Tej Kohli Business Blog

I came across an article on internetnews.com. Read the latest story on the Tej Kohli Blog.

 AVG Technologies is the latest antivirus vendor to beef up its security suite to cover as wide a range of threats as possible by including link-scanning technology it acquired late last year.

AVG (which changed its name from Grisoft earlier this year) isn’t as well known in the U.S. as Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro, but it has a huge international presence, particularly in Europe where it is based. It consistently scores very high in antivirus tests against known threats, but its tests against zero-day threats are a little more inconsistent.

That’s one area it’s working to overcome, and one step in the process was the December acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs, developer of LinkScanner, a utility that scans the links of search results on Google, Yahoo and other search engines to check for hidden malware behind the link. While the company is also working on its heuristics to catch as-yet undiscovered viruses, it’s also trying to help users avoid infection in the first place.

In addition to the LinkScanner Web checking, AVG Internet Security 8.0 offers a considerable performance improvement thanks to being rewritten for multi-core processors and combining its two separate virus and spyware databases into a single database. It also sports a whole new UI and offers scanning of any file transfers over the HTTP protocol, since that’s how most infections come into a computer.

Between the link checker and HTTP scanning, AVG believes “we’ve done all the things we need to do for today’s threats,” said Bridwell.

AVG Internet Security 8.0 also adds protection to Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers against so-called drive-by downloads, protects file exchanges over MSN and ICQ instant messengers, comes with a new firewall and a new anti-rootkit shield.

AVG Internet Security 8.0 is available for download starting February 28, at a cost of $54.99 for a one-year license and $79.99 for a two-year license.

Tej Kohli quotes an InternetNews article on Stocks.

Stocks soared Monday on news that bond insurers will hold onto their top credit ratings, at least for now.

The major indexes shot higher in the afternoon and finished with gains of more 1% after Standard & Poors reaffirmed the credit ratings of MBIA and Ambac Financial, removing a big cloud hanging over financial markets. Credit downgrades for the companies could have touched off another round of losses for troubled credit markets.

Dell gained 3% ahead of its results, which are due out after the close on Thursday.

Take-Two Interactive soared more than 50% after Electronic Arts made a hostile bid for the company, and Getty Images gained 29% on a private equity buyout.

Google was a notable laggard, falling 4%, possibly on reports that Microsoft is testing a new online ad effectiveness tool.

Apple managed to finish with a small gain despite a BMO downgrade on slowing iPod and iPhone demand. Juniper was up 5% on an RBC upgrade. Smith Micro fell 12% on a JP Morgan downgrade.

Marvell was up 6% on a positive Barron’s piece.

The Nasdaq rose 24 to 2347, the S&P gained 18 to 1371, and the Dow soared 189 to 12,570. Volume rose to 3.87 billion shares on the NYSE, and declined to 2.16 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 25-7 margin on the NYSE, and 20-9 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 84% on the NYSE, and 81% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 83-84 on the NYSE, and 58-124 on the Nasdaq.

Grafix founder Tej Kohli, a well known e-commerce expert trained his employees on mobile Internet. Tej Kohli explained all the ins and outs of how to use the wireless Internet as a mobile marketplace. If you’re also confused by that concept, then you’re exactly the type of person Tej Kohli loves to help. 

“There’s lots of big words involved with this that many old-school business minds don’t know how to grasp, but I think our success speaks for itself as a great place to go to for advice, support and implementation of online sales plans,” says Kohli. “We help people with everything from strategic planning and impact analysis through solution design and implementing those solutions.” Having more than 150 highly trained colleagues, Tej Kohli is proud of the bustling atmosphere within the Grafix headquarters. And he’s even prouder of the fact that the company has grown so big it maintains another branch all the way over in the Central American nation of Costa Rica. “We’re really expanding because we’re now seen as one of the go-to companies for quick and easily  understandable answers,” says Kohli. “It’s a big world out there and we feel confident that we’re ready to conquer the market.” 

Stocks finished modestly lower Friday, as weak New York state manufacturing and consumer sentiment reports and disappointing results from Best Buy did little to encourage buyers ahead of the long holiday weekend.

The tech sector closed lower despite big gains for Priceline.com and Brocade on their quarterly results, as slowdown fears and a chilly reception for NetSuite’s first public earnings report weighed on the sector.

Priceline shares soared 21% after the company beat estimates, and Brocade was up 13% on its results and an upgrade.

But NetSuite fell 10% after its first earnings report as a public company left investors fretting about decelerating growth. The company said it expects to grow sales more than 40% this year, in line with Wall Street expectations but less than last year’s 55% growth rate.

Best Buy fell 2.5% after lowering its 2008 earnings forecast amid softening demand, which weighed on shares of Amazon.com.

Hittite Microwave and Arris Group lost more than 30% on their results.

Intel, Cisco and Apple were among the tech leaders trading lower on the day.

HP gained 1.4% ahead of its earnings report due out after the close on Tuesday. Analysts are looking for 10% sales growth to $27.6 billion and earnings of 81 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial. The report will be a critical one for analysts trying to assess the health of IT spending.

The Nasdaq lost 10 to 2321, the S&P added 1 to 1350, and the Dow slipped 28 to 12,348. Volume declined to 3.58 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.05 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 18-14 margin on the NYSE, and 18-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 51% on the NYSE, and 68% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 18-128 on the NYSE, and 38-149 on the Nasdaq.

The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Indian IT space are confident of achieving 65 per cent growth in the next two years, surpassing 43 per cent growth rate posted for the last two years, according to a study from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B).

The study titled “Emerging IT SMEs of India 2007,” provides insights into 244 IT companies involved in providing software and hardware products and services. All the companies profiled were in the below-Rs 100 million-turnover bracket during the previous fiscal year.

The study notes that close to 53 percent of companies faced moderate problems in acquiring funding and 43 percent felt the proposed withdrawal of tax sops for the IT, ITeS and the BPO industry by 2009, will be significant in terms of deciding future industry growth.

Of the 437 locations, from which these 244 companies operate, Bangalore and Mumbai emerged as the top locations for operations. 18 percent and 17.6 percent of the profiled companies were operating from these two cities, respectively.

The overseas presence of 28 percent of the sample audience encapsulated the changing trend in the SMEs perspective, which are now willing to cross borders to pursue growth. Companies with Rs 10-50 million turnover accounted for almost 50 percent of the profiled companies.

The key findings of the study indicate that thirty-three per cent of companies offered IT services as well as software products. Custom application development and IT consulting are the two software services. 36 percent of the companies are looking at tier - II cities such as Nagpur, Surat, Guwhati and Chandigarh to develop centers; IT SMEs derive bulk of their revenues from the domestic market and only 35 per cent of the companies are involved in exports. Exports are mainly to the APAC region; thus IT SMEs are fairly insulated from the rupee appreciation while wage inflation, high attrition and withdrawal of tax sops remain topmost concerns for IT SMEs.

Kaushal Sampat, COO of D&B India, said, “Despite the strong growth prospects, the IT SME sector is witnessing several challenges such as the acute shortage of skilled manpower, which is mostly faced by IT SMEs located in Tier-II and Tier-III cities.”

Symantec has released is second-annual Risk Assessment survey and the results show that the definition of “risk” is expanding, as are the threats facing IT.

The survey of 405 IT managers, undertaken between February and November 2007, found that their top concern is network availability — with 78 percent citing it as a business-critical or serious risk.

The finding marked the first time that network availability surpassed security among IT managers’ concerns.

Security, which 70 percent of IT managers said was business-critical or a serious concern, was followed by performance (68 percent) and compliance (60 percent).

“That told us two things: respondents are taking a broader view of IT risk and what constitutes it and they are shifting away from just a security-oriented view to one of availability, compliance and performance,” said Jennie Grimes, senior director of Symantec’s IT risk management program office.

But while IT managers’ concerns are multiplying, confidence in their ability to keep a reign on things is slipping. More than half, 53 percent, said they expected a major IT incident related to those four issues.

Yet only a third said they had good management, configurations and backup plans.

Part of the reason for this is due to risk’s increasing scope. A year ago, the industry considered risk incident to be hacking attacks. Now, the term includes human error — like losing a laptop or backup tape, failing an internal audit and poor-performing applications.

The other problem is that with so many laptops being lost or stolen and insecure technologies, ranging from instant messenger to USB thumb drives, entering the workplace, IT is getting away from the people who live by it.

“I do believe the infrastructures are getting more complicated and I do believe that the notion of the perimeter of the network — traditionally having been a physical thing — is shifting to the human being and is causing complexity to increase,” Grimes said.

One possible reason for the drop in confidence is that the definition of IT and its influence on companies have also grown — so much so that IT has become the lifeblood of firms.

In recent years, the discussion among C-level executives has been how IT is expected to drive profits. Now the situation is beyond that, where companies simply can’t function without it.

“Organizations are realizing how much they rely on IT,” Grimes said.

For example, she said she noticed that many large firms now have a new executive in the ranks, the vice president of IT risk management, whose job is to deal with risks to the IT infrastructure.

Grimes said she’s met about 40 now, all relatively new to the position.

What’s different about them is that they all report to different superiors. Some report to the CIO or chief information security officer, some to legal and others to auditing and the controller. A few even report to the board of directors, she said.

“When you see that kind of range, that shows most organizations understand that it has to have an owner or a driver of risk assessment in the organization, but most of them are still grappling with how to empower that singular owner,” she added. “They know it has to be one person who holds the reigns but there is a lack of clarity of their responsibility.”

The way to get management to respond, they have learned, is to talk in business terms, she said.

“I do think in the coming year you will see things around this enablement discussion,” Grimes said. “Some of that will be IT risk managers realizing they have to change their language.”

One such example: An IT risk management executive may report a poor-performing e-commerce server in technical terms — such as describing the slower response, the inability to handle large numbers of customers, or some kind of benchmark. That doesn’t work.

But when the IT risk management officer says the company loses about five percent of sales due to a poor performing server, “then you have their attention.”