saic

McAfee: Cybercrooks target corporate trade secrets

Cybercriminals are increasingly moving from stealing just personal data to capturing trade secrets and other corporate intellectual capital that they can easily sell through the underground market, according to a new report from McAfee and the SAIC.

In today's release of a new study, "Underground Economies: Intellectual Capital and Sensitive Corporate Data Now the Latest Cybercrime Currency" (PDF), McAfee and the Science Applications International Corporate find that the theft of trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D data, and even source code is on the rise, especially as such information is often unprotected.

Based on a global … Read more

Maybe the software (products) business is dying, after all

Savio has a point, much as I don't want to admit it. However, it might not be the point he's thinking that he's making. Or, rather, the data points to an entirely different point.

Wayne Waddoups of SAIC sent this slide deck along to me from a presentation delivered by Michael Cusumanoa (MIT) at Carnegie Mellon University, and I found it fascinating. The data clearly shows a (strong) decline in enterprise software sales over the last few years, with the only exceptions being "hits" and "platform leaders." In other words, those who get lucky and those who have built a massive lock-in ecosystem.

As shown, software is clearly on the decline, while services revenue is on a strong upswing. This, as Cusumanoa posits, may well lead the industry to invest in the next big area of innovation: Services innovation.… Read more

Open source @ SAIC: Wayne Waddoups speaks

Last week The Open Road caught up with Justin Steinman @ Novell and Mike Olson @ Oracle to discover how open source factors into these companies' businesses. This time, we're switching gears a bit to talk with a company that sells services around software - both open source and proprietary - rather than a software company.

Being familiar with the interesting open source work happening at SAIC, I decided to talk with two members of its Open Source Community of Practice: Ryan Brunton, a developer within SAIC's Open Source Community of Practice, and Wayne Waddoups, vice president of Strategy, SAIC Office of Technology. SAIC has long worked with projects like Linux and MySQL, but it's the cutting edge work it's doing with open source applications and infrastructure that caught my eye. More to the point, and more to Wayne's and Ryan's response, I wanted to know how open source helps SAIC build its business.

Just as enterprise software vendors have their P&Ls tied to proprietary software (making adoption of open source more difficult than it otherwise would be), so, too, do tier-one systems integrators like SAIC, Accenture, etc. How does SAIC view open source, given revenues of $8.2 billion that might well point it back to proprietary software?

Wayne and Ryan write:… Read more