Gartner releases Magic Quadrant for UC 2014
Microsoft and Cisco maintained their lead in this year’s Unified Communications Magic Quadrant while Avaya and Mitel – thanks largely to its Astra acquisition – rounded out the Leader’s quad. The annual vendor ranking report focuses on on-prem UC equipment while a separate report addresses cloud-based UC offerings. There is an analysis of each vendor’s offerings and their relevance to the market. While Gartner is primarily focussed on enterprise deployments, the report has some significance for the channel as several of these organizations, including all the leaders along with ShorTel and NEC, have strong channel programs and SMB presence.
- Leaders: Microsoft, Cisco, Mitel (from Visionaries in 2013), Avaya.
- Visionaries: Unify (from Leaders in 2013), IBM (from Challengers in 2013)
- Challengers: NEC, Alcatel-Lucent
- Niche Players: ShoreTel, Interactive Intelligence, Huawei (from Challengers in 2013)
Symantec narrows the field, plans September CEO announcement
During its Q1 earnings call Mountain View, Calif.-based Symantec told Wall Street analysts its search for a new CEO is almost over and the company plans to make an announcement in September. Michael Brown, who has been serving as interim CEO since Steve Bennett was dismissed, said the search committee “has met with a number of highly qualified candidates” and is now down to the final vetting process. As for fiscal performance, earnings were up 50 percent for the quarter, generating a quarterly profit of $236 million, beating analyst expectations.
Force 3 Names New CEO, Lays Stake In Federal Networking And Security
In other executive news, Crofton, Md.-based Force 3 announced Mike Greaney is going to be its new CEO. Mike Greaney, who is being promoted from his previous position as President of Force 3 Federal, says he wants to see the company, currently known as a federal VAR, to carve out a specific identity and specialization in networking and security. Going forward, Greaney says Force 3 will transition to delivering next gen networking with SDN and cloud. Along with networking, security is going to be critical, especially for the federal government clients that make up 95 percent of Force 3's customers.
BlackBerry turns corner?
According to an internal memo reported by Reuters, Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry has finished shedding staff and will even hire in certain departments as the company looks to make up ground in the mobility market. “We have completed the restructuring notification process, and the workforce reduction that began three years ago is now behind us,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in the memo. “More importantly, barring any unexpected downturns in the market, we will be adding headcount in certain areas such as product development, sales and customer service, beginning in modest numbers.” Over the past three years, Blackberry has laid off 60 percent of its workforce while its share of the smartphone market dropped from 19 percent in 2010 to less than one percent in the most recent quarter (as reported by IDC). Chen, who brought a reputation for turning around troubled companies to the job when he took over in November, assured employees in the memo that Blackberry will meet its goal of having positive cash flow by the end of the fiscal year.
Security researcher cautions AWS customers
Organizations using Amazon Web Services customers should pay careful attention to the security architecture they use, warns Andres Riancho. An application security expert who leads the development and maintenance of web application security scanning project w3af, Riancho warned attendees of the 2014 Black Hat USA Briefings that cloud security problems, including serious breaches, can come from system configuration weaknesses and common web application vulnerabilities. Making a simple configuration error opens an attack vector that can enable an attacker to control virtual instances and access critical resources stored at AWS or any cloud hosting service. Last year vulnerability management vendor Rapid7 conducted a study which discovered thousands of publicly visible files, including account credentials and sales records. “It is my impression that this is not Amazon’s fault that these issues exist,” Riancho said. “Most of the vulnerabilities this year are from misconfigurations or small things where the developers working on applications made mistakes.”