Study: 54% of companies ban Facebook, Twitter at work

Planning on firing off a short missive on Twitter or posting an update to your friends on Facebook from the office? According to a study commissioned by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing company, 54% of U.S. companies say they've banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, while on the job. Better check the rules of your workplace first. The study, released today, also found that 19% of companies allow social networking use only for business purposes, while 16% allow limited personal use.

Nucleus Research, an IT research company, reported in July that companies that allow employee productivity drops 1.5% in companies that allow full access Facebook in the workplace. Only 10% of the 1,400 CIOs interviewed said that their companies allow employees full access to social networks during work hours. "Using social networking sites may divert employees' attention away from more pressing priorities, so it's understandable that some companies limit access," said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement. "For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes." A study released last summer concluded that social networking use can hurt the bottom line. That survey of 237 corporate employees also showed that 77% of workers who have a Facebook account use it during work hours. It did not say how many workers fit into that category, but did note that one in 33 workers surveyed use Facebook only while at work. Nucleus said the survey found that "some" employees use the social networking site as much as two hours a day at work.

And of those using Facebook at work, 87% said they had no clear business reason for accessing the network. And in August, the U.S. Marine Corps reaffirmed its ban on the use of social networks by its soldiers.

Storage software market sees signs of life, but no major recovery

The storage software market showed signs of rebounding in the second quarter, but is still falling short of the pace set last year. Within the storage software market, revenue for replication products grew 5% compared with the first quarter of this year, and data protection and recovery revenue was 3% higher than in the first quarter. Worldwide, storage software vendors raked in $2.8 billion in revenue in the quarter, down nearly 10% vs. the second quarter of 2008, according to an IDC report issued last week.\ However, some positive signs emerged. Revenue for device management and archiving software has also grown slightly since the beginning of 2009. "The storage software market is slowly starting to recover with positive growth over the first quarter of 2009," IDC analyst Michael Margossian said in a press release.

Globally, revenue for external disk storage systems was $4.1 billion in the second quarter, an 18% decline year-over-year. However, IDC cautioned that growth between the first and second quarters is typical, so the year-over-year comparisons are more significant. 9 data storage companies to watch   While last week's report covers storage software, IDC this month also reported that storage hardware sales continue to struggle. The network disk storage market declined 15% year-over-year. EMC led the storage software market with 22.4% of revenue in the second quarter, ahead of Symantec (18.5%), IBM (11.5%) and NetApp (8.5%). EMC also leads the external disk storage systems market with 21.5% of worldwide revenue. This was the third straight year enterprise storage systems revenue declined in the second quarter.

D.C. appoints CTO to take over scandal tainted agency

The District of Columbia this week hired a specialized search engine developer and entrepreneur as its new chief technology officer, overseeing what is arguably one of the most visible, progressive - and troubled - municipal technology operations in the U.S. New CTO Bryan Sivak is the founder of InQuira Inc. a privately held San Bruno, Calif.-based knowledge management firm, and has long worked on developing search engine technology designed for customer service environments. The new CTO joins a technology operation has faced some difficulties this year. Sivak succeeds Vivek Kundra, who left earlier this year after his appointment by President Barack Obama to become the nation's first CIO. That position had been filled on an interim basis since Kundra's departure.

A week after Kundra was appointed to the White House post, federal law enforcement officials filed bribery charges against Yusuf Acar, the department's acting chief security officer, in connection with what prosecutors alleged were a number of schemes developed to defraud the District of thousands of dollars. Payments were allegedly made to those "workers." After the arrests, Kundra took a leave from his new federal post. The scheme involved adding non-existent employees, or "ghost workers"," to the city payroll. Once the Obama administration determined that Kundra was not connected to the bribery scheme, he returned to the post. He is also a strong proponent of cloud computing.

Kundra gained notoriety and the attention of the Obama administration for his efforts to increase accessibility to government data. Mitchell Kramer, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston, said InQuira began operating as a developer of natural language search technology. This technology differs from more general Google-type search products by indexing only relevant information that can best answer specific customer queries. Later it combined that technology with a knowledge management and search application to create customer service tools that help customers seek product information and help on a company's Web site. Kramer said the market served by InQuira is growing, and is focused on high-end customers.

Kramer said it's unclear why someone with Sivak's background was selected for the District CTO's job. "For the last seven years he has worked for small software vendor that has a very narrow and not widely adopted application," he said. Salesforce.com is emerging as a competitor in that business. Kramer said Sivak could help the District use IT to provide better services to residents. Sivak was not immediately available for comment. But he wondered how Sivak will handle more general IT issues, such as changes to the government's general ledger systems, at least in the short term. "I'm sure he is capable of learning that stuff, but it's not clear that he has had the experience in acquiring, building and supporting those applications," Kramer said.

In a prepared statement announcing the appointment, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said that Sivak "brings a wealth of software and Internet technology experience to District government, and we look forward to putting his talents to good use for our residents." Prior to founding InQuira, Sivak co-founded Electric Knowledge LLC in 2000 along with Edwin Cooper. Sivak had earlier worked as a software engineer at IBM. In 2002 the company merged with answerFriend and the combined company became the basis of InQuira.

Cisco extends security controls to 'dark Web'

Cisco is tackling the so-called "dark Web" of online content that's not easily indexed or categorized by adding new usage controls to its IronPort S-Series Web Security Appliances. The IronPort Web Usage Controls software has an engine that reads a Web page on the fly and analyzes the content to decide if it's objectionable or off limits according to corporate policy, says Vivek Bhandari, a product marketing manager at Cisco. The new technology is packaged as a software blade that works with Cisco's URL filtering database to make decisions about user Web surfing to enforce acceptable-use policies.

Simply categorizing Web sites into lists - such as sports, shopping, hate sites or porn - is no longer sufficient because the Internet is now filled with highly transient and often dangerous sites that comprise the dark Web. "These sites are coming up and down so fast," Bhandari says, noting that the proliferation of blogs and social networking sites, with Web 2.0 technology underpinnings, are also contributing to an explosion in Web content. Cisco's S-Series appliances can perform malware detection and blocking. The dark Web may constitute 80% of objectionable content, outside the 20% of Web sites that can still be put neatly into list form, Cisco says. The new Web Usage Controls software adds the ability to monitor, block or warn users about Web traffic based on a method that combines URL filtering lists with contextual heuristics for analyzing content and checking hidden tags. With the configuration Cisco is advising customers to use, about 90% of objectionable dark Web content violating policy will be detected via IronPort Web Usage Controls without causing the false positive rate to spike, Bhandari says. Cisco's URL filtering database includes 65 URL categories and is updated every 5 minutes through Cisco's security intelligence operations.

IronPort S-Series appliances with Web Usage Controls, available now, start at $8,500.

Salesforce.com, Cisco partner on SMB call-center tech

Salesforce.com and Cisco Systems on Monday announced an offering for small and medium-size companies that integrates Salesforce.com's on-demand, customer-service software with Cisco's unified communications technology. The offering, which ties Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 to Cisco's VoIP-based Unified Contact Center, will be generally available in the first quarter of 2010 and sold by both companies, according to a statement. The Customer Interaction Cloud is aimed at businesses with between 30 and 300 sales representatives or call-center agents.

Pricing wasn't immediately available. Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com's senior vice president of CRM applications, said SMB customers have been petitioning the company for some time to help them integrate their CRM system with telecommunications functionality, which is "an expensive proposition" for smaller companies, he said. Salesforce used a lunchtime event in New York on Monday to unveil the Cisco partnership and highlight the 2.0 version of its Service Cloud, a set of technologies that allow companies to tap a variety of sources beyond the traditional call center - such as social networks and online customer communities - to meet customer-service needs. A representative from one Salesforce.com customer, American Century Investments, that is already using the Customer Interaction Cloud said its sales staff especially likes the "click-to-dial" feature of the integration of the Cisco and Salesforce.com technologies. "It's one less app on the desktop," Cory Cochran, director of technology strategy for American Century Investments, said of the new offering, which streamlines the user experience for busy salespeople who already use a lot of applications. Knowledge Base combines features from Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform and technology from its 2008 acquisition of InStranet to provide a database of information and tips for salespeople commonly found in knowledge bases through multiple channels.

Salesforce.com also on Monday revealed that the Knowledge Base aspect of Service Cloud 2 will be available in early November. The partnership is just the latest move by Salesforce.com to expand its technological footprint through partnerships, rather than internal development. Also Monday, Salesforce.com announced an upcoming "five-minute upgrade" option for the Service Cloud. Last week, it joined with Unit 4 Agresso to form FinancialForce.com, a new SaaS (software as a service) financials software company. Customers will receive read-only access to the application during scheduled maintenance windows, save for a five-minute "cut-over time," according to a statement. The option will "set a new standard" for on-demand software, Salesforce.com claimed.

This is made possible by Salesforce.com's mirrored data centers, the company said. The company is about to begin a pilot of the service with select customers, it said at Monday's event.