Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy (Belated) First Birthday!

.... to my ADSL application.

Last year in October a salesperson at Telkom phoned to let me know that my phone exchange supports ADSL and do I want to upgrade my line to have ADSL?

I did the maths and worked out that it would be cheaper for me to have ADSL and have the benefit of all-time-on access to the Internet.

So, I applied and a few days later my application was processed and I had an application number. It all got to the point where I had the modem connected and ready when a technical person at the exchange noticed that "no, the exchange is potentially ready for ADSL but was not, in fact, ready."

"But, good news, there is a project to upgrade the exchange to be ADSL capable. It should be done by latest end of December 2007."

That became end of January, end of February, end of April... then it jumped to end of June.

Now it is scheduled to be completed by the end of April 2009.

The way things are looking - I'll probably be celebrating the second birthday of my ADSL application this time next year... many happy returns.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Symantec's vision...

And so it begins...

Symantec bought out MessageLabs and is (in their own words) "combining MessageLabs’ deep expertise in the SaaS market with Symantec’s rich portfolio of technologies".

The interesting thing is that Symantec does not really lead in the anti-virus market (in terms of quality, not market share. All antivirus products are about the same) or antispam (MessageLabs is excellent here).

So, what could they possibly bring to the party that MessageLabs doesn't already have?

DLP.

MessageLabs has DLP but it is very simple and not really worth very much. The framework is certainly there though. Add some good DLP and voila - you have a product that is worth something.