Open IT Survey 2010 - Community-based Market Research

It is well known that people and companies can get very innovative if they wish to cut the costs, and it is especially great if this results in a smart solution.

Making a market survey or buying an existing one is not cheap, and getting one for free can be a large benefit for smaller companies.

I felt handicapped from the start that as a small Hungarian company, we haven't had much information about the global market we were aiming at. Purchasing a global market study cost much more than what we could have afforded.

I was hoping that all this will change when we become a bigger company. And now, although we are still not that big, we could afford to buy a study. But there is always something that seems to be more important and promises imminent benefits. I have realized that we will not spend on that sort of thing until its price is higher than the margin of error in our marketing budgets.

But if everything goes well, this will not even be necessary, because our latest initiative offers free market data for everyone.

Communities have always had high priorities for BalaBit: they are part of our philosophy, our strategy and everyday life. We have always been an active member of the open source software community, and our products are based open formats and open standards.

The Open IT Survey 2010 project offers nothing less than a market survey to be filled by community members who are free to use the results. Participants can complete the anonymous questionnaire in a few minutes, and gain access to global marketing data about IT market trends.

The members of the community have the needed knowledge, we should just collect and share it for everyone's benefit. The open-source movement owes its success to the community, and we are positive that communities are important in shaping the future.

The Open IT Survey wishes to collect the last year's results and this year's expectations, focusing on the performance and trends of the IT and IT security fields. The project has been launched only recently; the first results will be available at the beginning of April at the openITsurvey2010.balabit.com site. According to the organizers, the target group is "everyone who is interested in the results."

The project builds its communication heavily on the community; participants can recommend the project to others on the Facebook Community Portal, as well.

We would like the project to become a regular survey, and gradually collect and share more and more information to everyone, therefore we count on the community's feedback and opinion. Comments and ideas are welcome on the Facebook page.

Open IT Survey 2010

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Bathroom in the mountain

I start a new series on Hungarian sights to inform you about our country. The first post is about the Cave Bath which is the only thermal cave in Europe. Some weeks ago I was there with my girlfriend and it was really impressive. 

The Cave Bath is a thermal bath in a natural cave in Miskolctapolca, which is part of the city of Miskolc, Hungary, and is unique in Europe.

The thermal water (temperature: 30°C, 86°F) is reputed to cure pain in the joints, and since it has lower salt content than most thermal waters (around 1000 mg/litre), people can bathe in it for much longer, practically for an unlimited amount of time. The Cave Bath can be visited all year long except for January.

The cave and the thermal spring have been known since ancient times, but Tapolca became a popular bathing place only after the Ottoman occupation of Hungary (16th-17th century). During this time the area belonged to the Greek Orthodox abbey of Görömböly; the development of Tapolca into a bathing place was the idea of the abbot in 1711. He also brought doctors from Kassa, today Košice, Slovakia to examine the beneficial effects of the water. Three pools and an inn were constructed in 1723. The cave itself was not used yet, as the pools were outside. The water was colder than it is now, because the cold water springs of Tapolca (now playing an important role in providing Miskolc with drinkable water) were used too. By the mid-18th century, after a short period of popularity, the bath was neglected and by the 1800s the buildings were in ruins.

In 1837 the new abbot of Görömböly had the buildings restored and expanded. He also had the first indoor pool (though still outside the cave) built, but only for wealthy guests.

In the early 20th century the growing city Miskolc bought the area from the Greek Orthodox Church not only because of the thermal water but also because of the drinking water source (which now provides half of the city's water supply).

In the following years, new public baths were built. In 1934 Tapolca was officially recognised as a spa town. In 1939 the construction of a new bathing house began. During the construction several archaeological findings were unearthed, and a new, previously unknown water spring was found with a water temperature of 31.5°C. The thermal bath was opened in 1941 but the Cave Bath itself was opened only on 14 May 1959.

Since then the bath complex has been expanded several times. The outdoor pool and the characteristic, seashell-shaped roof before it were built in 1969. In the 1980s new rooms and corridors were built, and warmer pools (34°C and 36°C) were constructed. The newest expansion of the bath complex started in 1998.

Storm under the clouds

There are two security related issues about cloud computing and virtualization I am interested in.

1. The are not only spare-time services on the web but many-many business services running in clouds, as well. When you use some SaaS (Software as a Service) for example google aps, linkedin, twitter, facebook or salesforce... you use the http protocol as a remote GUI  protocol and not as a conventional content channel.  Enterprises should log and secure these channels just like other inhouse applications , but it is not easy because of the encrypted HTTPS. (This train of thought is related with SCB which can be fitting for this problem in the future with an http and an ssl proxy). So, this is a problem. :-)

There are a firewall related effect of SaaS, as well. Namely, companies want to enable and disable these web services. Not URLs, not protocols but services. And the gateway should identify these services with a combination of URL filtering, proxiing and pattern matching. This will be a new approach of firewalls.

2. Security in the cloud. Many companies started to build their own cloud with a high performance hardware or with an even more powerful cluster to run several virtual machines on it. Theoretically, these virtual machines act as real hardware without direct connection between each other. But, as we know very well, every single software have their bugs... so, we shouldn't believe that there is not security gaps in a cloud. But, what is the solution????? There is no concept about this problem. Maybe, we should imagine virtual gateways between virtual ports of virtual machines. This problem become a real big issue when we share a rented cloud with other organisations or when we use a Saas.

Make a comment with your opinion!

Professor BalaBit

We started the BalaBit Campus Program six years ago with three legs. We established a scholarship, we started a trainee program and we offered our experts for universities as guest speakers.

All of them runs with success, but now I would like to announce something great as for the university education. Last year we started a lab at University of Óbuda with five other Hungarian security companies (Kuert, VirusBuster, CERT.hu, e-Group, Security.hu). The subject contained general, product independent security disciples presented by this six Hungarian companies.

AND!!! Considering the last year interest this year the subject has been started as a recitation without limit of number. We are very proud of it!!!

Correlation

I am wondering on the new chocolate machine :-). Will there be any correlation between the existence of it and the change of the average body mass index at the company? Dolce vita...

Newcomer at marketing department

I am pleased to inform you that a marketing trainee begins on Monday in our team. Balázs Antal is a graduate at Colleague for Modern Business Studies and he will write his thesis at BalaBit, as well.

He is 23 year old, has experiences in event management and interested in online marketing. I am quite sure, he will be a huge help in developing our community marketing.

Balázs starts working in the frame of our 7 year old Campus Program that gave BalaBit dozens of developers and other professionals.

Symbian has become open

And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to inform you that the Symbian mobile platform has been opened by the Symbian Foundation. It was an obligate and brave decision at the same time. Obligate because the Android is too strong and too fast developed competitor but also brave because open source development is a quite new field for Samsung, Sonyericsson, Sharp and Nokia without enough experiences. We know it well, that an open source software project can easily lost its uniformity dissolving incompatible branches. To avoid this will be the key for keeping Symbian alive.

Anyway, it is the latest victory of open source development and business model!