D-Link is among a host of networking vendors trying to nab a share of the SMB market. In the second part of an in-depth interview with ARN's NADIA CAMERON, local managing director, Domenic Torre, shares his thoughts on how the company has fared in the commercial market to date and how the vendor plans to win market share by tackling key vertical markets.
In the first part of an in-depth interview with ARN's NADIA CAMERON, D-Link managing director, Domenic Torre, talks about how it has grown its product line-up and partner programs to address the business market.
Vint Cerf is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of the TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet. In 2005, he and Kahn received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
HP ProCurve's Mike Pritchard talks to <i>ARN</i>
The US$8.2 billion buyout of Avaya by Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group will change how the VOIP vendor will operate and interact with customers. Avaya Chief Operating Officer Mike Thurk discussed where the company goes from here with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth.
The Open Grid Forum, a standards organization focused on Grid Computing, counts EMC, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft among its members. Mark Linesch has taken leave from HP, where he had been vice president of the adaptive enterprise program, to head the organization. He discussed advances in storage-grid standards, the differences between storage grids and clusters, and the convergence of server and storage grids with Deni Connor.
Going up against IT gorillas such as Cisco is all in a day's work for IT industry veteran and channel personality, Gary Jackson. Having been around the IT traps since 1973, Jackson's current task is to build up Force10 Networks' Asia-Pacific business.
On the day he leaves Cisco after a stellar 13-year tenure, Mike Volpi shares some thoughts on his departure and his future plans with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.
As Cisco's chief development officer, Charles Giancarlo oversees the company's R&D direction and strategy. With the expansion into new markets and technologies -- such as consumer electronics and video -- the types of engineers Giancarlo manages at Cisco have diversified beyond router, switch, ASIC and network software developers. He spoke with Phil Hochmuth about handling juggling Cisco's various R&D activities, as well as some enterprise security technologies to expect from Cisco this year.
John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, spoke with Patrick Thibodeau last week about the company's new alliance with Intel. Excerpts from the interview follow:
When 3Com CEO Scott Murray stepped down abruptly in August 2006, after just seven months on the job, 3Com veteran Edgar Masri was called in to take over his old company. Masri led successful enterprise, carrier and network access business units at 3Com in the 1990s. When the company shed these businesses in an ill-fated transformation attempt in 2000, Masri left the firm and became a venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, and later COO at WiMax firm Redline Communications.
The agreement by Sun Microsystems and Intel to work together on product development, announced Monday, will bring improvements in how Solaris operates on Intel's chips, according to John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems. Those improvements will arrive in OpenSolaris, the open source version of the company's operating system. Under the new agreement, Sun will begin selling Intel-based systems while the two companies work to optimize Solaris on Intel's platforms. Fowler talked about the agreement and what it means after the deal was unveiled. Excerpts from that interview follow:
Verizon Business, an operating unit formed after Verizon Communications acquired MCI, marked its one-year anniversary on Jan.6. The U.S.-based operation expects total revenue to exceed US$20 billion for 2006, leading Verizon Business President John Killian to call it "a very good first year." In a recent interview with Computerworld, Killian talked about the past year, the competition and the future of his business unit.
The IEEE's latest project could significantly boost the speed of traffic delivery across the Internet. In November, the IEEE's 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group announced that it's working to create a 100Gbps Ethernet standard, which could be ready by 2010. The group is racing against time to accommodate the increasing demands of content creators and consumers around the world. Sandra Gittlen recently spoke with John D'Ambrosia, chairman of the study group and a scientist at Force10 Networks, about the impact of 100G Ethernet on technology users.
Edgar Masri, now the president and CEO of 3Com, rejoined the networking company in August 2006 after six years at Matrix Partners, a venture capital firm. Before that, he was general manager of 3Com's network systems business unit. Since his return, the company has acquired 100% of its former joint venture with China-based H3C Technologies Co., formerly known as Huawei, and announced that it is being bought by Bain Capital Partners, a private investment firm, for US$2.2 billion in cash. As the company looks to go private, Masri, 49, talked with Computerworld about how 3Com has grown, how it hopes to take on Cisco and the importance of open source.
Mark Fabbi, vice president distinguished analyst at Gartner, leads the firms Enterprise Network Infrastructure research, and regularly has the ears of the top CIOs and network executives in the Fortune 500. At Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo event last year in San Francisco, he laid out this argument against over-overbuilding corporate LANs with Gigabit Ethernet: installing huge pipes to the desktop is a waste, as more users are working from remote offices and from home. Fabbi expands on this idea in this Q&A with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth.
Cisco has a number of significant extensions to its venerable 7600 Ethernet edge router, which were previewed in December at ITU. Among the more important was Broadband Remote Access Server (B-RAS), making the six-year-old workhorse Cisco's strategic -- for now -- aggregation platform for video. Cisco Senior Vice President Mike Volpi shared his thoughts on the ripened router, its ever increasing roles and its competition with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.
With its US$2 billion (AUD$2.55 billion) acquisition of Redback Networks this week, Ericsson is now in direct competition with some of its biggest partners -- Cisco and Juniper -- in the red-hot carrier edge routing market. However, the company says the move is more of an effort to obtain IP and Ethernet technology it can use to pull its telecom and mobile infrastructure products forward into the IP-based future of telecom, says Karl Thedeen, vice president of wireline products for the Swedish vendor. But that's not to say Ericsson isn't looking to grow Redback's market share and technology itself. Thedeen expanded on the merger this week with Phil Hochmuth. [The following is an edited transcript.]
It's been a little more than a year since Mike Zafirovski left Motorola to take the reins at Nortel. In that time he has remade top management, raised the profile of Nortel's enterprise business, focused product development, slashed costs, instituted quality and ethics principles, and established sales and profitability targets. Zafirovski shared his thoughts with Jim Duffy on how things have gone and what's next.
Open source router company Vyatta debuted earlier this year with a Red Hat-style alternative to Cisco and Juniper offerings: the Open Flexible Router, an open source-based WAN router and firewall stack, freely downloadable, with service and support offerings available for purchase. Since then the company has generated buzz in the network industry, while releasing products such as a pre-installed appliance-like version on Dell servers. Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell and chief strategy officer Dave Roberts recently told Phil Hochmuth what Vyatta is, and is not, and what it hopes to become. (The following is an edited transcript.)
