This week at the Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas, Cisco made a couple of big IoT platform announcements. The networking giant showed off upgrades to its Cisco Jasper platform with Jasper Control Center 7.0, and it introduced Cisco Kinetic (and discussed a partnership with IBM).+ Also on Network World: Cisco upgrades one IoT platform and announces another +
The new IoT platforms seem great, but do they really address the elephant in the IoT room: interoperability? As far as I can tell, the Cisco platforms offer improved ways to manage IoT devices in a wide variety of use cases. But they don’t deal with what many observers call the biggest challenge facing the Internet of Things. As Altimeter puts it, “IoT requires standards to enable horizontal platforms that are communicable, operable, and programmable across devices, regardless of make, model, manufacturer, or industry.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you keep up with technology news, you’ve been hearing a lot lately about how enterprises are moving more and more key workloads from their own on-premise data centers to the public cloud. In fact, it happens so much that even the biggest transitions are hardly news anymore. Man bites dog?
What does make people pay attention, though, is when the opposite happens: When a major product or service moves from running in the public cloud to an on-premise data center. And that’s exactly what happened last week when CNBC broke the news that Facebook plans to move its WhatsApp service from IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud service to its proprietary data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you keep up with technology news, you’ve been hearing a lot lately about how enterprises are moving more and more key workloads from their own on-premise data centers to the public cloud. In fact, it happens so much that even the biggest transitions are hardly news anymore. Man bites dog?
What does make people pay attention, though, is when the opposite happens: When a major product or service moves from running in the public cloud to an on-premise data center. And that’s exactly what happened last week when CNBC broke the news that Facebook plans to move its WhatsApp service from IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud service to its proprietary data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It may not come as much of a surprise, but the latest numbers from International Data Corp. make it official: The server market is cratering. According to IDC, server vendor revenue plummeted 4.6 percent year over year the first quarter of 2017.The pain was widespread, IDC said, with market leader HPE seeing revenue drop 15.8 percent year over year to $2.9 billion. Number two vendor Dell was the only bright spot, notching 4.7 percent year-over-year growth to $2.4 billion (the growth may have come from Dell’s purchase of EMC’s data center business). But Cisco revenues fell 3 percent to $825 million, IBM dropped a whopping 34.7 percent to $745 million, and Lenovo tumbled 16.5 percent to $727 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It may not come as much of a surprise, but the latest numbers from International Data Corp. make it official: The server market is cratering. According to IDC, server vendor revenue plummeted 4.6 percent year over year the first quarter of 2017.The pain was widespread, IDC said, with market leader HPE seeing revenue drop 15.8 percent year over year to $2.9 billion. Number two vendor Dell was the only bright spot, notching 4.7 percent year-over-year growth to $2.4 billion (the growth may have come from Dell’s purchase of EMC’s data center business). But Cisco revenues fell 3 percent to $825 million, IBM dropped a whopping 34.7 percent to $745 million, and Lenovo tumbled 16.5 percent to $727 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, AT&T agreed to buy Vyatta Software’s network operating system, distributed services platform, software still under development, existing software licenses, and related intellectual property and other assets—including the vRouter product line. It will also acqui-hire some Brocade workers, mostly in California and the U.K.All about virtualization
The point, it seems, is to further boost AT&T’s industry-leading virtualization efforts, particularly in the and areas of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It was a busy holiday weekend, and Great Britain’s national flag carrier was forced to ground all flights out of London’s two main airports, Heathrow and Gatwick—which affected the airline’s operations around the world. Oh, and the incident also affected British Airways’ call centers and online booking sites, making the situation even more frustrating for stranded passengers.Most operations have now been restored, the airline says, but more than 1,000 flights were canceled and 75,000 passengers stranded. But here’s the thing: The problems weren’t due to some evil cyber attack or ransomware assault. Nope, it was just another “global IT system failure,” reportedly British Airways’ sixth such incident in the last year alone!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It was a busy holiday weekend, and Great Britain’s national flag carrier was forced to ground all flights out of London’s two main airports, Heathrow and Gatwick—which affected the airline’s operations around the world. Oh, and the incident also affected British Airways’ call centers and online booking sites, making the situation even more frustrating for stranded passengers.Most operations have now been restored, the airline says, but more than 1,000 flights were canceled and 75,000 passengers stranded. But here’s the thing: The problems weren’t due to some evil cyber attack or ransomware assault. Nope, it was just another “global IT system failure,” reportedly British Airways’ sixth such incident in the last year alone!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area, toting a MacBook Air laptop is practically a requirement. For several years now, they’ve been standard equipment for tech workers, entrepreneurs and seemingly everyone else in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.Armadas of the silvery machines, often individualized with colorful stickers for tech startups and rock bands, festoon co-working spaces and coffee shops from Santa Cruz to Petaluma. They’re light enough that techies typically carry them from meeting to meeting opened, casually dangling from a corner—it’s a wonder hundreds of them are damaged every day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Everyone knows that thoroughbred racehorses typically get funny, exotic names—from Hit It A Bomb to Paulassilverlining. But who knew there was a horse named Cloud Computing, let along that nag would snag the second jewel in the 2017 Triple Crown?It turns out The Preakness Stakes winner was a 13-1 long shot, but it doesn’t take an expert handicapper to see that the technology platform is becoming a prohibitive favorite. Heck, I’ve been making that call for a while now, including down the stretch this year:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The tally of damage from the WannaCry ransomware attack keeps growing, but it’s still not even close to bad enough to force real changes in cybersecurity. According to The New York Times, more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries around the world have been infected, but the responses being discussed still center around patches and passwords, updates and antivirus, backups and contingency plans. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The tally of damage from the WannaCry ransomware attack keeps growing, but it’s still not even close to bad enough to force real changes in cybersecurity. According to The New York Times, more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries around the world have been infected, but the responses being discussed still center around patches and passwords, updates and antivirus, backups and contingency plans. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’d like to think that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is taking my advice about how to improve his company’s Echo smart speaker and Alexa voice assistant—but he probably isn’t. More likely, the new Echo Show device the company announced yesterday is just another logical step in the evolution of voice recognition and smart assistants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has long been known keeping a big rainy day fund. But according to Lee Pinkowitz, a Georgetown University professor of finance quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “they’re saving for a millennial flood."The numbers are truly astonishing. The company has some $250 billion—a quarter of a trillion!—in cash, cash equivalents, and short- and long-term securities, including corporate paper, U.S. Treasury bond and money-market funds, the Journal said. Add it up, and it’s more than the total foreign-currency reserves held by many countries— including plenty of pretty big countries, like Mexico and Indonesia. In fact, as the Journal notes, it’s more than the foreign reserves of the U.K. and Canada … combined.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net
But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net
But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To most people, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is known as the company reshaping the way people buy everything from books to shoes to groceries. But the part of Amazon that is driving Bezos within shouting distance of becoming the world’s richest person doesn’t really sell anything, it rents computing power in the cloud.The cloud is more profitable than e-tailing
As the New York Times put it on Thursday, “The profit Amazon can make on cloud-computing services is significantly bigger than in its retail sales, and that has helped turn the Seattle company from a consistent money-loser to a respectable moneymaker.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, Qualcomm revealed that the first Windows 10 laptops using its Snapdragon 835 processors are due to hit the market late in 2017. That’s a big deal because up until now, Windows 10 has run only on x86 chips from Intel and AMD, and the Snapdragon chips use an ARM-based architecture optimized for mobile use.Windows 10 on ARM: Thinner, lighter, more connected
Here’s how PC World described these new machines, which are being jointly developed by Microsoft and Qualcomm:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know how on Star Trek doctors can diagnose what’s wrong with you just by waving a sparkly little salt shaker (no, really) over your body, or read your vital signs from a medical tricorder—a device that looks suspiciously like an old cassette recorder? Well, not surprisingly, it turns out that kind of medical technology would be tremendously valuable in the real world, and a pair of recent reports suggests we may be actually getting close to achieving it.Just like a Star Trek tricorder, only clunkier
First, the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize has been awarded for creating mobile devices that can non-invasively diagnose 13 medical conditions—and can be used by consumers without requiring professional help.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Plenty of companies have smart, resourceful IT teams that diligently support their organization’s computers and networking operations. But I’m not sure how many of them could pull off the technological tricks that a group of inmates at Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution did.From e-waste to identity theft
According to local news reports that blew up over the internet last week, at least five prisoners built a pair of working PC out of parts scavenged from e-waste as part of a program designed to teach computer skills by having inmates break down end-of-life computers and recycle the parts. The inmates smuggled the PCs to a training room, hid them in the ceiling and then ran wiring to connect to the prison network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fredric Paul