Weekly Intelligence Digest – March 9, 2015

Significant Developments for Week of 3/9/15

1. Akamai Addresses DNS Growth with Xerocole Acquisition

Akamai Technologies announces their acquisition of Xerocole, a recurrent DNS company. With Xerocole, Akamai hopes to accelerate DNS platform growth. The acquisition of Xerocole also promises to boost speed, security, and customizable DNS preferences and settings. Akamai expects to experience an increase in performance, as a quick and reliable DNS system with superior caching will provide a widespread benefit.

BID Insight: Akamai has a history of acquiring companies with disruptive technology, and the latest Xerocole acquisition underscores their drive to lead the industry. Akamai also chose to print in its press releases that the acquisition was purchased in cash. Akamai may be flexing its market muscles in preparation for future purchases.

2. Zscaler Scales Up Global Position with New CFO Hire

Zscaler hires Sydney Carey as their new Chief Financial Officer. A graduate of the School of Economics at Stanford University, Sydney Carey has demonstrated her expertise in the corporate finance world and as a successful executive. Carey has led a number of public and private companies, serving as CFO of MongoDB, and as long-standing executive vice president and CFO of TIBCO.

BID Insight: Syndey Carey was recognized as Bay Area CFO of the Year in 2012, and serves on the boards of both Proofpoint, and Bazaarvoice. TIBCO, the company for which she served as CFO and executive vice president, is a $3 billion software infrastructure company. Syndey’s financial and executive experience can aid Zscaler as they attempt to expand worldwide in the upcoming years. Syndey will be responsible for the company’s global financial operations.

3. Comcast Increases Options in New England Region

Comcast Business expands their fiber optic network to provide a multi-gigabit Ethernet solution for government organizations, businesses, hospitals, and schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. The three specific communities benefiting from these services are Claremont, NH, Windsor, VT, and West Windsor, VT. Comcast offers four different types of multi-gigabit packages, including Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet Virtual Private Line, Ethernet Network Service, and Ethernet Dedicated Internet.

BID Insight: This New England expansion is a prime example of Comcast’s attempts to improve the availability of its Ethernet services to provide a better quality of service, and to nurture growth and economic development. The multi-gigabit Ethernet services are deployed over Comcast’s network, which spans 140k miles across 39 states, resulting in excellent bandwidth and scaling capabilities. The fiber optic component represents a progressive move by Comcast, as it is similar in structure to the GPON technology and promotes Green IT.

4. Fastly Announces TSL/SSL Vulnerability, Exposes FREAK Attacks

Fastly draws attention to a new TSL/SSL vulnerability, described as a Factoring Attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys, or FREAK. Thanks to it’s advanced security stance, Fastly’s customers are in no danger of feeling the effects of this vulnerability. FREAK relies on export-grade ciphers for encryption – an outdated feature that Fastly removed from their configuration for at least four years ago. However, because Internet users are sluggish when removing outdated features and services from their infrastructure, the vulnerability still poses a threat to a number of non-Fastly users.

BID Insight: Fastly makes a great object lesson with this newly discovered vulnerability, highlighting the fact that their users are not going to be affected. As long as the client uses Fastly as their CDN, they can consider themselves invulnerable to FREAK. Fastly also explains why FREAK can be so potentially dangerous, as it is capable of intercepting signals at the middle point in order to trick servers into using export-grade ciphers, even if the client asked for cryptographically secure ciphers.

5. Ericsson Expands in Europe with Orange

Ericsson has been busy the last week, announcing two new partnerships. The first is a partnership with Orange operations to maintain and manage operations across five European countries: Belgium, Spain, Moldova, Romania, and Slovakia. This partnership contracted a 5-year agreement, which supports over 30 million customers throughout Europe.

BID Insight: Ericsson’s partnership with Orange makes Ericsson responsible for performance, network operations, optimization, expansion, support, and management of Orange’s fixed-line access, and 2-4G access. Through Ericsson, Orange will provide better overall performance while reducing operating costs. The agreement also solidifies the continuation of a long-term partnership between Ericsson and Orange.

6. Ericsson and ABB Pursue Automation Strategies

Ericsson’s rounds out the week with their ABB partnership. Ericsson hopes to use ABB’s technology to revolutionize data center infrastructure and architecture. The alliance will integrate ABB Decathlon DCIM and the Ericsson Cloud System. Data centers will gain the ability to automate a number of different IT management systems, including everything from hardware to cooling.

BID Insight: Ericsson’s data center integration with ABB will develop a few key benefits, including end-to-end visibility of all equipment and facility operations, and energy, maintenance, and cost savings for customers. Additionally, customers will experience improved reliability and performance. According to Ericsson, ABB is the only company in existence providing the scale of control and automation for data center operations.

7. KeyCDN Releases Logentries Community Pack

KeyCDN announces the arrival of Logentries Community Pack, providing real time analytics and logs to customers. The pack includes dashboards, alerts, and widgets, specifically designed for KeyCDN customers who are seeking more comprehensive data for their platform. Some of the capabilities the Logentries Community Pack enables are geolocation tags, status codes, and size related variables.

BID Insight: Many CDNs already offer some of these capabilities to their customers, however, but for KeyCDN this is a necessary step in the right direction. Alerts sent from the Logentries Community Pack allow customers to monitor traffic proactively in real-time, fix broken links immediately, and better analyze customer profiles and location.

8. Proofpoint Strengthens Security with Emerging Threats Acquisition

Proofpoint acquires Emerging Threats for approximately $40 million in cash and stock. Proofpoint plans to integrate Emerging Threats’ advanced threat intelligence software with its Targeted Attack Protection and Threat Response security platforms. Emerging Threats provides Proofpoint with an automated collection and analysis system, along with a team of threat researchers trained to detect, block, and mitigate cyber attacks.

BID Insight: The acquisition of Emerging Threats by Proofpoint should strengthen Proofpoint’s security platform, allowing for improved identification and response capabilities, and improved malware handling. The integration enables Proofpoint to collect millions of malware samples per day, resulting in deeper insight into malware distribution and C&C infrastructure.

9. Proofpoint Expands Social Media Security with Nexgate

Proofpoint also releases their Nexgate Social Threat Center, which collects and manages security intelligence across social accounts. Proofpoint leverages five different patent-pending social media technologies, and support from the largest social media security database.

BID Insight: With Nexgate Social Threat Center, Proofpoint dedicates an entire security center to monitoring threats occurring throughout social accounts, an unprecedented step in the security industry. Social media leaves a large footprint of data trails, likely to attract a number of security threats and attacks. The center will identify a range of social media threats, and also measure and monitor the effectiveness of preexisting security policies.

10. FireEye Protects Mobile Devices with SamsungKnox

FireEye Inc., announces the integration of FireEye Mobile Threat Prevention with SamsungKNOX-enabled devices. The software features include detection, risk status, analysis, bot detection, as well as user notification of potential malware activity. The new integration allows Samsung’s secure APIs to run the app on Samsung devices, ensuring that the application is free from risk.

BID Insight: It is clear that FireEye is on top of their security game, launching an integration with a mobile device provider to detect and analyze mobile security threats. This puts FireEye at the forefront of the emerging mobile security sector. FireEye will hold demonstrations of the tech at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona.

11. Neustar Launches Lead Decisioning Tool

Neustar announces the launch of its Lead Decisioning tool, the latest addition to their Lead Intelligence platform, at the LeadsCon Performance Marketing Conference. Neustar uses rule-based operational intelligence and automation in order to aid businesses in lead management. Customers already using this platform benefit from tools like Neustar’s data analysis, suggested media spend, and lead provisioning.

BID Insight: Along with the new addition of the Lead Decisioning tool to the Lead Intelligence Platform, Neustar is also providing businesses with real time data and analytics, API identification technology, and a filtering score that highlights prospective buyers. The Lead Intelligence platform can be an useful tool to businesses that are looking to spot trends and acquire new customers, with less hassle and better operational intelligence.

12. Highwinds Releases Revved Up StrikeTracker

Highwinds releases a new update to their CDN management control panel, StrikeTracker. Highwinds has completely rebuilt this console to provide a higher level of performance and scalability. StrikeTracker comes outfitted with RESTful API integration, revamped analytics, traffic analysis and a modern CDN feature set.

BID Insight: Highwinds latest console represents a step towards a more mobile future, developed in HTML 5 with full mobile and tablet support. StrikeTracker has long been a trusted platform for performance analytics, and the latest update should help users optimize their data strategy.