Many companies haven't bothered to flesh out their unified communications strategies because 1) it can be hard to calculate ROI, and 2) the deployment effort is often daunting given so much custom work is required to piece together the various components that make up an integrated UC system.
Mark Adams, vice president of IT at HireRight, is living the dream -- the chance to completely rethink the infrastructure for a $300 million software-as-a-service employment screening service company. While the nucleus of the 1,600 employee company has been around for 30+ years, a three year acquisition spree resulted in data center sprawl, leaving the company with 10 facilities, including company owned and collocation and disaster-recovery sites, some of them overseas. Now HireRight is three quarters of the way through a consolidation effort with a heavy emphasis on cloud. Adams gave an update on the company's modernization progress to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.
John D'Ambrosia, Chief Ethernet Evangelist in the CTO Office at Dell (he came onboard when Dell bought Force10), is a founder of the Ethernet Alliance and currently serving as its chairman. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with D'Ambrosia for an update on the Alliance and Ethernet advances.
Security is a top concern for potential cloud users so the formation of the Cloud Security Alliance was welcome news when the organization emerged in 2009. And while many vendors have since joined CSA, precious few service providers have stepped up to take part in its Security, Trust and Assurance Registry.
Joshua McKenty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Piston Cloud, what he calls The Enterprise OpenStack Company, was in on the ground floor of OpenStack's creation, working as he was on the Anso Labs team at NASA to build a compute cloud on top of open source platform Eucalyptus. The team eventually gave up on that and wrote Nova, which NASA uses today to power its Nebula Cloud environment, and Nova was ultimately contributed to the OpenStack project, which it formed with Rackspace. McKenty left NASA after Anso was acquired by Rackspace in 2010, and formed Piston Cloud in 2011 with co-founders Gretchen Curtis (also of NASA) and Christopher MacGown of Rackspace. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McKenty for a deep dive on why OpenStack matters and where Piston Cloud fits in.
One expected benefit from the shift to the cloud is the emergence of a refreshing new crop of innovative software suppliers.
Siemens Enterprise Communications, which has been rebuilding itself here in the U.S. for the past several years, will punctuate the idea that it deserves another look with the announcement Monday of Version 7.0 of its OpenScape UC suite that enables the VoIP platform to support up to 500,000 users.
<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/cisco/">Cisco</a> has been crowing about its rebound, and with good reason. What a difference a year makes.
A10 has built a solid business in the application delivery controller (ADC) market, but its platform also supports <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/073009-ipv6-guide.html">IPv6</a> migration and many cloud requirements, nicely positioning the company for the future. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently sat down with A10 founder and CEO Lee Chen for a company update. Chen, who was co-founder of Foundry Networks, says A10 already has 1,700 customers and more than 7,000 devices deployed.
R.K. Anand, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper Networks' Data Center Business Unit, was employee No. 12 of the network startup back in 1996, leaving a job as a microprocessor designer at Sun Microsystems. Years later he left Juniper for a brief stint at another startup, but came back to help finalize the company's QFabric product and get it out the door. QFabric began shipping in September 2011. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Anand at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a deep dive on the company's answer to high-end data center demands.
Ten years ago Apple posted revenue of $5.3 billion, a mere gnat compared to the IBM elephant which topped all tech companies with sales of $85.8 billion.
Count us among the critics of SOPA and PIPA, the two ill-conceived bills that were intended to protect American firms against copyright infringement by foreign websites.
By all accounts the economy is stronger now than it was 12 months ago, but it is also clear that companies are still moving cautiously, and for the bulk of IT that means continuing to do more with what you have, which is at least better than doing more with less.
It is hard to put your finger on any one thing that sums up developments in the world of IT this year, but a speaker at one of Network World's recent IT Roadmap conferences had an interesting analogy that seems apt.
The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools and the latter are often pressed into service in different ways, say nothing of the fact that the whole market is evolving quickly.
