ShoreTel, which made its mark in IP telephony by simplifying unified communications and reducing total cost of ownership, recently broke into the hosted VoIP business with the acquisition of M5. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with ShoreTel CEO Peter Blackmore to find out how integration of that company is going and where he is taking the company.
According to pundits a good percentage of IT spending is already out of IT's control and the trend calls for it to keep tipping away.
The problem with using broadband to back up branch office MPLS links is 1) you spend all that money on the pipes and most of the time they simply lie fallow, and 2) when MPLS does go down the failover process often takes so long it kills active sessions.
I get to meet a lot of interesting companies in my capacity here at Network World, some of them newcomers, some more established. Here's a roundup of a few that are addressing common problems.
Fidelis Security Systems has an interesting perspective on the world of security, working, as it does, with the U.S. government to keep other countries from prying into some of our nation's most critical networks. Now that many of those same countries are after intellectual property housed by enterprise shops, commercial customers are knocking at Fidelis' door looking for help. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked to Fidelis CEO Peter George about the shifting threat landscape and what companies are doing to cope.
The Senate failed to muster enough votes to pass the watered-down Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (S. 2105) earlier this month, which reminds me of the line by Col. Nathan R. Jessep in the movie "A Few Good Men": "All you did was weaken a country today ... That's all you did. You put people's lives in danger."
The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to overturn a lower court ruling that let a bank off the hook for losses incurred by a hacked customer has implications for both financial institutions (they need to do more) and their business customers (who typically lack legal protection from fraud that consumers enjoy).
Enterasys has a storied past, springing, as it did, from the loins of Cabletron, the network giant whose revenues once surpassed $1 billion, but then falling into disarray in the early 2000s. Enterasys today is a fast growing private company and part of a joint venture with Siemens Enterprise Communications, giving it added depth and reach. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with company President and CEO Chris Crowell to learn more about what Enterasys is up to and where it fits in.
There are a growing number of open source cloud infrastructure players in the market, but Eucalyptus says it is the best bet for private enterprise clouds. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with CEO Mårten Mickos, who, as the former CEO of MySQL, has loads of experience growing significant open source companies, to learn more about the company and how Mickos sees private clouds evolving. Mickos addresses where Eucalyptus fits in, typical use cases, how they are different from Piston Cloud and OpenStack, ties to Amazon (described as the Linux of today), the importance of migrating jobs to and from public clouds, plans for the $30 million in capital Eucalyptus just raised, and more in this wide-ranging chat.
You can gauge the promise of an emerging technology by the reaction of the biggest legacy player potentially threatened by the new arrival. It walks a fine line between jumping in too quickly and sanctioning a nascent movement that may not otherwise get off the ground, and reacting too slowly and losing advantage to fleet-footed upstarts.
Chris Young just celebrated his six-month anniversary as senior vice president of the recently formed Cisco Security Group reporting to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. He brings an interesting perspective to the position, hailing as he does from VMware and RSA. Young was senior vice president and general manager for VMware's end user computing solutions and, prior to that, senior vice president for products at RSA. After hearing Cisco CEO John Chambers proclaim in a recent teleconference that we could expect to see Cisco make big strides in security with Young onboard, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix tracked Young down for his vision and plans.
The Interop show in Las Vegas is always a good bellwether for enterprise technology trends, and perhaps the most striking thing about the recent show was how little the term "network fabric" came up.
On the face of it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed seems to address the long-held notion that encouraging private and public sector concerns to share security information will improve our general security.
Are you faced with the need to do a software portfolio analysis but find the prospect daunting given the scattered nature of your operation? A new SaaS-based offering from Cast might fit the bill.
Belief in OpenFlow-based software-defined networking is coalescing rapidly, the latest evidence being the overflow crowds at last week's Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., and new details about a Cisco startup that has been formed to address the opportunity.
