Broadcom has plans to be a large technology infrastructure company. CA Technologies will bring recurring software revenue to the party.
By Larry Dignan for Between the Lines | July 11, 2018 -- 23:56 GMT (16:56 PDT) | Topic: Enterprise Software
According to Broadcom, CA Technologies will add recurring revenue, make it a larger enterprise player and ultimately a company focused on infrastructure technology.
CA has transformed from a mainframe software company to one focused on DevOps as well as security and building applications.
Broadcom is paying a 20 percent premium from CA's closing price Wednesday. CA shareholder will get $44.50 in cash for each share.
For Broadcom, best known for trying to recently acquire Qualcomm, the CA purchase is a pivot of sorts. Broadcom was mostly focused on data center gear and processors.
Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, said CA Technologies will be "an important building block" and the company can utilize a large base of new customers. CA CEO Mike Gregoire said the combination of software and Broadcom's semiconductor knowhow is appealing.
As for the financials, Broadcom said CA Technologies will be accretive to its non-GAAP earnings. The combined company has annual revenue of $23.9 billion with adjusted EBITDA of $11.6 billion.
The increasing trend toward BYOD -- bring your own device -- is causing companies to explore new approaches for solving support, management, and security challenges.
It's so different that IT departments are grasping for any standard or proven approaches that make bring your own device (BYOD) access of enterprise resources both secure and reliable. The task is dauntingly complex, and new and unforeseen consequences of BYOD are cropping up regularly -- from deluged help desk to app performance snafus to new forms of security breaches.
The next BriefingsDirect discussion then works to bring clarity to solving the BYOD support, management, and security dilemma. To do so, we gathered a panel to explore some of the new and more effective approaches for making BYOD both safe and controlled.
The panel consists of Jonathan Sander, director of IAM Product Strategy at Dell Software, and Jane Wasson, senior product marketing manager for Mobile Security at Dell Software. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
What we're seeing now that's a little bit different is increasingly those mobile workers like the ease of use and the speed at which they can get to their email and their calendar apps with their own mobile devices. They now want IT to extend that so that they can get the same access to enterprise apps and resources on mobile devices that they've enjoyed on their IT controlled laptops over the years.
That creates a new challenge for IT. All of a sudden, rather than having a controlled set of devices and a controlled environment that they can manage, they have a variety of devices that end users have purchased. IT had no control over that choice and what's already loaded on those devices.
They don't want their back-end networks infected with malware. They don't want to have rogue users finding laptops or mobile devices and being able to access enterprise systems. It's a huge challenge for IT support groups.
It seems that there are unintended consequences here. What's happening now that we have this pull in the BYOD direction?
Sander: There are a lot of consequences, and understanding all of them is still in process. That's part of the problem. All of the problems that people are going to have as a result of BYOD are TBD. One of the ones that's most apparent right away is security. The approaches that people have taken in the past to lock down anything that's related to mobile have all centered on exactly what Jane pointed out. They were in charge of the device in some fashion. They had a foot in that door, and they could use some kind of lock-down.
I was sitting with someone at one of the big financial firms in New York City the other day. We asked them about their BYOD strategy, and he took a humorous approach to it. He said, "Yes, we have a really well-defined BYOD strategy -- as long as the device is the one we assign to you and uses the software that we approved and control all the policy on, you can bring it." I think that that's not too uncommon.
A lot of the firms that are very security sensitive have worked it out. On the other end of the scale, I've talked to people who say that BYOD is not something that is they are doing, but rather is being inflicted on them. That's the language they put it in. It relates back to that security problem, because when they're looking at trying to understand how their data is going to be present on these devices and what impact that will have on their risk standpoint, it's almost impossible to quantify.
If you look at the history of breaches, even with the controlled laptops that they had, you had laptops being stolen with tons of data on them. You know what happens the first time you get one of those breaches stemming from someone leaving their cellphone in the back seat of a taxi cab? These are things that are keeping people up at night.
Add to this that a lot of times, the security approaches they have taken have all been leveraging the fact that there is a single vendor that is somehow responsible for a lot of what they do. Now, with the explosion of the variety of devices and the fact that they have no control over what their employee might purchase to bring in, that notion is simply gone. With it went any hope of a standard, at least anytime soon, to help secure and lock down the data on all these different devices.
Another aspect of this is the diversity of the variables. There is web access, native apps, a variety of different carriers, different types of networks within those carriers, and all these different plans.
I suppose it's difficult to have just a standard operating procedure. It seems like there have to be dozens of standard operating procedures. Is that what they're finding in the field, and how does any organization come to grips with such diversity?
You mentioned web control. If you're assuming that this is a web application that they're rolling out on their own, that's one thing. If it's a cloud app, what happens when you have somebody using a cloud app on a BYOD device? How do you insert any control into that scenario at all? It gets very complex, very quickly.
Let's look at some specific types of starting points, putting in the blocking and tackling necessary to start to get a handle on this. Jane, what should companies be doing, in terms of setting up some building blocks, the means to tackle the reliability, security, and diversity?
Wasson: The good news is that being able to support remote workers is not new, because most companies already have policies in place to manage remote workers. What's new is that, rather than the devices that are accessing the enterprise apps and resources being IT controlled, those devices are no longer IT controlled.
Very often, the policies are there. What they need to do is rethink those policies in light of a mobile worker, a mobile device environment with so much of the same capability. You have to be able to know which devices are connecting to the network. Are those devices harboring malware that could infect your network? Are those devices locked down, so that authentication is necessary to get into your network?
You need to find technologies, basically, that allow you to force authentication on those mobile users before they can access your network. You need to find technologies that can help you interrogate those mobile devices to make sure that they're not going to infect your network with anything nasty. You need to find the technologies that allow you to look at that traffic as it's coming onto your network, and make sure that it's not carrying malware or other problems.
What you can do is introduce technologies onto your network, so that when your users log in to the network or authenticate onto the network, the device is queried, so that you are able to do some level of tracking of that device. You're able to potentially provide self-service portals, so that employees have the ability to download enterprise mobile applications onto that device.
I should imagine, Jonathan, that an organization that's had experience with managing laptops and full clients, as well as thin clients and zero clients, would have a leg up on moving into mobile device management. Is that the case?
Sander: To Jane's point, they should have policies in place that are going to apply here, so that in that sense, they have a leg up. They definitely need the technology in place to deliver on it, and that's on the device layer.
On the application layer, the data layer, the place where all the intellectual property (IP) for an organization sits in most cases, those layers should be -- the word "should" is tricky -- pretty well secured already. The idea is that they have already been on there on laptops, trying to get in from the outside, for a while, and there should be some level of lock-down there.
The trick comes when you have organizations that want to take it to the next level and supply some sort of experience that is different on the mobile device. That might mean the paranoid version, where I want to make sure that the user on the mobile device has a lot less access, and I want that to be governed by the fact that they are on the mobile device. I need to take that into account. But there is also the very proactive view that you don't have to be paranoid about it, and you can embrace it.
Jane, I have also heard that you need to think about networks in a different way. With some relevance to the past, network containment has been something organizations have done for remote branches. They've used VPNs with the end devices, fat clients, if you will. How does network containment mature for BYOD support?
Wasson: What's different here is that now you have a mobile device that is the conduit coming into the network. Whereas in the past, folks had been using primarily laptop VPN clients, that paradigm changes a little for the mobile world. Mobile users like the convenience and the ease of being able to use mobile applications.
Also, because with that mobile user it's a personal device and they control what mobile service they are using, IT groups need to care a lot about the networks from which the user is accessing the corporate environment.
For example, you want to make sure that you're using an encrypted SSL VPN connection to go back into your corporate datacenters. It needs to not only be encrypted as SSL VPN, but you also want to make sure that it's a very easy and simple experience for your mobile user.
What IT groups need to be looking for is that very simple mobile worker experience that allows you to very quickly authenticate onto the network and establish encrypted SSL VPN into the networks, so that you don't have to worry about interception on a Wi-Fi network or interception on a mobile service network in a public place.
The challenge there for IT is that you want to make sure that it's easy for IT to provision. You want a technology that recognizes that you have mobile users coming and allows you to very easily provision those users with the privileges you want them to have on your network and make sure that they are coming in over secure networks. There are lots of implications for networks, there but there are solutions to help address that.
Context is king in a lot of cases these days, when you are trying to figure out a good approach to security. What better context to be aware of than one person sitting at a desk behind all of corporate protection accessing a system versus the same person on their tablet in a Starbucks.
You are going to have lots of different layers of security, but they all need to be very well connected to one another. They need to be able to share data, share that context, and in that sharing, be able to create the right circumstance to have a secure access to whatever data is going to make the efficiency for that person be maximized.
When you do go mobile first with your network containment activities, with your connected security around access control, and when you've elevated management to mobile device management, you're probably an organization with better policies and with better means or security in total.
Sander: I agree that the worst consequence of not doing the mobile first is that you're going to have people end-gaming IT. You're going to have shadow IT spring up in lines of business. You're going to have smart end users simply figuring it out for themselves. Believe me, if you don't proactively lock it down, there are lots of ways to get it as mobile devices. Those companies that do think mobile first are the ones that are going to innovate their way out of those problems.
I see companies that have taken advantage of a mobile platform and tried to make sure that it is going to boost productivity. But the very first thing that happens, when they do that, is they get a huge pushback from security, from the risk people, and sometimes even from executive-level folks, who are a little more conservative in a lot of cases, and tend to think in terms of the impact first. Because they want to push into that mobility mindset, that pushback forces them to think their way through all the security impacts and get over those hurdles to get what they really want.
The idea is that if you do it well, doing good security for mobility and BYOD on the first try, getting that good security, becomes an enabler as more waves of it hit you, because you've already got it figured out. When the next line of business shows up and wants to do it seriously, you've got a good pattern there, which completely discourages all of that shadow IT and other nonsense, because you can give them good answers, and they want them.
They don't want to figure out ways around you. They want you to be an enabler. I was reading recently how security has to go from being the "department of no" to the "department of how," because a lot of times, that's really what it boils down to. If you're simply going to say no, they're going to figure out a way around you. If you tell them how to do it in a secure fashion, they'll do that. That's why they're asking in the first place. They want you to enable them.
Do we have any examples or anecdotes of organizations that have taken this plunge, embraced BYOD, perhaps with some mobile first mentality thrown in, and what are the results? What did they get?
We've seen educational institutions deploying mobile device management platforms, and in this case our Dell KACE K3000 Mobile Management platform with our mobile security solutions, such as our Mobile Connect application on devices, and Secure Remote appliances, enabling secure SSL VPN connection. What we're seeing is that the IT organizations have the level of control over those devices that they need.
They're able to query the traffic to make sure that traffic isn't coming from or going to inappropriate sites and making sure that there's no malware on the network. And they're able to gain control and security of the mobile students, while still enabling those students to use their personal devices and the tools of their choice.
Just as with this situation in other places, the first push back was from security. We worked with them, and the results were very similar to what Jane describes from a technology standpoint. Dell was able to supply them with mobile-device management and network controls. They had a really good single sign-on platform as well. So the doctors weren't constantly logging in again and again and again, even though they switched context and switched devices.
What they gained from that was a huge amount of productivity from the doctors. In this case, coincidentally, they gained big in the executive team's eyes for IT, because as I mentioned, a lot of them happened to be doctors. That was a good feedback loop. As they made that constituency very happy, that also fed directly into their executive team.
In this particular case they got a double benefit, not just happy users, but happy executives. I guess it's one of those, "I'm not just a president, but also user" type of things, where they were able to benefit twice from the same work.
Wasson: Today much of the malware is targeting PCs and laptops, but now, as smartphones have become more prevalent in the marketplace, increasingly hackers and cyber terrorists are recognizing that that's a great new platform to go after.
We're seeing an increase development of malware to go after mobile devices as a conduit to get into back-end networks. We should absolutely expect that that's going to continue. We're seeing a trend towards more targeted attacks. As technologies to protect are developed, it's going to be very important to find those technologies that specifically protect from targeted attacks.
The thing that's becoming increasingly important is to make sure that your security technologies aren't just looking at the reputation of who is trying to get into the network and protocols, but is actually looking at the actual traffic packets themselves. It's important to be able to identify those targeted attacks, advanced persistent threats, or malware that's hidden within your traffic, because in the network at large, the presence of malware is only growing.
For mobile platforms, historically it wasn't as big a problem. Now that we see more of them out there, they're becoming a more important target. So it's very important for IT support organizations to get ahead of this.
They need to recognize that where they had previously focused mostly on what's happening with PC laptop traffic, they really need to focus a lot more on making sure that they have good strategies and good policies in place also to address that mobile traffic.
Let's get a little bit more on the BYOD vision from Dell Software. Let's hear what you have in mind in terms of how one should go about, as an IT organization, getting a better handle on this.
Security is never going to look like that. Security is always going to have a lot of different moving parts, and that's because essentially security needs to map itself to the needs of the infrastructure that you've built. That's going to be dictated by organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, and everything in between.
Even though Intel's new Itanium chip arrived years late, some of its performance numbers have drawn qualified praise from industry analysts.
Two key chip speed measurements using standards set by testing organization Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) show the 800MHz Itanium in some cases neck-in-neck with Sun Microsystems' newest UltraSparc III chip and in some cases soundly beating it. Sun is Intel's chief competitor when it comes to trying to win a place for Itanium, a chip Intel announced Tuesday.
One measurement of "floating-point" mathematical calculations shows Itanium soundly beating UltraSparc III--even the delayed 900MHz version due to arrive shortly. But when it comes to more ordinary "integer" operations, Itanium is behind Sun's chip and even Intel's own Xeon server chip.
"The SpecFP (floating-point) number was just phenomenal, but the SpecInt (integer) number was very weak," said MicroDesign Resources analyst Kevin Krewell. "Intel has not been able to provide a very good reason why that number was so weak."
"We feel (integer performance) is competitive today with UltraSparc III, and we expect it to get better with McKinley," the second-generation Itanium model due in the first half of 2002, said Intel spokesman Seth Walker, who said Itanium shines on higher-level benchmarks such as database performance or data encryption.
Itanium is the first of a new high-end line of chips from Intel that speak a totally different language from the existing low-end Celeron, mid-range Pentium and high-end Xeon lines. The existing products are 32-bit chips, but the Itanium is a 64-bit model, the key difference between the two being the ability to accommodate vast amounts of memory.
Itanium, delayed several times from its planned arrival in the 1990s, was spawned by a collaboration between Hewlett-Packard and Intel. The chip is a key element of Intel's strategy to bring to top-end servers and workstations its philosophy of high-volume manufacturing and support from multiple computer makers. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has been largely locked out of the market, which is dominated by 64-bit chips from Sun, IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and SGI.
"Itanium itself is a solid product, but it doesn't blow the doors off the competition, as Intel had initially hoped (and hyped)," Kumar wrote in a report Wednesday. "But it is best viewed as the first step in a long line of processors that will eventually dominate the high end of computing, pushing aside current competitors such as IBM's Power family and Sun's Sparc processors."
Itanium beats even Compaq's lauded Alpha chip, Terry Shannon, author of the Shannon Knows Compaq newsletter, said in a note Tuesday. But Shannon predicted Alphas running at higher clock speeds--1GHz chips are expected by mid-July--"will restore Alpha's performance leadership across the board." Itanium didn't convince Shannon that its design "will doom rival architectures to near-term obsolescence."
Krewell predicted IBM's coming Power4 chip, due to arrive in servers this fall, also will keep the pressure on Itanium.
But delays have hampered Itanium's prospects. "If this product had come out last year, it would have been a much more impressive part," Krewell said.
But raw performance is just one of a host of factors Itanium faces in the marketplace. Of greater concern has been the fact that software must be completely rewritten to take advantage of Itanium's performance. Although older software designed for the earlier 32-bit chips will run, Itanium performance on such tasks is dismal.
The situation hasn't escaped Sun's notice. "We think that this announcement actually enhances our competitiveness because it highlights the transitions that customers and vendors need to go through with the Itanium," said said Nancy Weintraub, director of marketing for system products at Sun.
Customers must recompile their software for the new chip and re-certify it for the new systems, she said, whereas Sun customers are guaranteed that software written for earlier UltraSparc chips will run unmodified on the UltraSparc III.
Intel and its business partners have only just begun the laborious process of getting software ready for Itanium. The first version of Microsoft's Windows XP for Itanium workstations isn't expected until October 25, and higher-level software such as databases likely will arrive even later.
"We do not expect Itanium to be broadly deployed," Kumar said. Though some scientific users will buy the systems, "most businesses will purchase only a few Itanium systems for software development and testing."
Broader use will come with the second-generation McKinley chip due in systems a year from now. And another successor, code-named Madison and due in early 2003, is expected to be three times faster than the first Itanium, Kumar said.
Though introducing a totally new design is very hard on programmers and customers who must totally rewrite software, Sun and others will see their designs run out of steam and likely will have to take the drastic step Intel took when moving to the Itanium, Krewell said.
"At some point in time, you've got to break the previous architecture and start from scratch," Krewell said. "I think the UltraSparc architecture is getting old."
Intel has pushed its comparatively ancient 32-bit designs remarkably far, though, and Weintraub defended Sun's design. "We feel very strongly about the longevity of the Sparc chip," Weintraub said.
Two key chip measurements from testing company Standard Performance Evaluation show that Intel's new 800MHz Itanium server chip is neck and neck with Sun's newest UltraSparc III chip and, in some cases, Itanium is soundly beating it.
SpecInt: Measures relative speed in computing processes such as compressing a file, word processing or compiling software. Higher numbers mean greater performance.
Microsoft won't be keynoting or exhibiting at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, company officials announced on December 21.
Microsoft won't be keynoting the Consumer Electronics Show in 2013, as I first noted on Windows Weekly a couple of weeks back. In fact, Microsoft won't even have a booth at next year's CES, though company execs will still be attending and holding meetings with customers and partners.
Microsoft will be counting on its own events, stores, social media and marketing as venues and channels for its big announcements, as Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank Shaw announced in a blog post on December 21. Sounds a lot like... Apple -- at least to this Microsoft Watcher.
CEO Steve Ballmer is slated to keynote the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2012, however, on January 9, starting at 6:30 p.m. PT.