Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire assets from a Chinese hosted email and messaging company.
Hong Kong-based firm Outblaze sells hosted multilingual email and messaging services for other service providers, telcos and corporations to operate under their own brands.
Outblaze intellectual assets including code and staff will become part of IBM Lotus's Bluehouse project, IBM's online business social-networking and collaboration service, IBM announced on Thursday. Bluehouse is currently in open beta.
"The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus's commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement," said Bob Picciano, the general manager of IBM Lotus Software, in a statement.
Security experts warned that companies considering moving to hosted email services in developing countries should think about where their data will reside, and choose their provider carefully. While Hong Kong is a highly developed autonomous region of China, a report last week warned that emerging markets including China are at greater risk of cybercrime, while the US government warned in November that the Chinese government was using advanced cyber-espionage techniques.
"With any hosted service you have to do due diligence, look at the system, and how it's being managed," said Andy Buss, senior analyst at Canalys.
Buss recommended that businesses either use a trusted local company, or one of the trusted larger providers such as IBM for hosted messaging services. The analyst added that as more staff start to rely on online tools, companies have to work out how to integrate tools and workflows.
Talkback
Guys, come to Hong Kong just once before you call it developing? More skyscrapers than manhattan, an airport ranked among the best in the world (makes the tom bradley international terminal in LAX look like a refugee camp), gigabit speed internet available to the home, for far cheaper rates than anywhere stateside etc etc.
Then - outblaze has always - over the past 12 years its been in business - and over the past 8 years that I have headed security and antispam there - been right up there at the top, respected in the international security and antispam community.
The Washington Post, Businessweek etc think Outblaze is good, and that I'm supposed to know what I'm talking about when I say we're good at security and antispam, not a random developing country ISP in a hotbed of cybercrime activity (wow what a mares nest that..)
Hell, even your own colleagues at ZDNET think we're not shadowy cybercriminals working for some random shady outfit.
http://news.cnet.com/Exterminating-the-nuisance-of-spam/2008-7349_3-6135649.html
oh wait, cnet not ziff davis .. but here are a few others on zdnet that have interviewed me. Take your pick of the rest of the articles here .. http://www.hserus.net/wiki/index.php/Media_Coverage
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39228023,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Technology-solution-to-slicing-spam-lags/0,130061744,139116683,00.htm
Journalistic standards do seem to be slipping badly. Not like a quick google search (or a visit to our website) ... wouldnt have given you all this information and more, before you wrote a scare piece claiming there's a huge cybercrime risk in IBM buying us?
Did you actually bother to ask any of my colleagues, or me, for a comment at all, before publishing this?
srs
Suresh Ramasubramanian
Head, Antispam Operations, Outblaze Limited
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You are right, I didn't contact you for comment, and I apologise about that. However, the story was partly written using information from a press release from IBM and Outblaze -- there is information in the story that comes from Outblaze.
Businesses are worried about their content and intellectual property being hosted in locations that are unknown to them, and the story was written to reflect those concerns.
Yes, Hong Kong is highly developed and has a complex relationship with China.
a. That certainly werent in the press release
b. Werent quite accurate especially when applied to us
As you acknowledge, HKG is a quite developed place and yes, an autonomous region of china
However, if you look at cybercrime stats, HKG doesnt - at least now - have the sort of problem that mainland China has.
The last major problem was one where I helped to coordinate its mitigation as it happens
Read this article below if you wish, and my comments to the second article as well, to get some context.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/hk_the_most_unsafe_domains/
http://www.circleid.com/posts/anti_phishing_and_hong_kong/
And that said, while we happen to be headquartered in Hong Kong, we are emphatically not a hong kong or even a mainland chinese firm in terms of our operations, or our clientele, or our user base.
Our customers are spread around the world. And they at least havent had any cause to complain of our track record about handling cybercrime / spam, nor about this little habit I have of building bridges with and working alongside as many people and groups as I can, spread across government, industry and individual tech experts .. without that coordination, and without the respect those other people / groups hold me, and hold my employer in, I wouldnt be able to do my job at all. That's a concept I've extended in my work ccnsulting with the OECD and ITU on spam and botnets.
Just wanted to set the record straight. That article impugned my personal reputation - something I've tied to the reputation of my employer as being proactive and taking a leading role in antispam operations.
regards
srs
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Individual companies may well be spotless - and I don't think anyone's got reason to think anything less of your company or your reputation! -- but there are many factors that, I think, do reasonably affect people's perceptions of hosted enterprise services based outside Europe and the USA.
The regulatory and governmental environments there are different and to some extent harder to understand - and when even the US and UK governments are fomenting warrantless digital wiretaps and invoking state security as an excuse to get at lots of data, it's even harder to be confident of states with different traditions.
As for the Hong Kong/China issue, my experiences have been that the connections between companies based in either or both territories, with clients and official connectiosn in both, are complex indeed. Complexity breeds concern - especially these days, when complexity has been shown to have been a major factor in the economic turbulence we're currently enjoying.
These are valid concerns. The answer is as much openness, co-operation and transparency as possible, something with which you seem to agree!
Rupert
Hong Kong has an entirely separate set of regulators (and regulatory frameworks) - these mostly in line with what APEC suggests. As I said, entirely different from the environment you see in Mainland China (where I do tend to agree with you on its complexity).
Having dealt with Hong Kong and Mainland companies besides companies around the world, I am not at all sure that you'd see a difference (beyond what loosely gets termed "cultural") between a Hong Kong firm, a Singapore (say) firm, an Australian firm etc.
That said, raising fearful strawman arguments about cybercrime to bolster a fear of outsourcing, or even dealing with a firm in a country outside your own, is just not on.
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