ETB and FTS Continue to Consolidate Their Strategic Relationship

Boca Raton, Florida | November 18, 2009: FTS (LSE: FTS), a global provider of billing, CRM and policy control solutions for communication, content and service providers, today announced that ETB (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogotá), the largest local telephone company in Bogotá and the second largest telecommunications company in Colombia, has signed an agreement to extend services and support for ETB’s entire billing environment for the next three years.  ETB also recently deployed FTS’ Leap™ RevChain v 7.2 Billing solution.

ETB provides local telephony services to over 2 million subscribers, nationwide long distance services, Internet and connectivity services. In recent years, the Colombian operator registered a sharp increase in the number of subscribers and in the portfolio of services it offers.

ETB is a long-time customer of FTS’ Leap RevChain billing. In addition to providing the operator with maintenance, onsite support and change control services, the deployment enabled ETB to be one of the first providers to comply with regulatory changes.

“FTS’ Leap RevChain solution has been in operation at ETB for over four years,” said Yanet Garcia, ETB’s VP Informatica (IT). “This long-term agreement is a natural extension of the excellent business relationship between the companies.  We are confident that Leap RevChain will continue to provide us with the tools we need to accurately and flexibly undertake our rating and billing processes”.

“This agreement is in line with FTS’ strategy to further explore and penetrate the CALA market,” said Shaul Ganel, President, FTS Americas. “It continues to be exciting for us to team up with a growing, dynamic customer like ETB. Over the course of our relationship ETB has continued to keep us challenged and helped us push the product to be the best in its class. The Colombian operator is taking full advantage of Leap RevChain’s billing and rating features.”

FTS’ Leap RevChain is a full, end-to-end, rating, billing and customer-care solution for the service provider market throughout the Americas, supporting voice, data and content services. Comprised of integrated applications that are designed to address all the critical billing requirements of service providers, the solution was designed to deliver the increased throughput and response time required for rating and billing millions of complex usage records.

Leader of Multifunction Firewall Appliances Unveils Extensible Content Security (XCS) Platform to Provide Business E-mail, Web Content, Data Loss Prevention and Cloud-based Protection

18 November 2009 – WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader of business security solutions, today announced its entry into the messaging and content security markets with the launch of its new WatchGuard XCS (Extensible Content Security) platform.  As a comprehensive platform for business e-mail and Web 2.0 content security,  WatchGuard XCS combines innovative cloud-based security, data loss prevention and advanced messaging security technologies in a single, easy to use appliance that defends businesses against phishing attacks, identity theft, viruses, malware, data loss and other forms of network, application and data threats. 

“Next generation threats are becoming more sophisticated and stealthy.  Because of this, businesses today face unprecedented risk and exposure from e-mail and web-related threats,” said Joe Wang, CEO of WatchGuard Technologies.  “By combining WatchGuard’s state-of-the-art multifunction firewall appliances with the new XCS line of messaging and content security solutions, businesses gain a complete, multi-faceted and multi-layered defence architecture that is highly effective, extremely efficient and easy to manage.”

The WatchGuard XCS range provides defence-in-depth by combining advanced e-mail inspection with DLP capabilities and IP reputation to combat spam, viruses, malware and other forms of blended threats.  The WatchGuard XCS platform addresses e-mail security needs of small to medium sized businesses up to 1,000 users, with the WatchGuard XCS 170, 370 and 570 series. For mid-tier and enterprise organisations with 10,000 or more users that require advanced messaging and content protection, WatchGuard offers the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 series of appliances.

All of these appliances share best in class quality detection for maximum coverage and accuracy, as well as rapid response capabilities for zero-day threat outbreaks and automatic updates to protect against new forms of crimeware, spyware, rootkits, mobile malware and other malicious attacks. They also provide advanced management and reporting capabilities, which include archiving, on-box reporting, messaging logs, customizable granular policies and reports, TLS encryption and message redundancy.

Additionally, all WatchGuard XCS appliances can take advantage of WatchGuard’s revolutionary in-the-cloud security technology, ReputationAuthority.  With 99.99 percent accuracy, ReputationAuthority eliminates up to 98.3 percent of spam e-mail before it ever gets to a business network by using DNS blacklists, IP volume, behaviour analysis and content inspection.  Given that spam e-mail is a major carrier of viruses, phishing attempts and blended threats, having ReputationAuthority pre-screen and eliminate this unwanted traffic makes business networks, applications and data better protected.

With increasing regulatory and compliance requirements facing mid-tier and enterprise organisations, the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 appliances include sophisticated data loss prevention features, such as transparent remediation to automatically block, quarantine, re-route, blind copy, encrypt or allow messages based on configurable policies, as well as pre-defined compliance dictionaries for GLB, HIPAA, PCI DSS and others.  Seamless e-mail encryption secures confidential messages to any recipient without requiring a dedicated server, while e-profiling and data discovery allow administrators to classify sensitive data and dynamic on-demand clustering and queue replication provide additional redundancy and scalability.

According to market research, the estimated total addressable market for messaging and web content security is $6.8 billion for 2010, and is expected to grow at 11.2 percent per year.  Similar in size, the addressable market for WatchGuard’s current family of multifunction firewall and SSL VPN solutions is $4.7 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 9.9 percent.  With today’s launch of the WatchGuard XCS platform, WatchGuard nearly doubles its reach to an addressable market of $11.5 billion, which is expected to hit $15 billion by 2012.

Similarly, the growth of e-mail and web-related threats is expected to increase exponentially.  WatchGuard security analysts predict that messaging and web-based content threats will increase by a factor of 3 in 2010.  Contributing to this, WatchGuard security analysts predict that polymorphic viruses, botnets and blended threats will propagate in new ways, fuelled by social networking, collaboration applications and other Web 2.0 venues.

“With the expected growth of new messaging and web-based threats, businesses should review and evaluate their security posture to make sure that they have capable, flexible and scalable protection against these new threats,” said Brian Burke, Program Director, Security Products, at IDC. “By embracing a holistic security architecture, businesses can reduce their risk and exposure to these new forms of threats.”

Pricing and Availability
The WatchGuard XCS appliances will be available from WatchGuard channel partners around the world within 30 days. For small to medium sized businesses, the WatchGuard XCS appliances start at $2,475 with no per user license fee limitation.  The enterprise-grade XCS appliances range from $8,000 to $60,000.  UK prices are based on the current exchange rates and more information is available at www.watchguard.com.

BT’s Product and Systems Migration Project Award Entry Selected as Finalist

London, November 18th, 2009 – Today Ontology Systems announces that OSS/CAD, the groundbreaking application that uses ontologies to unify OSS/BSS and infrastructure, is integral to BT’s successful IET Innovation Awards 2009 entry: Semantic Tool to Accelerate Migration of Telecommunications Products and Systems.  The project has been selected as a finalist for the Telecommunications category of the IET Innovation Awards 2009. 

The IET Innovation Awards celebrate the products, technologies and processes that lead the way in engineering innovation. The awards are judged by engineering experts and recognise the depth of innovative work being carried out across all areas of engineering and technology.

The BT award entry was based on the team’s experiences of using OSS/CAD to discover and model dependencies among products, processes, systems, networks and customers. OSS/CAD then enables the understanding of the knock-on effect and impacts of product migration to conduct “what-if” scenario analysis and determine optimal order of migration steps.

John Wittgreffe, Chief Researcher, Corporate ICT Practice in BT commented: “The IET Innovation Awards are a great platform to showcase new and innovative technology that can impact business, and this finalist place shows both the ingenuity of OSS/CAD and the ability of BT Research & Technology to tackle such a complex problem in a new and exciting way.”

Nektarios Georgalas , Principal Researcher, Corporate ICT Practice in BT added: “The objective of using OSS/CAD is to simplify the migration process, save money by minimising iterations and achieve the most accurate migration impact analysis. By using semantics to describe the full meaning of entities, OSS/CAD was able to provide more complete descriptions of product and system dependencies, thus reducing the number of iterative consultations with the experts.”  

Georgalas continued: “OSS/CAD is able to discover hidden dependencies, which would otherwise go missing. OSS/CAD can very flexibly support changes to the dependency model with minimal impact on the integrated data. It also provides advanced facilities to visualise dependencies, so decision makers can very easily run “what-if” migration scenarios and weigh their options forward.”

Benedict Enweani, CEO, Ontology Systems concluded: “We are pleased that OSS/CAD is able to play such a key role in the BT project and that the overall innovation has been recognised by the IET. OSS/CAD is rapidly becoming a tool of choice for Telecom operators and service providers who need to better understand and manage their complex OSS/BSS infrastructures.”

The IET Innovation Awards 2009 will take place on 25th November 2009 at the Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground, London.  More information can be found at  www.theiet.org/innovation

New features simplify and automate DNSSEC deployment without proprietary appliances

Redwood City, Calif. - November 18, 2009 - Nominum, the leader in intelligent DNS solutions today announced new capabilities that eliminate barriers to DNSSEC deployment.  The solution completely integrates functions needed to successfully deploy DNSSEC at any scale without costly proprietary appliances. In addition, automation of DNSSEC processes eliminates operational overhead and errors that could cause Internet sites to disappear. Nominum now has the strongest possible protections for Internet users relying on both signed and unsigned DNS data.  These new features strengthen Nominum's unique layered defenses embedded in the Vantio caching DNS servers that protect over 170 million broadband households.  

"One of the grand challenges the Internet faces is: How do we make security scale?  With over 61% of compromises being traced to authentication flaws, we clearly have a big problem.  DNSSEC is the big solution that we need to fix authentication," said Dan Kaminsky the security researcher who identified a key flaw in DNS security in 2008.  "And there is progress:  I have been proud to see, in the wake of my DNS vulnerability finding, a steady drumbeat towards signatures at the Root and TLD layers.  But large organizations need it to be easier and less disruptive to deploy DNSSEC, before they can reasonably be expected to secure their own domain names.  That is why I am happy to see Nominum adding comprehensive DNSSEC support to their DNS server platforms -- and even happier to see DNSSEC almost entirely automated within it.  DNSSEC can, should, and must "Just Work", and Nominum has done an excellent job making that so."

Simplifying DNSSEC Deployment for Brand Owners and Service Providers

Today, brand owners have well understood procedures to publish and update DNS data that convey their brands (<a href="mailto:mail@nominum.com">mail@nominum.com</a>, http://www.nominum.com/).  Introducing DNSSEC adds many new complex functions that must be implemented flawlessly or Internet sites disappear.  Nominum integrated and automated these critical functions into existing DNS servers.  DNSSEC processes that previously took additional equipment such as external "signing" appliances are now Nominum software features running on commodity server hardware.  Complex multi-step manual operations that required expert intervention and frequent repetition can now be executed with a few keystrokes, once, by existing staff.  Eliminating intensive and repetitive manual effort removes the need for specialized expertise, prevents errors that result in service outages, and reduces costs.  

"Since the Kaminsky vulnerability, a lot of progress has been made in DNSSEC deployment with various top level domains signed or committed to be signed. The next battleground in DNSSEC adoption will be in getting brand (domain) owners to sign their data," said John Pescatore at Gartner Group.  "Tight integration of key DNSSEC automation functions into the DNS infrastructure will reduce cost and complexity for domain owners.  Robust validation solutions eliminate barriers for service providers. Together these capabilities will

Nominum's authoritative DNS servers - ANS and ANSP - support the industry's only solution that integrates all DNSSEC functions into the DNS server.  The solution simplifies network architectures, improves reliability, and reduces capital and operational expenses.  Online or offline deployment models for DNSSEC are supported, with all of the automation features.  

Signing DNS data is compute intensive and Nominum's new software maximizes performance by dedicating additional processors in multiprocessor platforms to signing. This approach maintains Nominum's industry leading performance and 100% availability even as DNS data is being signed.

For service providers and enterprises that do not want the complexity of DNS and DNSSEC at all, Nominum offers hosted services through SKYE^TM.  These services incorporate Nominum's leading technology in a highly reliable cloud based model.  They provide best DNS security with layered defenses and DNSSEC managed by experts, with zero operational burden. 

DNSSEC Already Available for Internet Users

Nominum's massive installed base of Vantio caching DNS servers already support DNSSEC and have validation turned "ON" by default. Unsigned domains are secured with layered defenses that provide the best protection in the industry against cache poisoning. This is critical since the migration to DNSSEC will take time and some domains may never be signed. 

DNSSEC is Not a Panacea

Although DNSSEC will improve DNS security, it does not address other visible Internet threats.  Attackers take advantage of the shortcomings of legacy DNS systems to lure users to malicious, illegal or unintended destinations. DNSSEC does not prevent this from happening. Nominum's Intelligent DNS systems apply policy to DNS answers to protect users against phishing, sites that distribute malware, botnets and spam. This ensures Internet users benefit from a safe, secure and productive Internet experience.

"Deploying DNSSEC is a major undertaking that is going to take many years, with growing pains along the way." said Paul Mockapetris, Chief Scientist at Nominum and inventor of the DNS. "There is a pressing need to make it easier for brand owners to protect their domains and provide the best protections to users for unsigned domains during and after this migration."

Availability

DNSSEC features are software only and generally available in Nominum's standard ANS and ANSP authoritative DNS servers, and Vantio caching DNS servers.