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Computerworld - ...inside your databases from seeing what's off-limits to them. Ashok Aggarwal, president of TeamSoft Technologies LLC in Santa Clara, Calif., argues that depending on LDAP-based systems or Active Directory to manage application access rights is an outmoded way to protect corporate data -- especially information that's stored in databases. "LDAP lets me into an application but does not protect individual data tables," Aggarwal says. TeamSoft's Arc Wall software intercepts users trying to access a data-base and approves their privileges to see data at the table, row and column level. It can limit what end users see based on corporate policies that can be defined by job classification or for each individual user. For example, Aggarwal notes that there's no reason for a company's help desk staffers to see the full account information of customers, including Social Security and credit card numbers, when they're simply solving IT problems. He claims that Arc Wall works with all relational databases. Coming in Q1 of next year is an upgrade that will enable Arc Wall to also restrict access to unstructured data, such as PDFs, Word documents and even mapping data in geographic information system files. Arc Wall comes as part of an appliance or as stand-alone software for Linux, Unix and Windows servers. Pricing starts at $15,000.
Build it faster. No, faster. Even...

Dave Haskins, executive vice president of development at Kinaxis Inc.

...faster than that! Product life cycles among manufacturers are becoming shorter. So much so, observes Dave Haskins, executive vice president of development at Kinaxis Inc. in Ottawa, that if ERP systems don't work in real time, they can restrict a company's ability to bring products to market in a timely fashion. Outsourcing compounds the problem, he says. Haskins claims that his company's RapidResponse demand management software provides a real-time view of your inventories and/or those of your suppliers, giving you an edge on knowing what can be built and when. With RapidResponse Version 8, due in mid-December, Kinaxis is shifting from a client/server Windows architecture to a Web services approach, using .Net on the back-end server and Java for clients. The new release also boosts performance, partly by increasing the amount of data that the software can crunch to 128GB, Hasking says.
IT auditors invade hosting firm...
...on an almost daily basis. That has been Rich Lee's experience since the compliance craze hit IT last year. Lee is CEO of Hosted Solutions LLC in Cary, N.C., and his three data centers support more than 300 corporate customers with either collocation or