Stories by: Tim Greene

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Interim Avaya CEO Charles Giancarlo is winding down his tenure at the helm as the company narrows down a permanent replacement for former CEO Lou D'Ambrosio, who stepped down earlier this year for health reasons.

Avaya is planning a core server with which customers and independent software vendors can easily build presence, voice and other communications modes into business applications.

McAfee is making it possible for customers to enforce network access policies on unmanaged devices such as laptops owned by visitors or consultants.

McAfee is hunkering down to integrate the security technologies it has bought over the past several months into its varied line of security software and appliances. Two trends in the company's activities are developing parallel products for deployment as software on endpoints and as network-based appliances. This week, for instance, the company is announcing that NAC software can be installed on its IntruShield IPS appliance to give customers the option of enforcing NAC policies in the network, not just on the endpoint. The company is bringing management of these platforms under control of its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in an effort to centralize control of network security. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene spoke with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt about these efforts as well as other issues facing the company.

Count the World Bank Group among the high-profile organizations suffering major data breaches - maybe.

Call it the Harvard University Tower of Babel. That might be the most descriptive way to look at the institution's network of networks that consists of 10 academic units with independent CIOs and staff who build and take care of their own environments, yet all rely on a centralized call-center infrastructure to serve users.

HP and Tandberg are uniting to provide a single source for telepresence gear as well as installation and monitoring.

F5 Networks has issued a new version of its FirePass software so it can apply group access policies to mobile devices as the log-in to SSL VPNs.

Novell is getting into network access control via an OEM agreement with StillSecure that initially provides a stand-alone product but also includes plans to ensure that software works well with Novell's ZENworks configuration management.

A former Alcatel official has to pay a US$261,500 fine and serve three years of supervised release for bribing Costa Rican officials to help Alcatel land a $149 million cellular network deal with a Costa Rican phone company.