Cisco has always been a master at picking the right adjacent markets to move into at the right time, and it often becomes one of the leaders in that space. Think of the impact the company has had in telephony, blade servers and security—to name just a few.This week at an event with a lot of pomp and circumstance that included CEO Chuck Robbins, Cisco announced it is moving into the analytics market. At first glance, one might ask what the heck Cisco is doing in analytics.The timing for Cisco is right, though. Many of the building blocks of the digital enterprise—technologies such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, mobility and security are network centric today. By harnessing network data, Cisco can provide data and insights that another vendor could not. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember when you got your driver’s license? That was a pretty big day. Now imagine that as the person at the DMV handed you your card, he or she also slipped you permits to operate a boat, drive a motorcycle and fly the Space Shuttle. Sounds crazy, right? Yet it’s happening in the world of mainframes every day thanks to new tools that make it possible to program and manage big iron in just about any language and on any platform.
Even five years ago it would have been inconceivable for this to happen. If you wanted to use a mainframe, you had to know COBOL. That’s all fine and good—if you graduated from college in 1978. But what about the next generation of mainframers? How were they supposed to use computers that required users to know a language that wasn’t even taught in most computer science programs anymore?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Where do millennials most want to work? 3M, according to a survey of 13,000 high school students, college students and young professionals. Last year’s top-ranked company, Google, is second on the 2016 list of most desirable employers.This year’s Millennial Career Survey is the ninth annual report from the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS), an international honors organization that aims to advance the goals of high achieving students. The full report digs into employment preferences, career planning, educational goals and life choices of the millennial generation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Where do millennials most want to work? 3M, according to a survey of 13,000 high school students, college students and young professionals. Last year’s top-ranked company, Google, is second on the 2016 list of most desirable employers.
This year’s Millennial Career Survey is the ninth annual report from the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS), an international honors organization that aims to advance the goals of high achieving students. The full report digs into employment preferences, career planning, educational goals and life choices of the millennial generation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovation Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently completed Innovation Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovate Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently completed Innovate Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft calls SQL Server 2016 the “biggest leap forward” in the 27-year evolution of the SQL Server database. As we’ll see, despite the excess of hype, the SQL Server 2016 database offers enterprises a number of attractive new capabilities, including built-in R analytics, querying of external Hadoop and Azure data stores, and neat management and data security features.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees.
“We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
National Harbor, Md. -- Corporate employees who help carry out cyberattacks are increasingly being sought and are seeking criminals to hire them, a Gartner analyst told a group at the consulting firm’s Security and Risk Management Summit.A group of 60 CIOs and CISOs she worked with say this recruitment is more active and becoming a larger concern because of their use of the Dark Web to sell their services, says Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.+More on Network World: National Intelligence office wants to perfect the art of security deception+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Raspberry Pi becomes more powerfulWith the explosion of interest in building Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on boards like the Raspberry Pi comes an explosion of tools that make creating RPi-based IoT systems not only easier, but also more powerful. I’ve hand-picked some of the latest, greatest and coolest tools that will make your Raspberry Pi IoT project killer. (And if you’re contemplating your operating systems choices, make sure you check out my Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating Systems, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 -- 58 choices in total!)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple Pay will soon be let users make online purchases, the company announced Monday at the WWDC 2016 keynote speech.“Now when you’re shopping online, you’ll have a ‘Pay with Apple Pay’ button,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. The new feature will be available when the latest version of macOS, Sierra, becomes available to Mac users this fall.Federighi said the online “Apple Pay” button will require users to authenticate their identity from a TouchID device—iPhone or Apple Watch—to preserve the security of their transactions.Apple Pay first went into operation in October 2014, but it’s been confined to real-world brick-and-mortar transactions—with iPhone owners using that device to pay for items when checking out at such stores—as well as purchases made from iOS apps. Today’s announcement expands the service to the broader realm of e-commerce—putting the service in broader competition with online pay services like PayPal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As scores of college graduates hit the job market this spring, their employment prospects are more promising than those of last year’s graduating class. In particular, computer science graduates are a hot commodity.“Not only does computer science provide every student foundational knowledge, it also leads to the highest-paying, fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy. There are currently over 500,000 open computing jobs, in every sector, from manufacturing to banking, from agriculture to healthcare, but only 50,000 computer science graduates a year,” reads an open letter released by the nonprofit Computer Science Education Coalition in partnership with Code.org. The letter urges Congress to boost federal funding to broaden access to computer science in K-12 classrooms. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the amount of structured and unstructured data generated through digital growth increases, the need for places to put the stuff is also growing.And it’s going to be in Hyper-converged Integrated Systems (HCIS), according to Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow, speaking at Gartner’s Tech Growth and Innovation Conference in Los Angeles last week.Hyper-converged systems are where software tools are used on commoditized hardware. HCIS is the platform for shared computing and storage resources. It’s “based on software-defined storage, software-defined compute, commodity hardware and a unified management interface,” Gartner explains on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1980, the final episode of one my favorite TV shows, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, aired. In “Who Speaks for Earth?” Sagan summarized the mess that has become humanity and the impending doom that will befall Earth if things do not change. The episode also provides alternatives to that behavior and offers a way to save Earth but begs the big question of who actually speaks for Earth to enable the behavior change.This is not unlike what’s happening in the data center today. It’s been well documented on this site and others that the data center is currently a mess. Data centers are built on repeatable building blocks, but configuration is still done manually. In Cosmos, Sagan gave the planet only a minuscule percentage chance of surviving if humans didn’t change their ways. Similarly, organizations must change the way they operate data centers if they are to make it in an increasingly digital world where speed is everything. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel hosted by CenturyLink on sustainability and efficiency in IT. At CenturyLink’s sunny Irvine, California, data center my co-panelists gathered ahead of going on stage and on camera. One of the panelists remarked that enterprise IT was dying—dying—slowly dying. But I believe this characterization is too broadly phrased and an inaccurate choice of words.The enterprise’s data center paradigm has changed irrevocably. And it will progress on its change cycle as enterprises embark on fewer new builds, and trends show that market share favors the commercial data center service providers. The paradigm of public cloud puts the sometimes outmoded ways of the enterprise data centers and legacy enterprise IT into an unfavorable light. But rest assured, there are some positive signs for enterprise IT—and good results ahead—but some changes do need to occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel hosted by CenturyLink on sustainability and efficiency in IT. At CenturyLink’s sunny Irvine, California, data center my co-panelists gathered ahead of going on stage and on camera. One of the panelists remarked that enterprise IT was dying—dying—slowly dying. But I believe this characterization is too broadly phrased and an inaccurate choice of words.
The enterprise’s data center paradigm has changed irrevocably. And it will progress on its change cycle as enterprises embark on fewer new builds, and trends show that market share favors the commercial data center service providers. The paradigm of public cloud puts the sometimes outmoded ways of the enterprise data centers and legacy enterprise IT into an unfavorable light. But rest assured, there are some positive signs for enterprise IT—and good results ahead—but some changes do need to occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Who among us hasn’t set up a new and unique email account for a particular commercial transaction just so we’ll know who to blame when the account gets flooded with spam? Well, a member of Reddit’s community devoted to systems administration (r/sysadmin) says he took the tactic a step further … actually, 12 steps further.From a post headlined: “How to get blacklisted as a vendor.”
Yesterday I was hunting for a new vendor. Mostly out of curiosity (but also to help me in picking a company that's not completely sleazy) I set up a batch of temporary phone numbers in our VoIP system, 12 in all, and called each vendor from a different number.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting a handle on cloud-based virtual operations is no easy task. Next month researchers from the Intelligence Advance Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will introduce a new program that looks to address that management concern by developing better technology to manage and secure Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments.+More on Network World: Intelligence agency wants computer scientists to develop brain-like computers+IARPA, the radical research arm of the of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will introduce the Virtuous User Environment (VirtUE) which it says aims to “creatively define and develop user environments that are more dynamic, secure, auditable, transferrable, and efficient than the current offerings provided by traditional physical workstations and commercial VDI; develop innovative, dynamic analytics and infrastructures that can leverage these newly developed user environments to both automatically detect and deter security threats that IC user environments will be subject to in the new cloud infrastructure.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here