The Laundroid will respond to limited voice control through integration with Cerevo’s Lumigent desk lamp. Save
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It's been awhile since we've heard about Laundroid , the laundry folding robot that will make lazy people swoon. Now, parent company Seven Dreamers has announced a new partnership that could make your laundry-related life even easier. Seven Dreamers is partnering with Cerevo, a company that focuses on IoT and connected devices in Japan and across the world, to bring voice control technology to Laundroid. But there's a catch: As of the announcement date, it won't work with Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant or any other widely used voice control service. Instead, Laundroid will only work with Cerevo's Lumigent, a desk lamp that responds to voice control. "Lumigent lights up automatically when spoken to. The integration will enable Lumigent to command the basic Laundroid operations," says the press release . Pricing on the lamp isn't available, but it will likely set you back between $400 and $700 . It's not clear what other IoT devices, if any, that Laundroid will connect with (it comes with onboard WiFi and is controlled by an app), though presumably Seven Dreamers is working on further integration. Adding insult to injury, Laundroid is ridiculously expensive —the first-run units are expected to be priced around 1.85 million yen, which is roughly $16,500. The company is accepting limited reservations for units in Japan starting today. While adding new features and integrations such as voice control is a good idea, doing so in such a limited, proprietary way is frustrating. Why not open the Laundroid for use with Siri, Amazon Alexa and the other voice control apps that people are already using? At such a high price point, it doesn't seem like that should be too much to ask.

Control this insane $16,000 laundry-folding robot with your voice

BeyondTrust announced today that it has acquired the assets of Database Activity Monitoring vendor Lumigent. Some of you are saying “Who?” Others, who have been around the DAM space a few years, shake your heads in dismay at what might have been. There was a time – way back in the 2004-2005 timeframe – that Lumigent had a clear leadership position in the Database Activity Monitoring space. They won many head-to-head sales engagements. They had a good sales and marketing team, the best Sarbanes-Oxley reports in the industry, the only viable auditing tool for Sybase, and the only platform that provided “before and after” query values. The latter was the hot feature for forensic audits and regulatory compliance, and every customer wanted it. Greylock, North Bridge, and NetIQ invested. Lumigent was a shining star in the nascent DAM market and they were making a name for themselves. Fast forward 6 years and we have an asset sale. That’s a politically correct term for fire sale. The kind where they’re selling the fixtures off the sinks. So how did it all go so very wrong? There was actually a long series of missteps, so we’ll discuss several major types of FAIL. It’s a classic example of how to plunge into the chasm, land in a fiery mess at the bottom, and get sold for scrap metal:
Strike One: Technology. Lumigent never capitalized on their technology lead. Their engineering team must have known that the triggers and stored procedures they used in the early days would not scale, even though early customers preferred them to native audit and tracing – which Lumigent then added to their mix! It seemed like Dumb and Dumber were managing their product roadmap. Sure, they improved data collection over time, but not enough; nor did they ever find a consistent strategy to collect events across all databases. Additionally, they focused on Sybase and MS SQL Server – to the exclusion of Oracle and IBM, who sell a few databases. Competitors quickly provided more – and better – collection options across all the major platforms. Competitors were easier to deploy and did not kill performance. Don’t get me started on the missed Vulnerability Assessment opportunity. Lest you forget, Lumigent acquired nTier, which was a bad assessment product. Nothing was structurally wrong with it, but it needed a lot of work on policies and reporting to be competitive. During the several years assessment was key to winning deals, Lumigent made no visible investments into the nTier technology. It only covered a couple databases, with only some of the needed policies for security or compliance, when it was acquired. They were not the only vendor stuck in the mud for a while, but the upshot is that they failed to upgrade their product to keep pace. Startups have to innovate, you know? Strike Two: Partnerships. Lumigent heavily courted Microsoft and Sybase. They geared their product strategy to work with these two database vendors to a fault. This helped early on, but both partners wanted far better auditing capabilities – specific to their respective database platforms – before they were willing to really get behind Lumigent. Behind the scenes Lumigent thought acquisition was a sure thing. Not so much – Lumigent neither delivered, nor did they hedge their bets with a heterogenous solution. When Lumigent failed to provide better auditing, the rumored Microsoft and Sybase acquisitions halted, and both partners had conversations with just about every other DAM vendor. The recent partnership with Deltek was solid, but simply not enough to carry the company. They didn’t just count their chickens before they hatched, they counted them the first time the rooster made eye contact. Strike Three: Misunderstanding the market. Lumigent’s story shifted from Database Security; to Compliance; to Database Auditing Solutions for Compliance and Security; to Information Centric Security; to Application Governance, Risk & Compliance; and then back to DAM – each step worse than the one before. The App GRC strategy was the most surprising and saddest, as it looked like a desperate attempt to save the firm by re-inventing their market. I appreciated their ingenuity in repackaging DAM into something totally new, and admired the cojones management displayed with their willingness to walk away from their primary market, but I thought they were nuts. And I told them. Rich and I stopped short of begging Lumigent to reconsider their App GRC path, with at least a half dozen reasons it was a bad idea, along with practical experience about how Information Risk Management and GRC messaging missed DAM buying centers. A couple years later that horse died, and Lumigent was back to square one. Very few start-up firms get three strikes. What does this mean for BeyondTrust? The good news is that DAM extends the PowerBroker functionality, providing a means to detect misuse and compromised credentials. The PowerBroker product family is focused on credential and authorization management, but its value is the ability to delegate capabilities without distributing credentials, and fine-grained task-oriented authorization maps. Before the acquisition the PowerBroker platform was geared for preventative security. DAM provides detective capabilities along with a number of compliance reports deeply focused on the database layer. This gives BeyondTrust users some new toys to play with that improve security and broaden the product line. BeyondTrust surely acquired the assets for a song, so they really can’t lose here. And I like the vision. I hope they take a long look at how their customers will use the technology – a few strategic improvements would go a long way to improve customer satisfaction. But there is some bad news. First, the Lumigent technology is way behind the curve. For Database Activity Monitoring or Vulnerability Assessment, Lumigent cannot compete head-to-head against other established vendors. The technology lacks consistency and capabilities across the board, including data collection, database platform support, policies, and platform management. For most acquirers that wouldn’t matter – BeyondTrust can at least sell ‘new’ Lumigent functions to their existing accounts to enhance security within their existing product suite. But to offer real value to customers, the Lumigent DAM and VA capabilities must be fully integrated to leverage audit and assessment results to improve authorization mapping. Unfortunately that’s the second problem: how can BeyondTrust integrate the DAM piece with an access control and authorization suite, without stepping on Protegrity’s database intrusion detection patent (US 7120933)? I’m not a patent attorney and therefore not qualified to comment on the law, but as a security technologist it looks like fully integrating BeyondTrust’s products would yield something remarkably similar to Protegrity’s patent. So what does this mean for the DAM market, which still grows at a healthy rate? Not much. Many Lumigent customers have switched to new products, or been looking at other solutions for a while. The technology has simply not kept up with the competition, and with holes in both functionality and platform support. That’s not to say the technology is non-viable, but it cannot become a class leader. In with a bang and out with a whimper, Lumigent is the sixth DAM vendor to be acquired, following IPLocks (Fortinet), Guardium (IBM), Secerno (Oracle), Tizor (IBM via Netezza), and Sentrigo (McAfee). —Adrian Lane

BeyondTrust Acquires Lumigent Assets

The M&A train gathers steam in the security space. With Lumigent’s assets off the table, the TripWire buy, Sophos/Astaro, and RSA/NetWitness, it seems the busiest guys in town are the investment bankers. VMware has joined the parade by buying configuration management player Shavlik , ostensibly to facilitate the adoption of virtualization in the SMB market segment, though we believe that oversimplifies VMware’s ambition to be a one-stop shop for all things virtual infrastructure. This is actually an interesting deal, particularly considering GigaOm’s excellent VMware is the New Microsoft, Just Without an OS . Think about that for a second. As Microsoft started attacking the enterprise with LAN Manager and then more specifically Windows 2K, their success was accelerated by offering seamless management of the server(s). Enterprise customers scoffed at Microsoft System Manager because it wasn’t OpenView or UniCenter, but it provided small customers with what they needed to lay down a foundation of Microsoft servers. In the small business segment, seamless management is critical thanks to the limited IT resources. And that will be a gating factor to adoption of virtualization in small companies as well. So decisively taking that issue off the table is a smart move for VMware. The ability to claim some security goodness is a bonus. You have to tip your hat to Mark and the rest of the team at Shavlik. They built the company without outside investment by focusing on a core market and not straying from it, even as Shavlik’s more enterprise-focused competitors, such as BigFix (IBM) and ConfigureSoft (EMC), were taken out by big IT players. Shavlik stayed focused on Windows environments, adding anti-virus and power management to the mix within the same management construct. They also invested heavily in spinning a SaaS management service to appeal to small companies (under 100 employees). If you look at Shavlik from an enterprise standpoint, as many of us are guilty of, they don’t measure up. But as VMware looks to go downmarket with virtualization Shavlik is a great fit. But we still need to assess the technology within the context of the entire virtual infrastructure. On one side they might be planning on adding it to VShield Endpoint to enhance VM configuration and tracking  – little things like making sure the instance you spin up was patched while in storage, and updates weren’t just applied to VMs running at the time. Or maybe they will skew this more towards managing virtual desktops. Or both. To assume they will only use Shavlik as a lever to get into SMB would be to downplay VMware’s grand ambition. With some R&D investment Shavlik’s technology could be extended to other platforms. And probably needs to be, because a technology like configuration management is core to managing this next wave of hybrid virtual/cloud data centers. VMware has plenty of options for integrating Shavlik, and most inevitably lead to impinging on the territory of its partners. Initially they won’t risk alienating HP, IBM, or EMC, who are significant partners for VMware. But at the end of the day all the Big IT players are competing to control the virtualization/cloud platform and infrastructure. VMware is clearly building itself out as a one-stop virtual infrastructure shop. It’s too early to see how it will fully play out, and a lot of organizations are using multiple virtualization and cloud providers to tackle different parts of the problem (servers, desktops, big iron, etc.). But ultimately, in most market segments, the player that provides the most effective platform will gain the largest market share. And that means they all need to field complete product lines. Which they will, keeping the investment bankers busy. —Mike Rothman

VMWare buys Shavlik: One Stop Shop for Virtual Infrastructure?

Deltek is a global provider of enterprise software and information solutions for government contractors, professional services firms, and other project-based businesses. It helps organizations research and identify opportunities, win new business, recruit and develop talent, optimize resources, streamline operations, and deliver more profitable projects. The company was founded in 1983 and is based in Herndon, Virginia.

Deltek

`` Deltek , Inc. 's Costpoint system is unquestionably the leading back and front-office solution that government contractors rely on to run their businesses , '' said Paul Campaniello , Lumigent 's Vice President of Marketing .

Deltek Partners with Lumigent to Deliver Governance, Risk, and Compliance Solution for Government Contractors.
Deltek Press Releases - deltek partners with lumigent to deliver governance, risk, and compliance solution for government contractors

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