Microsoft has debuted the cooking of a security-management platform codenamed Oxygen. For this, the Redmond company hired Mark Curphey, as the new head of the ACE Services in Europe. The work of the Application Consulting & Engineering Team over at Microsoft is intimately connected to application performance, security and privacy engineering. But Curphey, former Chief Technology Officer of SourceClear, will also lead the development efforts for Oxygen. In fact, Oxygen is the brain child of Curphey, and will grow under the Microsoft umbrella, now that the security expert has joined up with the company.

"I wanted to introduce myself as the newest member of the ACE Team. My name is Mark Curphey and I'll be heading up ACE Services in Europe and product managing a security product codenamed the Oxygen Security Platform that we'll be building. You'll be hearing a lot more from me in the future about what we are doing, software security in general and the Oxygen Security Platform. I am working on a blog series about Balanced Scorecards for information security programs and planning on posting some work on finding the security genome here soon," Curphey revealed.

According to Curphey, he received consistent feedback from customers, focused on the creation of a security management platform. In this context, it seems that Microsoft is hard at work increasing its footprint on the security market. With Oxygen, the Redmond company will have the option to tap security management for solutions in the corporate environment.

"It could best be described as ERP for Information Security, the security management equivalent of what Visual Studio Team System is to software development or in more general terms an information security specific Governance Risk and Compliance platform. We have started the work on our plans for the product (codenamed the Oxygen Security Platform)", Curphey added.