Cisco to Close Flip Camera

The networking and router company Cisco is shutting down the consumer-oriented Flip camera business that it bought for $590m in 2009. The move will mean the loss of 550 jobs worldwide, cost Cisco $300m and disappoint thousands of users who had enjoyed the devices' simplicity.

The shutdown, announced on Tuesday afternoon as part of a widespread reorganisation as the company attempts to rejig its business, will see Cisco reorganise its remaining consumer businesses to support its existing "key priorities" notably the routers and switches that generate the majority of its sales.

Though Cisco never broke out revenues from the Flip division, they are believed to be small: its latest accounts show that "other products" understood to include its Linksys routers and Flip cameras generated revenues of just $211m in the most recent quarter, down from $229m the previous quarter. Profits or losses for the division were not disclosed.

A spokeswoman for Cisco would not say whether the company had tried to sell the Flip business, but the fact of the closure suggests it was impossible to find a trade buyer.

That in turn suggests that the stand-alone movie camera business is effectively dead, killed off by smartphones capable of shooting HD video which have seen explosive sales in the past 18 months precisely the period since Cisco bought Flip.

The Flip camera, made originally by Pure Digital Technologies, burst to prominence in September 2007, before the widespread penetration of smartphones. Only 80m smartphones were sold in 2007 but that rose to 304m out of the 1.6bn phones sold in 2010. By contrast, Flip had sold 2m of its cameras by January 2009. Yet it was one of the most popular stand-alone camcorders on sale through Amazon, and in 2008 it was estimated to have a 17% share of the $2.4bn camcorder market behind only Sony, with 21%. But Sony held on to its lead and seems to have extended it in 2010 as the low-end market was eaten by mobile phones with video capability.

Flip's devices were hampered because while they were the same size as a smartphone, they could not offer a number of features that smartphones or high end "feature phones" could, such as uploads to online sites; but they didn't offer other features either such as Wi-Fi connectivity though this was often hinted at by executives or microphone sockets, which could have made them useful for some professionals. At the same time high-end professional cameras have begun to offer high-definition filming, leaving the Flip models without a viable market.

Cisco is embarking on a widespread review of its businesses. A week ago, Cisco chief executive John Chambers sent employees a memo vowing to take "bold steps" to narrow the company's focus after several quarters of disappointing results though the company is far from loss-making: in its last financial year, to the end of August 2010, it saw revenues rise 11% to $40bn and profits up 26% to $7.8bn.

The 550 job losses will have little impact on the total headcount within the 73,000 strong company, and a spokeswoman said it would try to find them jobs within Cisco.

Cisco's spokeswoman would not guarantee that the Linksys router business was guaranteed to survive the review, but said that it offered a "market leading product" and that it demonstrated a good fit with Cisco's core businesses.

• Ray Sangster, Flip's chief executive for Europe, Middle East and Africa, spoke to the Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast in July 2009, insisted that the acquisition would bring "synergies" between Linksys, Cisco and Flip but that he couldn't discuss them at the time because "they haven't been finalised".

Smartphones and Social Networks Targeted by Malware

Malware attacks are now more frequently focused on social networks and mobile devices. In Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report, the company noted that the number of malware attacks delivered through the Web practically doubled from 2009, with 65% of malicious links on Facebook arriving in the form of shortened URLs. The company also took special care to highlight the growing field of smartphone based attacks, in particular those targeting Android. Many of the pieces of Facebook and Android malware rely on the laziness of users. Apps must specifically request permissions, but many people simply click through the notifications without reading them carefully. And as time passes, the attacks will only become more sophisticated.

For now, attacks seem focused on harvesting personal data from profiles and sending text messages to premium services, which earn a commission for the scammer. But as users start turning to their cell phones for mobile banking and shopping more frequently, they're likely to become a much bigger target for digital crooks.

SAS evaluated in leading industry analyst

The Gartner report explained that "a holistic approach to enterprise risk management (ERM) requires software products that can maximise a firm's ability to capture measure and manage risk exposures consistently across the organisation".This research provides "a guide to credit, market and operational risk management (CRM, MRM and ORM, respectively) vendor software that includes risk-specific functionality, as well as capabilities that support enterprise-level, cross-discipline management of risk and performance".

The Gartner report recommended for organisations seeking ERM to "deploy solutions consistently across the entire institution (for all businesses and geographies), and avoid siloed approaches. Most institutions will develop a technology road map for incremental implementation of risk solutions based on enterprise-level performance priorities." Gartner continued by stating institutions should "use configuration, not customisation, to meet current and longer-term functional requirements".

To help organisations with ERM strategy, the SAS Business Analytics Framework can be used to build superior solutions, with SAS Risk Management for Banking covering market and credit risk and SAS Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) supporting operational risk and compliance needs. The framework provides measurement reporting and integration of information, and linking the enterprise risk function with other business areas such as financial management and customer management.

SAS combines strong risk analytics with superior data management and business intelligence capabilities to create a framework on which to deliver adaptable risk solutions to meet Gartner's recommendations.

SAS offers a variety of methods to support customer pricing modelling requirements via in-house developed models as well as from third-party vendors, such as FINCAD and FEA. SAS has sophisticated functionality providing scenario analysis, stress testing, and concentration analysis as well as the ability to manage complex products with the option to change, add or modify process, data or functionality.

In the report, Gartner found that organisations need to "create an enterprise-level data structure and IT architecture blueprint to support business risk management requirements that is co-ordinated with the institution's broader data structures and architecture". Gartner believes they should "evaluate a vendor's ability to enable a single, co-ordinated mechanism that supports the evaluation and response to risk threats and opportunities", as well as "use technology to minimise and take control of risk, not just to monitor and report it".

With the SAS solution's single integrated risk technology framework, one metadata layer connects the entire solution from data integration, data quality and data management. This also provides a holistic view of risk across credit, market and operational risk solutions, capital and performance management enabling management of complex interrelationships and converging risks. The single risk engine in SAS solutions for both market and credit risk and the fully integrated business intelligence capabilities leads to lower total cost of ownership.

SAS eliminates manual processes for data quality and data transformation, so organisations can avoid the need for upload, download and re-load of data across multiple platforms with reduced errors and operational losses.

Gartner also advises organisations to "plan strategically beyond tactical functionality, assess how vendors can improve the management of risk interdependencies, and integrate risk and performance management”.

"SAS offers a portfolio of risk and compliance products that can build on existing implementations, or provide a fast track for new customers," said Andre Zitzke, Practice Lead Risk at SAS South Africa. "Banks need to have analytical capabilities that can quickly evolve to meet changing business and regulatory requirements."

Extreme Partner on Lifecycle Management: Citrix

Network solutions specialist Extreme Networks, Inc., announced that it is collaborating with virtual computing giant Citrix Systems to integrate server virtualization with the network. The company earlier announced its mobility and virtualization lifecycle management solution, XNV, with initial support for Citrix XenServer and VMware.

XNV virtualization and cloud architecture is designed to enable network level virtualization support including management, reporting, and configuration and integrates the network management system with the virtualization management platform to ensure visibility and synchronization between the server virtualization environment and the network.

The company’s data center network solutions are focused on providing an open and integrated virtualization environment, enabling data centers to optimize and automate the networking function. Utilizing the ExtremeXOS operating system and intelligence layer, applications like virtualization mobility in conjunction with the virtualization platform Citrix XenServer are more easily integrated and managed by the network.

"One of the major challenges in the next phase of virtualization adoption lies in integration and support for networking functionality," said Gordon Mangione, vice president of the datacenter and cloud division at Citrix. "Extreme Networks offers an open platform approach that enables XenServer customers to tightly integrate server virtualization with the network, giving users a seamless mobile VM experience in the data center."



With the BlackDiamond and Summit switches running the ExtremeXOS operating system, Mangione said Extreme Networks is well suited to deliver high- performance cloud-based networking infrastructure. With data center features including XNV and Direct Attach, the company has helped lead integration across multi-vendor virtualized environments in managed hosting, cloud and enterprise environments, he said.

"Extreme Networks is addressing the advanced capabilities enabled by virtualization through an open network, multi-hypervisor approach," said Kevin Ryan, director of data center solutions for Extreme Networks. "Citrix is an ideal integration partner as one of the leaders in server virtualization, and as a platform of choice of many of our customers in the managed hosting and cloud marketplace."

The company also announced a partnership with Nimsoft to better address managed hosting and cloud service providers who need to monitor and optimize their hosting connections and environments. The itegration was based on the ExtremeXOS operating system to integrate with the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS), and offer real-time visibility of the network to its customers with NMS dashboards and reports.

"Customers are increasingly looking for hosted solutions that can provide adaptable scalability, improved cost-effectiveness, and rock-solid reliability," said Gary Read, Nimsoft CEO. "The combination of Extreme Networks' cloud-based networking solutions and NMS uniquely fulfill this market demand by providing customers with both high-value cloud infrastructure and high-value visibility into that infrastructure."