Quit Playing Hide-and-Seek...

By Mark Hall

February 6, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - ...with corporate data. "Search technology is critical to overall business and should be part of an IT infrastructure, just like databases," says John Felahi, vice president of product management at Fast Search & Transfer ASA in Oslo. The company's Fast Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) software indexes information that's stored in multiple languages and in numerous operating environments and data formats. Felahi says Version 5, due this week, adds support for Documentum and Micro-soft SharePoint files and has improved context-search capabilities. "For example," he says, "it knows 'the' in 'The Who' is part of the name." Most search engines, he claims, will drop the 'the' and botch the search. The Fast ESP upgrade also adds the ability to search through videos and Web services applications. Pricing starts at about $120,000.


Jim Dondero, vice president of marketing at Current Communications Group LLC

Broadband services via power lines...
...could spark new IT initiatives. Although consumers will be the most obvious beneficiaries of the nascent market for broadband over power lines (BPL), "CIOs will get advantages, too," says Jim Dondero, vice president of marketing at Current Communications Group LLC in Germantown, Md. Dondero claims that branch offices and home-based workers served by BPL technology will get faster upload and download performance than cable- modem users do. Later this year, for example, Current Communications will offer a two-way, 5MB/sec. BPL service. That will make videoconferencing viable for remote users, Dondero says. He adds that BPL deployments will be attractive to utilities because of the technology's expected benefits, such as its ability to help determine the health of power lines.
Wade Malcolm, vice president of power and delivery markets at the Electric Power Research Institute Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., agrees that BPL could be used to predict, detect and manage power outages. But, he cautions, the tools being deployed now "are in their relative infancy." In addition, the views of BPL's value among utilities "are quite diverse," he says. One adopter is TXU Electric Delivery, a subsidiary of Dallas-based TXU Corp. that is beginning a 10-year deal with Current Communications to offer BPL services to its 2 million customers. Dondero hopes that will set off light bulbs over the heads of other utility executives.


Dennis Szerszen, vice president of marketing and corporate development at SecureWave SA

Restrict your servers to running...
...approved apps only. Next week, SecureWave SA in Luxembourg will release its Sanctuary Application Control Server software, which limits the applications that can execute on your Windows servers to a white list of approved programs. "It

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