Dell may be the largest tech company to ever go private, but it is by no means the only vendor that has decided it would be better off to pursue strategic options without the constant second guessing of public investors. To learn more about the trend, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked with Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which has taken Riverbed, Dynatrace and many other network companies private, and with Kevin Thompson, CEO of SolarWinds, a supplier of IT management tools that Thoma Bravo helped take private in a $4.5 billion deal last February. Below is the interview with Boro. Click here for the interview with Thompson from SolarWinds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell may be the largest tech company to ever go private, but it is by no means the only vendor that has decided it would be better off to pursue strategic options without the constant second guessing of public investors. To learn more about the trend, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked with Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at Private Equity firm Thoma Bravo, which has taken Riverbed, Dynatrace and other network companies private, and with Kevin Thompson, CEO of SolarWinds, a supplier of IT management tools that Thoma Bravo helped take private in a $4.5 billion deal last February. Below is the interview with Thompson from SolarWinds. Click here for the interview with Boro from Thoma Bravo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell may be the largest tech company to ever go private, but it is by no means the only vendor that has decided it would be better off to pursue strategic options without the constant second guessing of public investors. To learn more about the trend, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked with Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which has taken Riverbed, Dynatrace and many other network companies private, and with Kevin Thompson, CEO of SolarWinds, a supplier of IT management tools that Thoma Bravo helped take private in a $4.5 billion deal last February. Below is the interview with Boro. Click here for the interview with Thompson from SolarWinds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Director of Program Management for Azure at Microsoft, Corey Sanders heads the compute team which is responsible for the VM-based offerings on Windows and Linux, the new microservices platform, and container services, among other things. Sanders joined the Azure team about six years ago, before which he was a developer in the Windows Serviceability team. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently visited Sanders in his Redmond, WA, office to get a better sense of how Microsoft’s cloud business is taking shape.
Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management for Azure, Microsoft To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud Access Security Brokers are increasingly popular because they give enterprise IT shops a centralized way to control access to multiple cloud resources. But are they worth it? We want to find out.Network World is teaming with IDC to field a survey of companies that have implemented or have experience with CASBs and invite you to participate. Your answers are confidential and will be reported in combination with responses from your peers. As way of thanks, we'll send you a PDF of the survey highlights and you will be eligible to enter a sweepstakes for $250.To participate, click on the following URL or paste into your browser: https://response.questback.com/idg/casb2016/To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kirill Tatarinov took over as CEO of Citrix in January, a key piece of a company reorganization demanded by activist investor Elliott Management, which had acquired a 7.5% stake in Citrix. Tatarinov, a 13 year veteran of Microsoft, where he was most recently Executive Vice President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division, is putting the finishing touches on the company’s new plan, which will be introduced at the company’s large user conference in May, but he shared a preliminary glimpse with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.
Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Startup Nyansa Inc. today launched a SaaS-based IT network analytics service that can inspect, analyze and correlate wireline and wireless data to help large campus IT shops speed network problem resolution and create performance baselines that can be used for network tuning, gauging the impact of network changes, and justifying new network investments.
The CEO and co-founder of the company, which has raised $12 million in venture backing, is Abe Ankumah, onetime Senior Director of Products and Business Operations at Aruba Networks, who went on to become Director of Client Products and Alliances at Meraki. When Meraki was acquired by Cisco in 2012 Ankumah became Director of Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group, but left in late 2013 to cofound Nyansa with CTO Anand Srinivas and VP of Engineering Daniel Kan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thirty years ago today we published the first issue of Network World and, needless to say, a lot has happened since then.
To take you back, consider that 1986 was the year the space shuttle Challenger blew up, Chernobyl melted down, President Ronald Reagan was in office and the cold war was grinding down thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies pushing the Soviet Union toward glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).”
The U.S. gross domestic product was $8 trillion ($16 trillion today), the national debt was $2 trillion (about $20 trillion today), and $7,500 could buy you a new Ford Mustang (about $28,000 today).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Network World celebrates its 30th anniversary, we took a look back at the scene in 1986 ... and had a chuckle. NETWORK WORLD/STEPHEN SAUER
NETWORK WORLD TURNS 30: The networked world |9 ways technology will change within the next 10 years | The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years | 30 years of gadgets, computers and video games from my fabulous life | Network World celebrates 30 years | Thumbing through issue No.1 of Network World
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Network World celebrates its 30th anniversary, we took a look back at the scene in 1986 ... and had a chuckle. NETWORK WORLD/STEPHEN SAUER
NETWORK WORLD TURNS 30: The networked world |9 ways technology will change within the next 10 years | The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years | 30 years of gadgets, computers and video games from my fabulous life | Network World celebrates 30 years | Thumbing through issue No.1 of Network World
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The move to a cloud-based ERP system forced Skullcandy to rethink its global network, which ultimately led to the decision to migrate to an offering from Aryaka. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently discussed the migration with Systems Manager Yohan Beghein.
Skullcandy Systems Manager Yohan Beghein
What WAN problem were you having that encouraged you to go looking for an alternative?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When your company is known for innovation, the role of Chief Strategy Officer is a pretty daunting job. Hilton Romanski was elevated to that position right before Chuck Robbins took over as CEO last July. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Romanski to get an inside view of how the Cisco strategy engine runs.
Different companies seem to define strategy jobs differently, so let’s start with how it works at Cisco. CISCO
Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Hilton RomanskiTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T is pouring billions into its network to make it more dynamic, which is resulting in new capabilities for enterprise customers. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently stopped by AT&T headquarters in Dallas to talk to Josh Goodell, VP of Network on Demand, about what the company is learning from early adopters of its Switched Ethernet on Demand service and what comes next. Among other things, Goodell explains how provisioning now takes days vs. weeks, service profiles can be changed in seconds, and how he expects large shops to use APIs to connect their network management systems directly to AT&T controls. Oh, and a slew of virtual functions are on the horizon that will enable you to ditch all those appliances you’ve been accumulating.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Change is still afoot in Software Defined Networking, but it is now at least clear that SDN is here to stay, that SDN will be the way we build networks going forward. In this Network World Spotlight special report, pulled together by the editors of Network World, we analyze key developments and gauge where organizations stand today in their SDN planning.Inside you’ll find:* Controller Market Consolidation. There are still many types controllers available, but the market is rallying around OpenDaylight and the Open Network Operating System.* Crossroads for OpenFlow? Once conflated with SDN, OpenFlow progress seems to have stalled. Does OpenFlow still have a significant role to play?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Senior Director of Technical Marketing and Solutions Engineering at Cisco, Frank D’Agostino leads the development and technical go-to-market strategy for Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the company’s portfolio of Software Defined Networking tools. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently spoke with D’Agostino about what the company is learning as customers adopt SDN. (D’Agostino was formerly VP of WW Technical Operations for Nicira Networks, the company VMware bought to drive its SDN strategy.)
Is there a profile emerging of what a typical ACI customer looks like in terms of the types of challenges they’re trying to address?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) starts back up in June, the data collected and distributed worldwide for research will surpass the 200 petabytes exchanged among LHC sites the last time the collider was operational. Network challenges at this scale are different from what enterprises typically confront, but Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics at Caltech, who has been a leader in global scale networking and computing for the high energy physics community for the last 30 years, and Julian Bunn, Principal Computational Scientist at Caltech, hope to introduce a technology to this rarified environment that enterprises are also now contemplating: Software Defined Networking (SDN). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently sat down with Newman and Bunn to get a glimpse inside the demanding world of research networks and the promise of SDN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The network at CoxHealth, a healthcare organization in Springfield, Missouri, with five hospitals, 83 clinics and 10,000 employees, was running out of gas just as new demands were ratcheting up, so Senior Manager for IT Dan Brewer started to rethink everything. Here’s the story he shared with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Although the video has been up for awhile, if you haven’t had the chance to watch Amazon Web Service’s VP & Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton spell out AWS facts at the re:Invent conference last November, do yourself a favor and pull up a chair. Fascinating stuff that gives you some insight into the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing.The video is embedded below (or you can watch it on YouTube here, but here are some facts to whet your appetite:
AWS has more than 1 million users
AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) usage is growing 132% year over year
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is growing 99% year over year
Every day AWS adds as much new server capacity as Amazon used to support its $7 billion business back in 2004
Networking only represents 8% of monthly AWS operating costs, Hamilton says, but the “cost of networking is escalating relative to the cost of all the other equipment.” That is very “anti-Moore,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Faced with exponential growth in wireless devices and an increasingly digital curriculum, Jeff Dietsche, Systems and Infrastructure Manager for the South Washington County Schools in Minnesota, decided his only hope was to deal with a single vendor and use SDN to streamline operations. Dietsche tells the tale to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The transformation of Network IT into a collaborative and agile team that is positioned to respond to rapid changes in technology is underway, according to Network World’s 2015 State of the Network survey. And IT decision-makers are optimistic that adopting advanced networking technologies will have a positive impact on IT operations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
John Dix