New Oracle center to tackle homeland defense

From...

By Dan Verton

(IDG) -- Oracle Corp. is building an Information Assurance Center at its offices in Reston, Virginia, and has hired a veteran CIA officer to lead it.

Company executives said the aim is for the center to eventually become a security research and development lab for the IT industry as a whole.

Oracle plans to complete by year's end construction of the facility that will house the center. The company is currently in discussions with government agencies, universities and major systems integrators to establish a cooperative research and development relationship that Oracle customers can tap into for assistance with enterprise security.

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The center will serve as a one-stop shop for expertise on incident prevention, detection and crisis management, and will provide a test bed for new approaches to security, business continuity and disaster recovery, officials said.

The plan is to eventually extend the reach of the center beyond Oracle's customer base and make it a security research laboratory that will "advance the state of the art in information security," said Tim Hoechst, senior vice president of technology at Oracle Service Industries.

"My hope is that this becomes more of an industry security center rather than an Oracle technology center and that it expands to all aspects of security -- from physical security to database security, and everything in between," said Hoechst.

Oracle, whose name was derived from a 1979 CIA development project, has hired David Carey, a 34-year veteran of the CIA and the agency's former executive director, to head the new center. Carey is credited with playing a major role in revitalizing the agency's clandestine and analysis capabilities. He also expanded the CIO role at the CIA from simply a technology manager to the agency's IT service provider.

As executive director, "you do everything from strategic planning to emptying the waste baskets," said Carey, who was about to be reassigned overseas when he decided it was time for a challenge in the private sector. Carey entered discussions with Oracle last spring and officially joined the company September 4.

New Trend

The announcement of Oracle's new center came on the heels of IBM's formation of IBM Global Security Services. Analysts view both moves as a post-September 11 push by vendors to take advantage of the burgeoning government security market.

It's a trend that's moving in the right direction, said James Governor, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, New Hampshire "This kind of cross-organization coordination will become increasingly important," said Governor. "A distributed world requires distributed approaches to security."

"It's voracity, elevated by the recent congressional allocation and by wartime consumption, [that] makes government the right market for vendors to target right now," said Phil Russom, an independent analyst in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been touting his company's security expertise. Only weeks after he pledged to give the government free software for a national identification card (see story), Ellison challenged the hacker community during the recent Comdex conference in Las Vegas to break into the Oracle9i database, which, he said, is "unbreakable." Ellison also emphasized 14 security certifications that Oracle has received from the federal government.