Intel Security, previously and better known as McAfee, has been sold to private equity firm TPG for $4.2bn, despite Intel paying $7.7bn for it in 2010.

The chip firm will receive $3.1bn in cash as part of the transaction and retain a 49 per cent minority stake. TPG will take control with a 51 per cent stake, and will invest $1.1bn in the company.

Intel Security is based on the McAfee business and was renamed two years ago. The company will revert to the better known McAfee brand, despite John McAfee reportedly suing Intel over the use of his name.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2017, and Chris Young, general manager of Intel Security Group, will become CEO of McAfee.

Young described TPG in an open letter to stakeholders as a “seasoned technology investor” that was “attracted to our current momentum and long-term potential”.

He claimed that McAfee currently protects “more than a quarter of a billion endpoints” and more than 200 million consumers, and is present in two thirds of the world’s 2,000 largest companies.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich claimed that, despite the sale, security “remains important in everything we do at Intel”.

“We will continue to integrate industry-leading security and privacy capabilities in our products from the cloud to billions of smart, connected computing devices,” he added.

Bryan Taylor, a partner at TPG, said that the company had “long identified the cyber security sector, which has experienced strong growth due to the increasing volume and severity of cyber attacks, as one of the most important areas in technology”.

Intel’s acquisition of McAfee Security in 2010 was intended to enable the company to beef up security around PCs and sell McAfee antivirus and other security software around its core business.

However, the combination never worked as the money to be made in the security business became increasingly focused on the data center and cloud computing.

Courtesy-TheInq

Five years ago Intel bought McAfee for $7.7bn acquisition. Two years ago it re-branded it as Intel Security. There was talk about chip based security and how important this would be as the world moved to the Internet of Things.

Now the company has discussed the future of Intel Security with bankers, including potentially the outfit. The semiconductor company has been shifting its focus to higher-growth areas, such as chips for data center machines and Internet-connected devices, as the personal-computer market has declined.

The security sector has seen a lot of interest from private equity buyers. Symantec said earlier this month it was acquiring Web security provider Blue Coat for $4.65 billion in cash, in a deal that will see Silver Lake, an investor in Symantec, enhancing its investment in the merged company, and Bain Capital, majority shareholder in Blue Coat, reinvesting $750 million in the business through convertible notes.

However Intel’s move into the Internet of Things does make it difficult for it to exit the security business completely. In fact some analysts think it will only sell of part of the business and keep some key bits for itself.

Courtesy-Fud

The company will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers “quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code.”

EZSource offers a visual dashboard that’s designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.

Developers must often manually check thousands or millions of lines of code, but EZSource’s software instead alerts them to the number of sections of code that access a particular entity, such as a database table, so they can check them to see if updates are needed.

IBM’s purchase is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sixty-eight percent of the world’s production IT workloads run on mainframes, IBM said, amounting to roughly 30 billion business transactions processed each day.

“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses,” said Ross Mauri, general manager for IBM z Systems. “As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes.”

EZSource will bring an important capability to the IBM ecosystem, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

“While IBM takes advantage of a legacy architecture with z Systems, it’s important that the software modernizes, and that’s exactly what EZSource does,” Moorhead said.

Large organizations still run a lot of mainframe systems, particularly within the financial-services sector, noted analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics.

“As these organizations roll out new mobile, social and other digital business experiences, they have no choice but to expose these mainframe systems via APIs,” Scavo said.

But in many large organizations, skilled mainframe developers are in short supply — especially those who really understand these legacy systems, he added.

“Anything to increase the productivity of these developers will go a long way to ensuring the success of their digital business initiatives,” Scavo said. “Automation tools to discover, expose and analyze the inner workings of these legacy apps are really needed.”

It’s a smart move for IBM, he added.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/looking-to-transform-mainframe-business-ibm-acquires-ezsource.html

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)’s chief executive, Gottfried Leibbrandt, told a financial services conference in Brussels that SWIFT will launch a five-point plan later this week.

Banks send payment instructions to one another via SWIFT messages. In February, thieves hacked into the SWIFT system of the Bangladesh central bank, sending messages to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York allowing them to steal $81 million.

The attack follows a similar but little-noticed theft from Banco del Austro in Ecuador last year that netted thieves more than $12 million, and a previously undisclosed attack on Vietnam’s Tien Phong Bank that was not successful.

The crimes have dented the banking industry’s faith in SWIFT, a Belgium-based co-operative owned by its users.

The Bangladesh Bank hack was a “watershed event for the banking industry”, Leibbrandt said.

“There will be a before and an after Bangladesh. The Bangladesh fraud is not an isolated incident … this is a big deal. And it gets to the heart of banking.”

SWIFT wants banks to “drastically” improve information sharing, to toughen up security procedures around SWIFT and to increase their use of software that could spot fraudulent payments.

SWIFT will also provide tighter guidelines that auditors and regulators can use to assess whether banks’ SWIFT security procedures are good enough.

Leibbrandt again defended SWIFT’s role, saying the hacks happened primarily because of failures at users. “Many of the less protected banks are in countries were skills are really scarce,” he said, pointing the finger at providers of services to banks.

“We will have to create an ecosystem of providers and partners, for example by introducing certification requirements for third-party providers,” he said.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/uncategorized/swift-to-implement-new-security-program-after-recent-hacking.html

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research said that Quantum computing is “stupendously exciting right now.”

Apparently it is Microsoft Research’s largest area of investment and Lee is pretty certain it is on the verge of some major scientific achievements.

“There’s just hope and optimism those scientific achievements will lead to practical outcomes. It’s hard to know when and where,” Lee said.

This is the first we have heard about Redmond’s quantum ambitions for a while. In 2014 the company revealed its “Station Q” group located on the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, which has focused on quantum computing since its establishment a decade ago.

We sort of assumed that Microsoft would not get much work done on Quantum states because faced with a choice most cats would rather die in a box rather than listen to Steve Ballmer. But we guess with a more cat friendly CEO it is moving ahead.

Lee said that he has explained quantum computing research to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella by comparing it with speech processing. In that field, Microsoft researchers worked “so hard for a decade with no practical improvement,” he said. Then deep learning brought about considerable leaps forward in speech recognition and Microsoft was in on the ground floor.

“With quantum, we’ve made just gigantic advancements making semiconductor interfacing, allowing semiconductor materials to operate as though they were superconducting. What that means is the possibility of semiconductors that can operate at extremely high clock rates with very, very little or no heat dissipation. It’s just really spectacular.”

Courtesy-Fud

JP Rangaswami, who joined Deutsche Bank in January as its first-ever chief data officer, said better and cheaper metadata was allowing the bank to analyze previously inaccessible information.

“We are able to see patterns that we could not see beforehand, allowing us to gain insights we couldn’t gain before,” Rangaswami told Reuters in an interview.

Upgrading the technical infrastructure Deutsche Bank needs to get the most out of this data is a priority for Chief Executive John Cryan. He is trying to improve the performance of Germany’s biggest bank, which is struggling to adapt to the tougher climate for banks since the financial crisis.

Cryan, who unveiled a big overhaul at Deutsche on Oct. 29, said at the time that imposing standards on Deutsche’s IT infrastructure was key to improving controls and reducing overheads.

The CEO said in the October presentation that IT design had occurred in silos with the application of little or no common standards. “Our systems are disjointed, cumbersome and far too often just plain incompatible.”

An annual global survey of more than 200 senior bankers published last week by banking software firm Temenos found that “IT Modernization” was now top priority, displacing earlier investment objectives such as regulation and customer friendly mobile apps. IT modernization ranked only fourth among major priorities in the survey last year.

The shift toward technology as a priority shows the extent of the challenge facing banks to modernize infrastructure to analyze internal customer data and try to fend off competition from new financial technology companies.

Rangaswami, who was chief scientist at Silicon Valley marketing software giant Salesforce from 2010 until 2014, said the data would allow Deutsche to tailor services to customers’ needs and to identify bottlenecks and regional implications faster and solve problems more quickly.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/deutsche-bank-taking-a-deeper-dive-into-big-data.html