Passlogix, an enterprise software company focused on simplifying access to company resources, is announcing an authentication product which will allow users to log on to Windows with any type of identification device–including national ID badges, access cards, one-time password tokens, and biometrics. The product, v-GO Universal Authentication Manager, utilizes the customers’ existing infrastructure while also leveraging corporate directories; thus lowering the total cost of ownership from an average of $150 per user to $15.

Larry Ellison isn’t the only one who has his reservations regarding the legitimacy of cloud computing. Synctus, a bootstrapped Manchester-based startup, is emerging from stealth with the introduction of a hardware product aimed at increasing the speed and efficiency of sharing files between different offices of the same company.

Keeping tabs on the performance of an SMB’s network is a necessary, and often laborious, task. System admins need to be able to know if and where problems are occurring on their network. Network monitoring tools are useful because they can alert a user when a pipe is clogged; however, receiving an alert will not help a system admin identify the source of the clog. Packet analyzers solve this problem when used for specific links, but deploying and monitoring them throughout an entire network would exceed most SMB’s resources given the overhead. As a result, many companies are turning to flow analyzers, which capture and process data from flow technologies, such as Cisco’s NetFlow and sFlow, to monitor their network.

Plixer International, a company devoted to measuring network performance, is deploying significant updates to its SaaS flow analysis tool, Scrutinizer. The updates are designed to save system administrators time by creating a new reporting tool, the matrix, as well as by correlating data across the routers and switches; instead of simply giving views from individual routers. Additionally, the updates will provide statistics from Cisco ASA firewalls and have full support for NBAR definitions.

As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.

Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged.

When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers.

Lotus Notes is still a widely used platform with a user base of over 145 million. Their relevancy, however, is declining rapidly due to the increased popularity of Google Apps and Microsoft hosted email, which are lauded as more user-friendly and convenient. Synaptris, through the deployment of their Lotus Notes add-on FewClix, hopes to remedy these common complaints. With an advanced search function, addition of a grouping feature, and a way to personalize your mailbox, FewClix hopes to make Lotus Notes more efficient.

Achieving Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance for online transactions is an expensive and timely endeavor; routinely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and spanning several quarters to reach the desired status. In fact, according to Gartner, PCI compliance will cost up to an average of $2.7 million among Level 1 merchants and $267,000 among Level 2 merchants. Further, Visa and Mastercard will be imposing new PCI requirements upon online merchants, which will include more frequent on and off site security reviews, beginning in 2010; thus forcing more companies to upgrade their systems to meet compliance standards.

The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.

Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info.

Relaxed, a stealth startup centered around Apache CouchDB has raised $2 million from Redpoint Ventures according to an SEC filing and confirmed by CEO Damien Katz. Three original authors of Apache CouchDB–Damien Katz, J. Chris Anderson, and Jan Lehnardt–are listed as Executive Officers of the company.

For those who are unfamiliar, CouchDB is a free open source indexable document database server which uses Javascript as a query language. CouchDB is designed for the reporting and storage of large amounts of semi-structured, document oriented data, unlike SQL databases which store and report on very structured and correlated data.

Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.

A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products.

A new white paper authored by Digital Fuel, based off of a study conducted by IDG Research Services, states that over half of IT managers believe their current level of IT cost visibility is lacking and needs improvement. Given that 84% of those polled said that having detailed insight into IT costs is critical, this discrepancy is quite jarring.

The study, based on a sample of over 130 respondents who had direct involvement with managing IT costs and had IT budgets of over $10 million, showcased the fact that IT organizations have a hard time coming up with ways to manage their IT costs. In particular, those surveyed believe that defining a cost-model and breaking down their IT costs in various manners were the most difficult. Additionally, those polled stated they wanted a better way to identify and assess cost inefficiencies in their IT departments as well as giving their business units more information to control their IT demand.

Nuxeo, an Enterprise Content Management company founded in 2000, announced today the release of their newest product, Nuxeo Document Management 5.3. This product comes replete with integration of OpenSocial initiatives, Windows Sharepoint Support services, improved search functions, and CMIS support.

Nuxeo’s newest release aims to please the demands of customers who need an all-inclusive solution to the management of digital content while simultaneously incorporating social business applications. The introduction of OpenSocial support to Nuxeo DM 5.3 allows users to create gadgets to use within enterprise applications. Nuxeo DM 5.3 can be used as an OpenSocial container, allowing for enterprise mashups with products such as Atlassian’s Jira, as well as being a publisher of gadgets.

If you disagreed with the views Larry Ellison expressed a few weeks ago regarding cloud computing and its future, you weren’t alone. Today, banking on the future success of cloud computing, Dell and Salesforce.com announced a new line of cloud based solutions for small and medium sized businesses to enhance the effectiveness of customer relationship management applications.

Zyrion, a Sunnyvale based provider of Business Service Management (BSM) products, announced today the integration of Network Flow Analysis capabilities into their latest product, Traverse 5.0. Traverse allows its users to drill down into the performance of their IT services in real-time; thus enabling IT and business personnel to not only identify which devices are down or impacted, but also see which business services are compromised.

This new iteration of Traverse includes what Zyrion calls a RealView Dashboard. This feature allows users to see any IT metric in real-time through the use of graphs, tables and charts. These IT metrics can then be compared, using a customized dashboard, to a slew of business services metrics. This feature makes Traverse useful to IT admins and managers alike. For instance, while an IT admin may only be interested in the performance of services on the infrastructure like the up-time of a specific server, a manager can use this information in conjunction with the features in the RealView Dashboard, and look at the dollar impact of the server’s downtime.