In a presentation to analysts, customers, and the press at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last week, Oracle president Charles Phillips unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g which is intended to help customers maximize business agility and productivity by providing an integrated approach to IT management. "It's about finally trying to get control of this complex thing called IT — trying to manage the entire stack in a way that is different that is different than we have in the past. We are just now getting to the point in the evolution of the industry and in Oracle's strategy where that is now possible," Phillips said.

Leading storage vendors have recently added support for Symantec's industry standard Thin Reclamation AP, Symantec announced. The Symantec Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin-provisioning storage arrays, and is now supported by Symantec partners Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP and NetApp, in addition to previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM.

Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of Web management solutions, announced it is shipping a new line of management software to enhance the management and security of cloud environments. Layer 7's new CloudSpan family of products include three products intended to help address critical connectivity, security and delivery needs of both consumers and providers of cloud services.

dataguise, a provider of security solutions for protecting sensitive data across the enterprise, yesterday announced a 14-day fully functional software trial version of its dgdiscover database security solution for Microsoft SQL Server and MS Access environments.

As you work to protect your data in this day-and-age of data breaches and regulatory compliance, technology and software solutions to data and database security spring to the top of most people's minds. This is to be expected because, after all, most of our data is stored on computers so technology and software are required to protect the data from unauthorized access. This is a good thing: Technology is a crucial component of protecting your valuable business data. But it is not the only thing.

It's hard enough to lock down sensitive data when you know exactly which server the database is running on, but what will you do when you deploy virtualization and these systems are constantly moving? And making sure your own database administrators (DBAs) and system administrators aren't copying or viewing confidential records is already a challenge - how are you going to know when your cloud computing vendor's staff members are not using their privileges inappropriately? These are just two of the obstacles that any enterprise must overcome in order to deploy a secure database platform in a virtual environment, or in the cloud. In some cases, these concerns have been preventing organizations from moving to virtualization or cloud computing.

COLLABORATE 10 will at long last bring together Sun and Oracle users for the first time under one roof. Ian Abramson, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, talks with DBTA about what the group is planning for the April conference in Las Vegas, and how the integration of customers and technology is being handled by Oracle and the IOUG.

SOA Software, an SOA and cloud services governance provider, is delivering a toolset that includes advanced policy and security federation for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and cloud services. The new product, Policy Manager 6.0, is intended to enable the right level of control over distributed, heterogeneous systems and platforms, the vendor says.

Terracotta, a provider of Java application scalability solutions, and EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-class products and services based on the PostgreSQL open source database, announced they are teaming up to jointly address the complex technical challenges of scaling the data layer in private clouds.

HiT Software, Inc., a provider of data integration, replication and transformation products, has announced that the newest version of DBMoto, its change data capture (CDC) and data replication solution, has been expanded to include multi-server synchronization. In addition, the release also offers a dynamic, configurable GUI (graphical user interface), and provides updates for remote administration and advanced security options, as well as additional database support. DBMoto 7 will be released in the second quarter of 2010.

As businesses worldwide embrace netbooks as a way to bridge the gap between low price and high performance in information technology, IBM, Canonical, and Simmtronics have announced that Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, is available to emerging markets at a low price of $190. With initial availability in emerging markets such as South Africa, the Simmbook is preloaded with IBM Client for Smart Work, which includes IBM Lotus Symphony, access to IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, and choice of adding other IBM Lotus collaboration software like Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime.

Embarcadero Technologies has introduced DBArtisan XE, the newest addition to the DBArtisan family of heterogeneous database administration tools. With support for multiple database platforms "out of the box," DBArtisan XE enables database administrators (DBAs) to maximize the performance, availability and security of all major database management systems, including Oracle and MySQL, as well as SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase from a single interface.

Lieberman Software Corporation, a provider of privileged identity management and security management solutions, has announced enhancements to its account password management solution, Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM). ERPM now delivers fine-grained management features to protect every asset in the cloud infrastructure - including physical and virtual computers and network appliances, hypervisors, databases, middleware, and line-of-business applications. With this version of ERPM, cloud service providers can assure both customers and IT auditors that privileged access to sensitive data is continuously monitored and secured.

Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance solutions for the enterprise, has announced an update for its products, AppDetectivePro for auditors and IT advisors, and DbProtect for the enterprise, in response to the Massachusetts Data Privacy Law 201 CMR 17 effective March 1, 2010.

SymSoft Corporation, a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions for SAP environments, has announced the release of ControlPanelGRC User and Role Change Analyzer. The new module, which is part of SymSoft's ControlPanelGRC suite of GRC solutions, provides security administrators with the ability to create additional documentation on the reasons changes were made on users and provide versioning of roles in SAP systems.

Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group, presented a keynote address that examined key issues that users should think about when considering adoption of open source solutions. The talk was titled "Asking the Hard Questions About Open Source Software."

Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group, presented a keynote address that examined key issues that users should think about when considering adoption of open source solutions.

Oracle has unveiled Oracle Imaging and Process Management 11g and Oracle Forms Recognition. Both products are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and are part of Oracle's strategic solution for Enterprise Application Documents.

IBM announced a data deduplication solution for z/OS mainframe environments. The System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z combines IBM's virtual tape library (VTL) technology with its HyperFactor inline data deduplication software.

For many organizations, application information lifecycle management, or ILM, now offers expedient - and badly needed - measures for properly defining, managing, and storing data. Many enterprises are being stymied by a massive proliferation of data in their databases and applications. Growing volumes of transaction data are being digitally captured and stored, along with unstructured forms of data files such as email, video, and graphics. Adding to this tsunami are multiple copies of all this data being stored throughout organizations. At the same time, increasingly tight mandates and regulations put the onus on organizations to maintain this data and keep it available for years to come. Much of this data still resides on legacy systems, which are costly to operate and maintain.

Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced Repscan version 3.0, a major new release of its database vulnerability assessment and security scanning software. Version 3.0 incorporates new and improved features that allow users to more easily navigate, identify and interpret critical data within an enterprise. Among new product features is a graphical user interface, which has been redesigned to allow even security experts with limited database knowledge to run and interpret results. The whole user interface was redesigned from ground up to be more approachable by someone who was not necessarily a database expert, Andy Feit, vice president of marketing for Sentrigo, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Zmanda, a provider of open source and cloud-based backup solutions, has announced a product that enables Tivoli administrators to incorporate backups of MySQL databases as part of an enterprise-wide backup and disaster recovery strategy. The solution, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Option for Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, enables MySQL users to manage their data protection policies through Tivoli.

Confio Software today announced availability of Ignite 8, a major expansion of its database performance solution. Ignite 8 expands the Ignite for SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and Sybase products to include comprehensive performance monitoring in combination with the response-time analysis for which Ignite has been known.

Sybase, Inc. recently reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2009. "2009 was obviously a great year of major accomplishment for Sybase," stated John Chen, chairman, CEO and president, during the Q4 earnings call. "We are very pleased that we delivered consistent financial performance throughout the year," which culminated in "the best quarter of the company history in Q4 and a third consecutive year of record revenue, earnings, as well as cash flow." For the full year, he noted, revenue came in at $1.17 billion, the highest ever, and above the company's outlook as it entered into 2009, 12 months ago.

Rocket Software is planning a complimentary webcast series focused on the latest release of RocketU2 SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture (SB/XA). SB/XA is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) and deployment environment delivering up-to-the-minute interface design and portable reporting capabilities. Existing SB+ applications can automatically convert without requiring changes to the underlying code.

Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced Repscan version 3.0, a major new release of its database vulnerability assessment and security scanning software.

Sybase has announced that its Sybase IQ column-based analytics server, in collaboration with solutions from HP and Red Hat, achieved the top data warehousing benchmark result among currently published non-clustered Linux and x86 systems in the TPC-H benchmark at the 1 TB scale factor.

CA says it has extended two of its web access security products to include support for JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployments. CA SiteMinder and CA SOA Security Manager now offer secure access management for Web applications and services deployed on JBoss Enterprise Middleware, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Cloud computing emerged as a key technology trend in 2009. While concerns about economic payback and data protection may be holding organizations back, Unisys predicts that in 2010 previously reluctant users will clearly see the potential the cloud represents and start making the move to take advantage of it. 5 Minute Briefing recently chatted with Brian Ott, vice president of Unisys' worldwide cloud program, about what the company sees ahead this year in terms of the enterprise embrace of cloud computing and the cloud trends Unisys expects to dominate 2010.