Six Crucial Tech Companies You've Never Heard Of

the world of tech news, there are certain number of players that dominate the headlines. Apple! Microsoft! Dell! Oracle! IBM! Facebook! And yet the world of the tech business is much deeper than this, and there are many companies that employ thousands and make billions and yet don't have much of a profile among even the tech-savvy observers. This article doesn't pretend to offer a comprehensive list of such corporations, but the six companies profiled here do serve as a stand-in for the kind of below-the-radar firms that any tech observer should know more about. They aren't consumer focused; they aren't flashy or led by charismatic visionaries; they sell to people who sell to people who sell to you; and the modern world wouldn't work right without them. Pictured: You've almost certainly come into contact with code written at this Tata Consultancy office in Hyderabad, India.

In the world of tech news, there are certain number of players that dominate the headlines. Apple! Microsoft! Dell! Oracle! IBM! Facebook! And yet the world of the tech business is much deeper than this, and there are many companies that employ thousands and make billions and yet don't have much of a profile among even the tech-savvy observers. This article doesn't pretend to offer a comprehensive list of such corporations, but the six companies profiled here do serve as a stand-in for the kind of below-t

he-radar firms that any tech observer should know more about. They aren't consumer focused; they aren't flashy or led by charismatic visionaries; they sell to people who sell to people who sell to you; and the modern world wouldn't work right without them. Pictured: You've almost certainly come into contact with code written at this Tata Consultancy office in Hyderabad, India.

Flextronics

For most electronic equipment, the brand on the device is not necessarily the name of the company that owns the factory where it was put together. Singapore-based Flextronics is a good example. You don't own anything with a "Flextronics" label on it, but the company made $24.1 billion in revenue off of any number of gadgets that probably lurk in your

CenturyLink
Ever since the U.S. government broke up AT&T's telecom monopoly, the company has been reassembling itself, like bits of liquid metal coming together to reform the T-1000 in "Terminator 2." Much of the country's local landline service is now provided by a reconstituted AT&T, while in the Northeast that role is filled by Verizon. It's easy to forget about Qwest, formerly US West, which takes the Rockies as its territory. But even people who can smugly name all the Baby Bells (remember Nynex? Good times!) may not know that, while the Qwest brand name survives in many markets, it no longer exists as an independent company. In April 2010, it was acquired by CenturyTel, which was descended from a tiny Louisiana local

Equinix
Equinix has littered the landscape with dozens of low-key data centers, colocation facilities and "Equinix Internet exchanges." The latter route traffic among more than 600 different telecom providers from all over the world; Peter Van Camp, the company's executive chairman, calls them "international airports where passengers from many different airlines make connections to get to their final destinations." The company's also in the cloud business and provides direct access to AWS.

Crown Castle International
Wireless connectivity might seem like a ubiquitous and intangible product, but it doesn't happen without thousands of tall metal structures festooned with electronics and radio transmitter. The famous companies whose names are plastered all over your credit card bill in many cases can't be bothered with this kind of nuts and bolts stuff, so they turn to infrastructure companies likeCrown Castle International. Crown Castle is based in the U.S. and supplies the wireless backbone in 68 of the 100 largest U.S. cities

Science Applications International Corporation

Selling computers, software and services to individuals or evepanies can be something of a chore, because event

Selling computers, software and services to individuals or even companies can be something of a chore, because eventually there's not enough money to buy even the most coveted stuff. But over the last 10 years, the various U.S. defense, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been eager to spend on high tech -- which explains Science Applications International

ually there's not enough money to buy

TCS

The Tata Group is a sprawling business empire, one of India's largest, oldest and most storied companies. Tata Consultancy Services began as an in-house computer services division, but quickly started taking in clients from other companies, then other countries. Today it has more than 200,000 employees -- many of whom are doing the sorts of things you expect out of an Indian outsourcing firm, toiling on software projects for big companies in the West:

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5 Hidden dangers of Facebook:

Over the last few years, Facebook's growth has been phenomenal. The world's no. 1 social networking site also sometime back beat Google to become the most visited Web site in the US for an entire week at a stretch. However, the site has also lately being receiving lot of flak for its privacy policies.

An expert in online privacy drew attention to the five dangers of sharing information on social networking site Facebook. Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, said that marketing efforts by the company often results in a compromise on account holders' privacy.

Goodchild noted five risks of using Facebook. They are:

1. According to Facebook policy last updated on April 2010, "When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends' names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection."

2. In March, private e-mail according to a Gawker report, private email addresses that many Facebook users wanted to keep hidden were revealed publicly on a multitude of Facebook profiles. The glitch was later resolved by Facebook.

3. Recently, a Facebook event invitation was reportedly sent to some over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" However, the message was actually a scam and the users who entered their passwords in response to the message in turn sent the whole thing to their friends lists too.

"This was a phishing scam and Jim's account appears to have been compromised," read a statement from Facebook as provided to venture industry news site PEHub.

4. On May 6th, the popular social network patched a major security bug that allowed users to snoop on their friends' private chats, and view their pending friend requests. The exploit forced Facebook to temporarily disable chat.

5. Earlier this week, 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the site manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use.

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Singapore most IT competitive APAC market

SINGAPORE--Strong investments in human capital, particularly IT employment and enrolment in higher education, have helped Singapore emerge as the No. 1 Asia-Pacific market in terms of IT competitiveness, and third globally, a new report revealed.

The Business Software Alliance's (BSA) Global IT Competitiveness Index, which was released Tuesday, noted that besides Singapore, six other Asia-Pacific countries--Australia, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Hong Kong--made it on the top 20 list, too.

The region's strong showing proves that investments in IT do pay off, said Roger Somerville, senior director of government and policy for BSA Asia-Pacific.

Somerville, who was speaking at the media briefing here Tuesday in conjunction with the launch of the Index, added that the seven countries, out of 17 Asian economies surveyed, on the list is a "high proportion" when compared with previous editions.

Commissioned by the BSA and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the Global IT Competitiveness Index benchmarked 66 countries in the world according to six criteria: overall business environment; IT infrastructure; human capital; research and development; legal frameworks; and IT industry support.

Globally, the United States continued to lead with 80.5 points while Finland came in next at 72.0. Singapore took third spot with 69.8, overtaking Australia, which was the top Asia market in theprevious study released in 2009.

Investments in IT pay off
Commenting on the findings, Somerville said the main reason why established IT powerhouses continue to cling on to leadership positions, even as other emerging markets raise their game, is because "advantage begets advantage".

He explained that despite its current fiscal difficulties, the U.S. economy remains top on the Index as its long, sustained periods of past investments in the six criteria "are still paying off" and have become "self-churning".

"Such economies with solid IT fundamentals won't topple off suddenly," he added.

That said, Somerville noted that this year's results clearly highlighted how "investment begets advantage" as well, since the countries which saw the most improvement in rankings were the ones which pumped significant resources into their IT initiative.

In fact, most of these countries came from the Asia-Pacific region, he pointed out. Singapore, in particular is a role model of how investing in IT brings benefits. The city-state's competitiveness is largely based on its human capital ranking such as IT employment and enrolment in higher education, he revealed.

Singapore also has a positive business environment and is a regional leader in intellectual property (IP) laws and other forms of legal protection, Somerville added.

The BSA executive also said of the six criteria, there is no one criterion that will singlehandedly boost an economy's IT competitiveness.

Citing China as an example, Somerville said it has spent a great deal on IT infrastructure, or as he puts it "things that money can fix", such as PC ownership and broadband penetration. While such investments have helped, he said no economy can focus on "just ensuring everyone has a mobile phone".

So China is now looking at the "softer side" of the criteria, including how people can be innovative and improving its IP and legal environment, he noted.

Overall, while Western economies still performed strongly in the index, Asian economies are fast improving and could potentially reshape the global IT marketplace, Somerville said.

"There is a movement or expansion of IT competitiveness from the bastions to emerging economies, where investments in the right places begets advantages and [act as] an escalator [to move up the ranks]," he concluded.

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Singapore tops Google+ APAC users

Key markets in Asia Pacific have taken positively to Google+, with users in Singapore accounting for the largest share of visits to the new social networking platform, according to new data from Experian Hitwise.

Statistics from the eight-week study also showed that Singapore is the only country in the region with "sustained continued growth in visits after the beta launch", according to figures released Friday.

It said the city-state's usage of Google+ ranked No. 6 in the global Social Networking and Forums category, with a visit share of 1.2 percent at its peak for the week ending Aug. 27. The research firm attributed local popularity of Google's new social network to its search engine dominance in the country.

In Singapore, about 34.5 percent of upstream traffic to Google+ originated from the localized version of Google's search engine.

India came in second in Asia, but the country's figures lagged far behind Singapore's. Indian netizens accounted for only 0.2 percent of worldwide visits during the final week of the study, Experian Hitwise said. After the beta launch of Google+ on Jul. 9, it shot up to its peak of 0.4 percent users a week later and remained so for two weeks. Its popularity subsequently declined.

At its peak, India was in 14^th place for Google+ traffic.

Social media savvy Hong Kong bucked the trend, averaging only 0.074 percent visit share throughout the entire eight weeks. It ranked 90^th in the global usage of Google's new social network.

The research firm noted that the strong presence of Chinese social networking sites in the market could have impacted Google+ visits. Statistics showed that 60 percent of users there visit Facebook and YouTube, while the remaining 40 percent frequent Chinese forums and microblogging sites such as Discuss and Weibo.

The other two Asia-Pacific markets covered--Australia and New Zealand--fared slightly better, peaking at 58^th and 84^th spots, respectively, during the period of assessment.

Experian Hitwise said Google's new social network "sees key reliance" on other properties such as its search engines and Gmail for referral and direction.

ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET reported Thursday that Google+ users are on the fall after "surging for the first couple of weeks in July".

Quoting a study, also by Experian Hitwise, it said that Google+ users have dropped from a peak of 1.8 million in mid-July to 1.16 million last week. This figure corresponds with earlier numbers from ComScore, which said in a press release on Jul. 27 that traffic to the new social networking site had begun to slow, with user figures dropping 3 percent between the third and fourth week of July.

The average time spent on the site has also been fluctuating, Experian Hitwise said.

As of early August, Google+ is said to have at least 25 million users globally.

Hype dying down
Singapore users told ZDNet Asia that they were excited to jump on the bandwagon during the beta launch of Google+, with many friends clamoring for "invites". However, due to the limited activity within the "circles", some are no longer visiting the site regularly.

Nicole Nilar-Aye, a CRM (customer relationship management) manager, said she rarely uses it "as only one friend is active".

Jonas Wong, an active social media user, expressed the same sentiment. He explained that the lack of updates in his circles made no sense for him to visit Google+ regularly.

"I do have a lot of friends and acquaintances in different circles, but since no one is updating anything, the hype has died down," he shared.

"But it is still in its infant stages, the potential is huge, so I hope Google can continue to push out more features to keep the platform buzzing and eventually build something that can give Facebook a run for its money."www.facebook.com/pages/TechadvancesbyTechnology/293331837349083!

Kaspersky Lab appoints Sachin Tendulkar as brand ambassador

IT security solutions provider Kaspersky Lab today said it appointed ace cricketer Sachin Tendulkar its brand ambassador.

Beginning October, Tendulkar will be the face of theIT security brand and under the exclusive association, he will represent the Kaspersky brand in India and other regional markets around the world, Kaspersky said in a statement.

Through this association, Kaspersky Lab aims to strengthen brand recall to meet the company's ambitious growth plans.

"The youth of this nation looks up to Sachin Tendulkar as a huge inspiration. We are naturally excited to be associated with the cricketing maestro," Kaspersky Lab Managing Director (Asia Pacific) Harry Cheung said.

Kaspersky Lab is headquartered in Moscow and operates across Europe, Middle East and Africa, North and South America, Japan and other countries of the Asian and South Pacific region.

It offers range of solutions for home users, small and medium enterprises, corporations, offering protection from IT security threats, including viruses, spyware, crimeware, hacker attacks, phishing and spam.www.facebook.com/pages/TechadvancesbyTechnology/293331837349083!

From Now on, You don't need ticket printouts to travel on Indian Railways

IRCTC has announced that it will accept what it calls Virtual Reservation Message, which it defines as ‘a screen-shot of the e-ticket displayed through laptops/palmtops/ Mobile phone’. About time, though you’ll still need to carry an ID proof.

This comes as a much awaited step – especially for those of us who’ve had to scramble for printouts just before journeys. Or worse, have forgotten printouts and ended up in a mess.

Why So Slow?

This, of course, begs the question as to why it takes so long for the Indian Railways to embrace any technology or change.

Of course, there’s the fact that there’s bureaucracy and red tape. But the underlying reason really is that the Railways is an economic monopoly. Because Indian Railways has no competition, it has no fear of losing business, and thus no incentives to change or to go the extra mile to improve its profits.

If say, the rights to operate trains were auctioned out to private companies, I dare say we’d see far more(and far faster) change – better food, more comfortable carriages, and perhaps even facilities like in-train entertainment. We’ve seen much change in nearly every other space – from telecom to automobiles – but not in Railways.

Railway officials point out that Railways cannot be privatized easily because it has a social responsibility. Often Railways has to take up ‘financially unviable but socially desirable routes that reach remote areas’ – those would get shot down by private companies.

Because railways is so fundamental a service and privatization would mean increased fares, any such measure to privatize railways would render train travel inaccessible to many poor people, and thus unacceptable to the Government.

Of course, the lack of privatization would also mean technology adoption will remain slow. Thus we’ve had to contend with slow change, simply because of the way Indian Railways sees itself.

For now, of course, we can celebrate small victories like being able to travel without printed tickets.

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Pros and cons of tower, rack, blade servers

There are three main choices when it comes to buying a new server: tower, rack or blade. Here are some of the pros and cons about each kind of server, as well as some of my experiences with each one.

Tower servers
Tower servers seem dated and look more like desktops than servers, but these servers can pack a punch. In general, if you have a lot of servers, you're probably not using a bunch of tower servers, because they can take up a lot of space and are tough to physically manage since you can't easily stack them on one another.

In some cases as organizations grow and move to rack servers, conversion kits can be purchased to turn a tower server into a rack-mount server.

As implied, tower servers are probably found more often in smaller environments than anywhere else, although you might find them in point solutions in larger places.

Tower servers are generally on the lower end price-wise, although they can expand pretty decently and become really expensive.

Tower servers take up a lot of space and require individual monitors, keyboards, and mice or a keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) switch that allows them to be managed with a single set of equipment. In addition, cabling can be no fun, especially if you have a lot of network adapters and other I/O needs. You'll have cables everywhere.

I don't buy a lot of tower servers these days, but they still have a place. My most recent tower server purchase was to serve as my backup system running Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010.

Rack servers
If you run a data center of any reasonable size, you've probably used a lot of industry standard 19-inch wide rack servers. Sized in Us (which is a single 1.75-inch rack unit), rack servers can range from 1U "pizza boxes" to 5U, 8U, and more. In general, the bigger the server, the more expansion opportunities are available.

Rack servers are extremely common and make their home inside these racks along with other critical data center equipment such as backup batteries, switches and storage arrays. Rack servers make it easy to keep things neat and orderly since most racks include cable management of some kind. However, rack servers don't really simplify the cabling morass since you still need a lot of cabling to make everything work--it's just neater.

I once worked in a data center in which I had to deploy 42 2U Dell servers into three racks. Each server had to have dual power cables, keyboard, video, and mouse cables and six (yes, six) network cables (six colors with each color denoting a specific network). It was a tough task to keep the cabling under control, to put it mildly. Because everything was racked, there was built-in cable management that made this easier.

Like tower servers, rack servers often need KVM capability in order to be managed, although some organizations simply push a monitor cart around and connect to video and USB ports on the front of the server so that they don't need to worry about KVM.

Rack servers are very expandable; some include 12 or more disks right in the chassis and support for four or more processors, each with multiple cores. In addition, many rack servers support large amounts of RAM, so these devices can be computing powerhouses.

Blade servers
There was a day when buying individual blade servers meant trading expansion possibilities for compactness. Although this is still true to some extent, today's blade servers pack quite a wallop. I recently purchased a half-height Dell M610 blade server with 96 GB of RAM and two six-core processors.

There is still some truth to the fact that blade servers have expansion challenges when compared to the tower and rack-based options. For example, most tower servers have pretty significant expansion options when it comes to PCI/PCI Express slots and more disk drives. Many blade servers are limited to two to four internal hard drives, although organizations that use blade servers are likely to have shared storage of some kind backing the blade system.

Further, when it comes to I/O expansion options, blade servers are a bit limited by their lack of expansion slots. Some blade servers boast PCI or PCI Express expansion slots, but for most blade servers, expansion is achieved through the use of specially designed expansion cards.

In my case, the Dell M600 and M610 blades have three mezzanines. The first mezzanine consists of dual Gigabit Ethernet adapters. The remaining mezzanines are populated based on organizational need. Our blades have a second set of Gigabit Ethernet adapters housed in the second mezzanine and Fibre Channel adapters in the third. If necessary, I could also choose to use mezzanine cards with four ports in some configurations. So, although the blade server doesn't have quite the I/O selection of other server form factors, it's no slouch, either.

When raw computing power and server density is the key drive, blade servers meet the need. For example, in my environment, I have a 10U Dell M1000e blade chassis that can support up to 16 servers. So, each server uses the equivalent of 0.625U of rack space. On top of that, the blade chassis holds four gigabit Ethernet switches and two Fibre Channel switches, so there is additional rack space savings since I don't need to rack mount these devices to support different connectivity options. In addition, the blade chassis has a built-in KVM switch so I don't need to buy a third party and cable it up.

Speaking of cabling, a blade environment generally has much less of it than tower or rack environments since a lot of the connectivity is handled internally. You'll end up with a neater server room as a result.

Another point is adding a new server consists of simply sliding it into an available slot in the chassis. There is no need to rack a new server and deal with a bunch of new cabling. This small size makes heat dissipation a challenge. Blade chassis can put out a lot of heat.

From a cost perspective, blade servers require some initial infrastructure, such as the chassis, so the upfront cost is often higher than for servers of other types.

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Bottom line
If you need one or two servers, a tower solution probably makes sense. If you need three to 24 servers or massive scalability, then rack servers are for you. When you go need more than 24 servers, I advise you to consider a blade solution to meet your datacenter needs.

Enable remote server management through a GPO

When I wrote my tip on how to administer Windows Server Core systems remotely, I didn't give much thought to automating the process.

Maybe I didn't see myself using the new Server Manager utility as much or possibly was focused too much on possibly using Windows Firewall centrally through Group Policy for all servers on an internal network. However, when I look at my track record, I use remote server management all the time.

Remote server management is a perfect thing to automate centrally with a Group Policy Object (GPO). It's quite easy to do, though it will go a lot better if you have Windows Firewall set up centrally within Group Policy. I've never used Windows Firewall on internal networks; I've played with ideas and configurations that may have used it, but I never pushed it out to a bunch of servers with a firewall profile for an internal network.

In most of my recent environments, especially labs, I've set Windows Firewall to be disabled via Group Policy. If you have that in place, this will be a rather easy addition.

To enable remote management, you need to run a winrm command. This is the running configuration for Windows Remote Management, and the associated Windows service is installed and running automatically with default installations of Windows Server 2008 R2. For one-off systems, simply running winrm quickconfig will enable remote management. If you want to apply it centrally to a number of computer accounts, a GPO is the way to go.

The command to run via a script, applied to a computer account GPO, is winrm quickconfig -q and can be saved as a PowerShell script, a .bat, or a .cmd file. This script can be run to a computer account, and it doesn't require a user to log on to execute this script, which makes security provisioning quite easy. The computer script running winrm would go in Computer Configuration | Policies | Windows Settings | Scripts | Startup (Figure A).

Figure A

Once the computers apply the GPO (usually on the next boot), remote connections from Server Manager are quite easy.

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