insight from it,” said Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman, EMC. As a purpose-built, parallel system, the EMC Greenplum data computing appliance offers up to 3x more scalability and up to 4x as many database cores than competitive systems for a good price/performance ratio. It is available in flexible half-rack, full-rack, and multiple-rack appliance configurations for terabyte to petabyte-scale requirements. It is integrated with EMC's replication, backup and recovery for information protection. “EMC and Greenplum represent a natural and powerful combination,” said Scott McNealy, Executive Advisor-Data Computing Products Division, EMC. “EMC is a major infrastructure player with data large and small, casual and critical, all over the world. Greenplum offers next-generation data analytics technology allowing customers to monetize this data. That's what the big data era is about,” added McNealy.

WatchGuard gets virtual on security
| DQC News Bureau |

WatchGuard Technologies has released a virtualized version of the WatchGuard Quarantine Management Server. Used in conjunction with WatchGuard XCS content security appliances, the WatchGuard QMS Virtual Edition is an automated, intelligent and easy-to-use e-mail quarantine solution that allows electronic messages that contain unwanted content, such as spam, phishing attempts, viruses, malware or other messages to be directed and stored on a dedicated virtual quarantine appliance. By having a secure holding area for suspect messages, administrators gain greater management and control over corporate e-mail, as well as an additional defense-in-depth layer of protection against e-mail vectored threats. “E-mail continues to be a significant threat vector for most businesses around the world, and management of quarantined messages is critical to balancing security with productivity,” said Mohit Puri, Country Manager-India and SAARC, WatchGuard Technologies. “By using the WatchGuard QMS Virtual Edition, customers can control their quarantined e-mail while further improving their network, data and application protection. Because it is free, total cost of ownership is dramatically improved,” he further added.