Today’s topics include CEO Ginni Rometty detailing the value of IBM being “underneath” consumers’ services, and FireEye updating its server email security platform for advanced threats.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty took the stage last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and claimed that while consumers may not know it, they rely on IBM “being underneath” a wide variety of services. She supported her claim by detailing IBM’s pioneering advances in cloud, quantum computing, Watson artificial intelligence and blockchain, among other areas.
To help her case, she received assistance from executives representing name brand consumer-facing enterprises, including ExxonMobil and Walmart. IBM Cloud provides the foundation for the ExxonMobil’s Speedpass+, a personalization service that enables customers to pay for gas and car washes with their mobile devices.
Meanwhile, Charles Redfield, executive vice president of food for Walmart U.S., discussed how IBM’s Food Trust initiative uses blockchain technology to transparently ensure food freshness and safety. The effort has attracted about 50 enterprises, including Walmart, Carrefour and Kroger.
FireEye launched on Jan. 9 the FireEye Email Security – Server Edition 8.2 release, providing organizations with new capabilities to detect advanced email threats, including executive impersonation, which is often referred to as Business Email Compromise.
FireEye has also integrated the MalwareGuard machine learning technology from its Endpoint security platform to help protect email systems against evolving risks. Additionally, the core detection sandbox within FireEye Email Security has been improved to help organizations customize the technology for their own specific environment.
Ken Bagnall, vice president of email security at FireEye, emphasized that the primary goal with FireEye Email Security 8.2 is to catch threats that are not being caught by other means or technology and to deal with the mitigation techniques that attackers have used to bypass email security services in the past.