Mass Mauls Maxx and Marshalls

Have you been following the hemorrhaging of confidential customer data from the veins of careless companies of late? We at Ipswitch sure have. Recently, local retailer TJX, parent company of TX Maxx and the locally beloved Maashalls, reported a data breach and the resultant loss of customer credit card numbers to parties unknown. A week later, they reported that the breach was worse than previously believed, while some reported that up to 30% of New Englanders might be affected. And those are all links from Network World, you wouldn’t believe what the local press have to say about it.

This urge to merge makes me want to purge

As I often do on the morning drive, I was listening to NPR’s Morning Edition on good old fashioned FM radio. Not a podcast, not on satellite. Call me a luddite. Anyway, the point is that I heard an item that made me want to pull over and bang my head against an ice-coated snow bank. But this is Massachusetts and the breakdown lane is not for nervous breakdowns – or even for stopping – so I drove on to blog about it.

A rising CSCO lifts some boats

I’m sure we won’t be accused of pump and dump by tipping our hat with some admiration at Cisco’s earnings report yesterday in which they reported a 41% increase in earnings. Accoridng to CEO John Chambers the results came in better than expected. I say, good for Cisco. They are providing the infrastructure that runs networks and somehow avoiding commoditization. Last week I was at their Networkers event in France, and it was packed with people who had paid hundreds maybe thousands of Euro to attend sessions all about Cisco gear and protocols.

In addition, CNN reports that Cisco’s good news brought increases in the value the stock of such firms as Intel, Juniper, and HP.