I arrived in Austin Sunday night to get ready for a factory tour on Monday, a kickoff dinner and then two days of briefings from Dell executives, including Michael Dell himself! Dell’s ISG business is growing at a very fast pace and continues to build momentum and focus within the broader organization.

We had a nice overview of the product roadmap, including some of the exciting enhancements Dell is making to their storage products such as the MD3000 and the new EqualLogic PS5000 series iSCSI solutions.

I really enjoyed the Council meeting and it reminds me all over again; what I admire about Dell is the way they and Michael Dell himself stay close to the customer. The entire purpose of this event is to “get it right” and determine meaningful ways to embrace change (including change in the manufacturing process) in order to make their customers more successful. Ah shucks, you may say that all companies behave this way… well I must tell you that is not true and at times, I find it difficult as we continue to grow to stay as close as I would like to all of our customers varying needs and directions.

This concept of gathering, internalizing and embracing customer feedback is a simple principle of Business Success stories. Always trying to improve the pace of change and build meaningful sticky relationships with customers. Dell’s very successful Ideastorm site where customers post product feedback and are active participants in the Dell community is a great example of how to do this right. No other hardware vendor that we have worked with or attempted to work with has ever gone to the extent of embracing change that Dell has during our 5-year relationship.

From the custom factory integration services to the attention to detail in the order and manufacturing, and logistics processes, Dell helps us execute for our customers and I must admit that we could not have built the business as quickly or efficiently without Dell!

So thank you Michael Dell for building a business that embraces change and is focused on helping your ISG customers succeed.

Soldiers were deployed throughout Italy on Monday to embassies, subway and railway stations, as part of broader government measures to fight violent crime here for which illegal immigrants are broadly blamed.

[...]

The conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi won elections in April while promising to crack down on petty crime and illegal immigrants. The new patrols of soldiers, who are not empowered to make arrests, do not seem aimed only at illegal immigrants, though the patrols were deployed to centers where illegal immigrants are housed.

“Security is something concrete,” Mr. La Russa said on Monday. The troops, he said, will be a “deterrent to criminals.”

That reminds me of one of my favorite logical fallacies: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it." It does seem largely to be a demonstration of "doing something" by the Berlusconi government. The legitimate police, of course, think it's a terrible idea.

“You need to be specially trained to carry out some kinds of controls,” Nicola Tanzi, the secretary of a trade union that represents Italian police officers. “Soldiers just aren’t qualified.”

He also questioned whether the $93.6 million that will be spent for the extra deployment, called Operation Safe Streets, might not have been better used to increase the budgets for Italy’s police and military.

Continuing the rapid consolidation or maybe the swallowing of the DLP market McAfee while announcing flat earnings today also announced that they were acquiring Reconnex for 46 million in cash. That just about does it in the DLP market with most of the pots having found a cover.  Congrats to all of the folks at Reconnex!

Continuing the rapid consolidation or maybe the swallowing of the DLP market McAfee while announcing flat earnings today also announced that they were acquiring Reconnex for 46 million in cash. That just about does it in the DLP market with most of the pots having found a cover.  Congrats to all of the folks at Reconnex!

Upping The IPS Ante

Motorola announced this week its intentions to acquires Wireless IDS/IPS vendor AirDefense. The acquisition may provide a bit of deja vu to readers who recall the acquisition of Network Chemistry's wireless IDS/IPS assets by Aruba Networks in 2007.

Meru Networks, eschewing acquisition for product introduction made its own announcement on Monday, announcing the company's RF Barrier, an active RF management solution that aims to solve the problem of what the vendor is calling "leaky RF." The Meru solution actively blocks 802.11 RF from escaping the physical confines of a WLAN deployment to thwart external "parking lot" attacks by closing Wi-Fi based attack avenues.

In fact, 2007 - 2008 has been a time focused on shoring up the security of the WLAN as the networks become more critical to over 50% of enterprises Forrester sees investing in the networks today. As the networks are more pervasive, moving toward covering the entire physical environment, and more employees are relying on Wi-Fi to access corporate data and applications, it's high-time to secure the WLAN.

In the case of Motorola, the Wi-Fi network is especially critical. As the vendor embarks on selling its message of the all-wireless enterprise, where WLANs will interconnect not only users to the network, but networke edge devices -- such as WLAN access points -- to the network along with storage, printers and other peripheral devices, the WLAN is citical and, therefore, a major focus for security.

In markets such as retail, standards like the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard dictate wireless security, but compliance and regulation aside, it is becoming easier to secure the WLAN, regardless of the industry you are in. Vendors are rapily working to close security gaps with product enhancements and new product introductions. Look for a broader suite of solutions to address security coming from your primary network vendor; while this won't negate the need to  integrate these add-on network elements, the single source should ease integration to some degree.

How secure do you feel your organization's WLAN is today? What are your concerns either about securing the network or its current lack of security?