Crumbs

It hasn't been the busiest tech exhibition of the year by a long way, but one stand which has provoked a bit of interest at the RSA Security conference is the bookstand.

Publisher Wiley has been on the warpath with a hefty array of security books. Topping the list of interest today, it says, is cryptography.

Chey Cobb's Cryptography for Dummies is one of the latest in the ever-popular Dummies series, and it's been one of the most sought after books at Wiley's stand.

Likewise Cryptology unlocked, a translated version of Reinhard Wobst's text, has also been one of the favourites.

Some of the more cynical books are also doing good business. Renowned security pundit Bruce Schneier has already sold 150,000 copies of Secrets and Lies - Digital Security in a Networking World, which promises to update readers on security after 9/11. In the book Schneier says you can't promise security, but you can at least try to improve it.

The Network Security bible by Eric cole, Ronald Krutz and James Conley has also attracted attention today, with its promise to be the A-Z of network security. It's actually not strictly an A-Z, but if you want to know your stream ciphers from your block ciphers, or the differing types of IPS, this book may be for you.

Software bugs are the thrust of a weighty tome: The Shellcoder's Handbook, by Chris Anley, John Heasman, Felix Linder and Gerardo Richarte. "Become familiar with security holes in Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and Cisco IOS," boasts the backpage propaganda, as well as promising to make readers aware of weaknesses in their own systems and training them in assessing the quality of security products.

Ex-National Security Agency analyst Ira Winkler has a more worrying perspective. "Spies Among Us: How to stop spies, terrorists, hackers and criminals you don't even know you encounter every day", looks ready to set the pulse racing.

And who could turn their back on a book focusing on that most topical subject: mobile security. Daniel Hoffman claims to reveal a range of threats to the corporate BlackBerry, and any other PDA and smartphone you care to mention.

Security professionals will have plenty of food for thought tonight.

Microsoft has released early details ahead of its official launch of Office Communications Server this evening.

Bill Gates is due to officially launch OCS – Microsoft’s unified communications offering – in a conference call at 5.15pm.

In a presentation to press this afternoon at the IP’07 show in London’s Earls Court, Warren Barkley, program manager for unified communications at Microsoft, gave indications of the scale of his company’s proposition.

One hundred companies have been experimenting with the production version of Office Communications Server. These have been almost entirely large corporates, including BMW, Siemens, Audi and Shell, and they have an average of 97,000 employees, Barkley said.

Fifty partners are due to be revealed by Gates this evening, which includes device manufacturers and software integrators, among others.

200,000 users have downloaded trial versions of the software, Barkley added.

He drew attention to a so-called Magic Quadrant, produced by Gartner, which shows the leading vendors of unified communications, in the opinion of the analyst firm. Microsoft was one of the top three, along with Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent.

Microsoft also reached for some juicy quotes from analysts.

“The impact of unified communications will define the next decade of the comms and IT industry,” said IDC earlier this year.

Now that I can almost agree with.

ZDNet.co.uk has already reviewed Office Communications Server 2007.

Unified communications was the subject of a hotly contested debate at IP ’07 earlier today.

I've just attended one of the big debates of the IP'07 show: and one of the very biggest themes of the event is unified communications.

Unified comms involves bringing together voice, data, video and presence functionality, so a) everything happens over one network and b) you know where you contacts are.

The problem for IT professionals is every vendor has a different way of doing things: and they are starting, in gentle terms, to squabble about it.

In short, the PBX vendors believe they have a great proposition coming from the voice side of things. Microsoft believes it has a great proposition coming from the software side of things.

Put Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco and Nortel in one room, and it all kicks off.

Cisco and Nortel are apparently partnering with Microsoft on unified comms, yet each wants to succeed in its own right.

All the equipment vendors believe the network is crucial to the success of UC; Microsoft does not.

The challenge for the vendors is to make sure their products are fully open, so IT professionals can pick equipment from one or several vendors as they choose.

The danger is, as found frequently in the technology sector, that if the vendors all pursue their own direction, then it'll be a lose-lose scenario.

Business customers will be locked into one vendor's solution out of necessity, and the vendors' sales will, as a result, suffer.

Let's hope the vendors get it together and produce open solutions that will really benefit business productivity.

Andy Green is to leave BT after 21 years. The telco's CEO of group strategy and operations will become the chief executive of Logica CMG on January 1 2008.

Green led BT's international business sales as CEO of BT Global Services for 6 years from 2001 until BT's restructuring earlier this year.

No successor has yet been announced.