Like many industry analysts, Gartner's John Pescatore got his start working hands-on with technology. He began his career at government agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service, then spent 11 years at GTE. Now a vice president and Gartner fellow, covering security and privacy, Pescatore recently discussed his beginnings in IT with Denise Dubie and revealed how he has watched the hot market evolve over more than 25 years.
Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve LAN switch business is second only to Cisco in revenue and port shipments, outperforming venerable competitors such as 3Com, Nortel, Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks. John McHugh, vice president and general manager of ProCurve Networking by HP, recently spoke with Phil Hochmuth about where ProCurve stands inside the larger HP organization, and other issues facing the group. The following is an edited version of their conversation.
WAN optimization is topping minds of enterprise IT managers as they look to centralize operations and consolidate data centers. But by serving applications to remote offices from a central location, they also risk degrading application performance over WAN links and cutting into employee productivity.
Earlier this month, Brocade Communications Systems ran a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal promising its customers and users of McData's director switches that once the merger between the two companies is completed sometime in the first quarter, Brocade will continue to service both vendors' current products for up to five years. The ad also promised a minimum of six months' advance notice before taking any product off the market. Brocade CEO Mike Klayko and Tom Buiocchi, vice president of worldwide marketing at San Jose-based Brocade, recently spoke with Computerworld to clarify the companies' integration road map.
Cisco wants to become a bigger player in the network and application performance management technology realm. In December the company launched the Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) product suite, which offered customers traffic and packet analysis, bandwidth monitoring and application performance management products and services.
John Roese becomes chief technology officer at Nortel Networks in Ontario, this week following his appointment to the post last week. Roese (pronounced Rose), 35, will lead more than 12,000 engineers and developers in the Nortel research and development headquarters in Ottawa and will be responsible for the company's R&D strategy and execution. Before joining Nortel, he was CTO at Broadcom for three months, and before that, he held the CTO title at Enterasys Networks and Cabletron. He talked with Computerworld US about Nortel's future.
"The last 10 years have been exactly what we had hoped for," said Scott Kriens chairman and CEO of Juniper Networks. Kriens, who joined the company at its inception in 1996, talks about Juniper's success with Computerworld at Interop Las Vegas 2006. Kriens also weighed in on the need to move away from "proprietary tech," what enterprises need from their networks and where Juniper goes from here. Excerpts from the interview follow:
Microsoft this week unveiled its Centro product plan, which is intended to make it easier to administer networks in midsize businesses. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill interviewed Steven VanRoekel, director of Midsize Business Solutions Strategy at Microsoft, about Centro.
Storage switch maker McData in January acquired CNT, a leader in WAN extension and long-distance data replication technology. Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor recently sat down with McData CEO, Chairman and President John Kelly to chat about the reasons why McData acquired CNT and the state of the Fibre Channel switch market.
Cisco for years has talked about moving "up the stack" - taking on more application-based network roles instead of just moving packets at Layers 2 and 3. The recent launch of Cisco's Application-Oriented Network (AON) business unit is the latest move in this direction, with the introduction of hardware and software that can read XML message traffic and route whole messages instead of just packets. But instead of buying its way into the XML market, Cisco has hired Taf Anthias, a 32-year IBM veteran and former head of its MQ messaging group, to lead the internal development of XML and message-based switching technology. Anthias serves as vice president of Cisco's AON business unit, and he spoke with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth about the vendor's latest data center initiative.
If you think Network Appliance's (NetApp) recent partnership with IBM was about getting the storage server vendor into the enterprise, Dan Warmenhoven wants you to think again. The company is already there, and enterprise customers are helping to fuel the company's extraordinary sales growth says NetApp's chief executive officer.
Avaya was borne out of AT&T/Lucent's legacy. But since its 2000 launch, the enterprise telephony vendor has tried to recast itself as an enterprise applications company, with a focus on voice. Recent moves include the migration of Avaya's legacy PBX to a Linux-based server application, and the introduction of an application server for partners and users to develop VOIP-integrated software such as applications that integrate VOIP and messaging with ERP software, Web sites or portals. Avaya CEO Donald Peterson recently discussed the company's evolution, as well as current trends in the enterprise VOIP market, with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth.
Cisco Systems's acquisition of Linksys Group in 2003 brought the maker of utilitarian business and carrier gear into home networking for the first time. Now Cisco, along with a growing number of rivals, is running headlong into the very heart of home electronics: the TVs, stereos and video devices that traditionally have had nothing to do with routers or switches. That the company saw the importance of the acquisition is clear from its choice of a leader. At the helm of Linksys is Charles Giancarlo, a longtime Cisco executive who developed the company's merger and acquisition strategy in the 1990s and now holds the titles of Cisco senior vice president and chief technology officer in addition to president of Cisco-Linksys.
Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at Microsoft, wants to dispel the notion that 64-bit computing is helpful only for big database servers and computer-assisted design (CAD) applications. Allchin last week extolled the benefits of 64-bit computing during an interview with Computerworld. Microsoft is expected to release 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 this month.
Voice over IP (VOIP) and open source technology hold great promise for cost savings, but also threaten traditional ways of doing business. Rather than shy away from the challenges that these disruptive technologies represent, Bell Laboratories, the renowned R&D (research and development) arm of Lucent Technologies Inc. in Murray Hill, New Jersey, is attempting to bring them into the mainstream.
It's been a busy year, to the say the least, for Tim Dickinson.
After eight years at the company, Kevin Rollins was appointed president and CEO of the US$41.4 billion computer juggernaut Dell last July. Many still think of Dell as a desktop supplier, but the company has become a powerhouse in server and notebooks as well and is making strong moves in the printer and storage markets.
Nortel Networks' strategic emphasis on the enterprise was somewhat surprising when the company announced its reorganization two weeks ago, given that enterprise equipment wasn't viewed as core to the telecom vendor's business. But nothing could be further from the truth, according to CEO Bill Owens, who spoke with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy this week.
A no-nonsense character, Novell’s manager of partner relationships, Steve Martin gets to the heart of the matter when talking shop. And with Novell making some pivotal moves in the market — gobbling up Linux players Ximian and SuSE — he had some choice tidbits about channel life and the networking giant.
Mario Mazzola, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems and the company's chief development officer, recently spoke with Computerworld about Cisco's pricing and its innovation efforts.
