IBM overtook Japan’s Trend Micro Inc to become the world’s No. 3 provider of security software last year, after acquiring cybersecurity firm Trusteer, according to market share data released on Tuesday by Gartner.

Symantec Corp and Intel Corp’s McAfee retained their slots as the top two makers of security software in a market whose sales last year rose 4.9 percent to $19.9 billion (11.8 billion pounds), according to the annual survey by the Connecticut-based research firm.

IBM’s revenue from security software climbed 19 percent to $1.14 billion last year, Gartner said. In a deal announced last August, IBM paid close to $1 billion for Trusteer, whose products help businesses fight malicious software and cyber fraud, as part of an effort to boost its line of security offerings.

Meanwhile, Trend Micro’s sales dropped 5.3 percent to $1.11 billion, according to the Gartner survey.

Symantec’s revenue fell 0.3 percent to $3.7 billion. The company replaced its CEO in March, marking the second time it has replaced its leader in two years as its board looks to stimulate revenue growth and its stock price.

McAfee’s revenue rose 3.9 percent to $1.7 billion. EMC Corp, which owns RSA Security, saw revenue climb 5.9 percent to $760 million, putting it into the No. 5 slot in the market, according to Gartner’s survey.

Electric lights are 135 years old. The Internet is 45. They’re finally getting connected.

To demonstrate how the Internet is changing one of the oldest and least exciting technology businesses around, Shane De Lima, an engineer at Philips Lighting, took out his smartphone. A flick across the screen sent a message to a nearby Wi-Fi router and then to a wireless hub, which shot a radio command to a chip in the base of an LED lamp in front of us.

A moment later, the conference room where we were sitting darkened.

It may seem like Rube Goldberg’s idea of how to turn off a light. Or it could be the beginning of how lighting companies such as Philips find their way from selling lighting hardware into networks, software, apps, and new kinds of services.

Because LEDs are solid-state devices that emit light from a semiconductor chip, they already sit on a circuit board. That means they can readily share space with sensors, wireless chips, and a small computer, allowing light fixtures to become networked sensor hubs.

For example, last year Philips gave outside developers access to the software that runs its Hue line of residential LED lights. Now it’s possible to download Goldee, a smartphone app that turns your house the color of a Paris sunset, or Ambify, a $2.99 app created by a German programmer that makes the lights flash to music as in a jukebox.

That’s a very different kind of business from selling light bulbs, as Philips has done since 1891. “With the new digitization of light, we have only begun to scratch the surface on how we can control it, integrate it with other systems, and collect rich data,” says Brian Bernstein, Philips’s global head of indoor lighting systems.

Another look at how lighting systems are changing will emerge this November, when a 14-story regional headquarters for Deloitte, nearing completion in Amsterdam, will be festooned with networked LEDs in each fixture—the first such installation for Philips.

Each of 6,500 light fixtures will have an IP address and five sensors—all of them wired only to Ethernet cables. (They’ll use “power over Ethernet” technology to deliver the juice to each fixture as well as data.) The fixtures include a light sensor to dim the LEDs during the day, and a motion detector that covers the area directly beneath each light and turns the light off when no one is there. “We expect to spend 70 percent less on light, because systems [give] us much more control,” says Erik Ubels, chief information officer at Deloitte in the Netherlands. Additional sensors in the LED fixtures can monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and heat, turning the lights into a kind of building-management system.

Prices for LEDs are high but falling quickly. A “dumb” LED that puts out as much light as a $1.25 incandescent bulb now sells for $9 (but uses one-sixth the energy and lasts much longer). That’s down from $40 each a couple of years ago. A connected LED bulb from Philips’s Hue line retails in the U.S. for $59. But these will get cheaper, too. Philips says a third of its lighting revenue now comes from LEDs, and about 1.7 percent from the newer LEDs that can connect to the Internet.

Many other uses are being explored. A department store in Dusseldorf, Germany, is using LEDs to send out light frequencies that communicate with shoppers’ smartphones. Philips has placed street lights in Barcelona that react to how many people are strolling by.

(Reuters) – Apple Inc is preparing to sell its first wearable device this October, aiming to produce 3 million to 5 million smartwatches a month in its initial run, the Nikkei reported on Friday, citing an unidentified parts supplier and sources familiar with the matter.

Specifications are still being finalized, but the devices are likely to sport curved OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays and sensors that collect health data from blood glucose and calorie consumption to sleep activity, the Japanese news service cited industry sources as saying.

The industry has long expected Apple to unveil some sort of smartwatch, following the release of Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Gear watches.

Wall Street is hoping to see a new Apple product this year to galvanize the former stock market darling’s share price and end a years-long drought of ground-breaking devices. CEO Tim Cook has promised “new product categories” in 2014.

Apple declined to comment.

Kim Stallknecht for The New York TimesA quantum computer without its protective thermal canister. The kind of computing D-Wave pursues seeks to define a problem’s answer in terms of an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities.

In a paper published on arXiv.org, researchers from University College London, and the University of Southern Californiacompared the data obtained from a D-Wave computer with three possible explanations from classical physics, and one from the type of quantum computing that D-Wave is pursuing. None of the classical outcomes fit the data, while the quantum outcome fit the data from the machine.

If proved out, the results will be a significant boost for D-Wave, a 13-year-old company that has won contracts with Lockheed Martinand a joint research endeavor by Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as significant skepticism from many academic quantum physicists. Taking an applied approach sharply different from that previously tried by most academics, D-Wave has reported computing gains vastly better than anyone else.

Scientists at D-Wave, which is based in British Columbia, were quick to cheer the results.

“This is analogous with the transition from classical physics to relativity,” said Colin Williams, a quantum physicist who serves as D-Wave’s director of business development. “This slays the objections.”

Not entirely. “What I think is going on here is that they didn’t model the ‘noise’ correctly,” said Umesh Vazirani, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was referring to possible distortions to the data caused by a technique in the experiment that effectively turned up the temperature, affecting the behavior of qubits. “One should have a little more respect with the truth.”

Quantum computing proposes to solve problems using properties of quantum physics that differ from the classical understanding of matter. In quantum physics, subatomic particles can inhabit a range of states, even at the same time, and appear to affect one another over great distances – even, it is posited, across different universes.

The kind of computing D-Wave pursues seeks to define a problem’s answer in terms of an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities. This is analogous to the way a plant uses quantum processes to efficiently harvest sunlight for carbohydrates in photosynthesis

Mr. Vazirani seemed more charitable to D-Wave than in the past. In January, he and others published a paper of their own that indicated D-Wave had not cracked quantum computing. Since then, he said, “after talking with them I feel a lot better about them. They are working hard to prove quantum computing.”

In a paper also published on arXiv.org in January, scientists from D-Wave, U.S.C., and the University of British Columbia said they had found evidence in their machine of quantum entanglement, which is when one unit, or qubit, can affect another without direct contact.

“None of the classical models show what D-Wave hardware does,” said Mr. Williams.

While the controversy has gone on for years, it may reach an end within a year or two. Mr. Williams said that in April, D-Wave will be conducting experiments with a machine managing over 1,000 qubits, about twice the number currently inside its best machine.

A 2,000-qubit machine is scheduled for the end of the year, and will be ready for experiments within a few months after that. If D-Wave can rapidly solve the kind of large problems a machine like that is expected to, that would perhaps be the most persuasive evidence possible that we have entered a new computing era.

Mon Mar 24, 2014 7:21am EDT

Security software maker Palo Alto Networks Inc (PANW.N) said it agreed to buy privately-held Israeli cybersecurity company Cyvera for about $200 million to expand its offerings that protect businesses from cyber attacks.

Palo Alto said the deal would close in the second half of its fiscal year 2014.

Palo Alto said Cyvera’s software – which protects businesses from cyber threats by blocking unknown, zero-day attacks – would help its customers to safely enable applications and protect them against threats on any device, across any network.

Zero-day cyber attacks exploit a vulnerability in computer systems and networks known only to the attacker.

Tel Aviv-based Cyvera has 55 employees, Palo Alto said.

(Reporting by Soham Chatterjee in Bangalore; Editing by Kirti Pandey)

Cisco said it will spend the amount to build data centers to help run the new service called Cisco Cloud Services.

Cisco, which mainly deals in networking hardware, wants to take advantage of companies’ desire to rent computing services rather than buying and maintaining their own machines.

The company said it plans to deliver the service with and through partners including Australian telecom service provider Telstra, tech distributor Ingram Micro Inc, and Indian IT company Wipro Ltd.

“Customers, providers and channel partners … want to rapidly deploy valuable enterprise-class cloud experiences for key customers — all while mitigating the risk of capital investment,” Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales, said in a statement.

Cisco’s plans were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Enterprise hardware spending is dwindling across the globe as companies cope with shrinking budgets, slowing or uncertain economies and a fundamental migration to cloud computing, which reduces demand for equipment by outsourcing data management and computing needs.

Microsoft Corp last year said it was cutting prices for hosting and processing customers’ online data in an aggressive challenge to Amazon’s lead in the growing business of cloud computing.

Shares of Cisco, which closed at $21.64 on Friday on the Nasdaq, were up 0.28 percent at $21.70 in pre-market trading on Monday.

(Reporting by Arnab Sen and Supriya Kurane in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Savio D’Souza)