You don’t become one of the most admired and successful CEOs in Silicon Valley and in all of business by doing many things wrong.Sure, there were missteps along the way for Cisco during the 20 year leadership of John Chambers. But they are outnumbered by the successes and overshadowed by the company’s sustained growth over those two decades.“The growth of the company, from what it was to what it became,” will be the highlight of Chambers’ career, says Glenn O’Donnell, a Forrester Research analyst. “Cisco is one of the great success stories of Silicon Valley. That will be his legacy.”Chambers will step down on July 26. His successor is Chuck Robbins, a 17-year Cisco veteran and currently the senior vice president of worldwide operations, responsible for direct and indirect sales. That was the same role Chambers had in 1995 when he was named CEO, having come to Cisco from Wang Laboratories in 1991.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple iPad users will soon be able to interact with Citrix Systems’ virtual Windows apps using a mouse.When Citrix unveiled a prototype of the X1 mouse in January, the company wasn’t sure it would become a real product. But the high level of interest the mouse has generated convinced the company to develop it commercially. It will be launched on May 12 at Citrix’s Synergy conference.Citrix has received positive feedback from organizations of different sizes that want the mobility of an iPad and the security of its application virtualization platform XenApp, Chris Fleck, vice president of Emerging Solutions, said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has introduced a service for storing large amounts of data online, potentially enabling organizations to execute big data analysis as a cloud service.The offering, called Google Cloud Bigtable, "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing," said Tom Kershaw, who is Google's director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform.Bigtable powers many of Google's core services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Analytics.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data's biggest challenges
The service could be used to store sensor data from an Internet-of-things monitoring system. Finance companies could house petabytes of trading data on the service to analyze for emerging trends. Telecommunications companies, digital advertising firms, energy, biomedical, and other data-intensive industries might benefit from the technology as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nvidia’s 3G and LTE modem business is up for sale as the company moves away from mobile devices.The company on Tuesday said it plans to wind down its Icera modem operations by the second quarter of fiscal 2016 and sell its assets. Nvidia will start licensing modems from third-party companies to pair LTE connectivity with its Tegra chips.Nvidia gained a modem unit when it acquired Icera in 2011 for US$367 million. At the time, Nvidia was growing fast in smartphone and tablets with its popular Tegra chips, and Icera provided the central 3G and LTE connectivity for mobile devices. The Tegra 4i chip, announced in 2013, packaged a Tegra processor with an integrated Icera LTE modem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hardware makers are providing the building blocks for databases, ERP and analytics applications to run faster in data centers with new systems based on Intel’s latest Xeon E7 v3 chips.Seventeen hardware makers have announced 45 systems running on Intel’s new chips, which have up to 18 CPU cores. Servers from big names like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have more memory capacity, internal bandwidth and storage capacity to speed up applications.The new Intel Xeon chips, announced on Tuesday, provide more throughput and power-saving features than the Xeon E7 v2 chips that shipped last year. As a result, a task could be executed on fewer servers while consuming less power, which could help cut electric bills. Alternatively, system administrators could extract more performance from the same number of servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s simple for consumers to get apps whenever the mood strikes them, but in enterprises it’s typically a different story. Borrowing a page from successful consumer app stores, SAP has launched SAP Store, hoping to make software purchases just as easy on the business side.Unveiled Tuesday at Sapphire Now in Orlando, the SAP Store is a key part of the digital-business push SAP has made at the conference. Its goal is to allow enterprise users to buy software from SAP without the need for a purchase order, invoice or lengthy request-for-proposal process.Built on SAP’s own Hybris Commerce Suite and available across devices, the store offers a one-click online agreement and transparent pricing. Individuals can configure their new applications—usually in a few hours or less, SAP says—without needing help from their IT department or outside consultants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring.Although Microsoft isn’t in talks with Salesforce and a deal isn’t imminent, Microsoft is evaluating making a bid for the cloud CRM provider after it was approached by another potential buyer, Bloomberg reported Tuesday afternoon.Salesforce is working with two investment banks to decide how to respond to acquisition offers, and its options range from rejecting all bids to working out a deal, according to Bloomberg, whose information comes from anonymous sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco next month will unveil an Ethernet switch designed for campus aggregation but in a space saving form factor that’s smaller than previous models.The Catalyst 6840-X is a 2RU device featuring up to 40 10G Ethernet ports and two 40G uplinks. It will include all of the software feature sets of the Catalyst 6800 line, which was introduced two years ago, and the 12+-year-old Catalyst 6500.
The Catalyst 6840-X comes in four configurations: 16x10G, 32x10G, 24x10G with two 40G uplinks, and 40x10G with two 40G uplinks. All switches are Layer 2/3 IPv4/v6 devices with MPLS, VPLS, 256K IPv4 routes, 512K NetFlow flows, large buffers, TrustSec Security Group Tags, MACSec, LISP and support for Catalyst 6800 Instant Access switch clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
EMC will release its ViPR Controller storage automation and control software as an open-source project, letting third parties develop their own services and applications on top of it and possibly make ViPR work with more parts of enterprise storage environments.The open-source release, called Project CoprHD, is set to go up on GitHub next month. It will be licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 so vendors, developers and others can contribute to the code. Project CoprHD will have essentially all the capabilities of ViPR Controller, which EMC will continue to sell in a commercial version that includes service and support.ViPR Controller is intended to turn multiple storage systems from EMC and other vendors into a single virtual pool and automate the provisioning of data capacity to applications based on policies. Among other things, it can work with most storage platforms from EMC, plus major hardware and software products from several other vendors, including HP, NetApp, HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) and Microsoft, according to EMC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Smaller servers are taking over data centers, but Intel believes the future is also bright for powerful big-iron servers, thanks to companies’ embrace of machine learning, which requires a lot of horsepower to process complex algorithms and large data sets.With its new top-line Xeon E7 v3 server chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture, Intel hopes to capitalize on the demand for this type of server. With up to 18 CPU cores, the chips are Intel’s fastest, and designed for databases, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems and analytics related to machine learning.Complex machine learning models can’t be distributed over the cloud or a set of smaller hyperscale servers in a data center. Instead, a more powerful cluster of servers is needed to run deep-learning systems, where the larger number of cores could power more precise analysis of oceans of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You've always been able to run containers on a variety of operating systems: Zones on Solaris; Jails on BSD; Docker on Linux and now Windows Server; OpenVZ on Linux, and so on. As Docker in particular and containers in general explode in popularity, operating system companies are taking a different tack. They're now arguing that to make the most of containers you need a skinny operating system to go with them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Carly Fiorina has been described as flamboyant, bold, polarizing, decisive, imperious and unqualified. Her six-year tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard ended with her forced resignation, something that's not helpful as she begins a presidential run.If Fiorina's bid for the Republican nomination, announced on Monday, registers more than a single digit in the polls, her tenure at HP will be scrutinized -- as will her exit. (Though she might be able to explain the latter away.)+ A LOOK BACK: Carly Fiorina features Cisco in political attack ad +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Little did we know that our interview with John Chambers at Cisco’s Texas Data Center Day in April might be our last with him as the company’s CEO. As we learned this week, he’ll hand the reins to Chuck Robbins in July, though will remain the company’s chairman and become its executive chairman as well. He’ll also hand Robbins the challenge of making Cisco the No.1 IT company by forging ahead with its data center, cloud and Internet of Everything initiatives. Chambers discussed those topics and more with IDG Enterprise VP and Chief Content Officer John Gallant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chambers steps down as Cisco CEO, Robbins gets the jobIt’s finally time for the changing of the guard at Cisco, after many months of rumors that John Chambers, CEO for 20 years, was planning his retirement. His surprise replacement is senior VP of worldwide operations Chuck Robbins, who wasn’t highlighted in a succession plan a few years ago. Chambers will move into the role of executive chairman on July 26 when Robbins takes over.EU’s new digital strategy could target US tech vendorsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’m feeling guilty; let me tell you why ...
I hate having to stop using a piece of equipment because of designed-in obsolescence but, sometimes, there’s no choice. Consider products such as many of the available Bluetooth headsets; once the internal, non-replaceable battery fails they can only be thrown away. But those are as nothing to the top end Apple products which are designed for a life span of three years.I ran into the planned obsolescence issue recently with a 27-inch Apple iMac I purchased just over four years ago. It was a mid-2010 model and I loved it until OS X Yosemite appeared. I’d given the new OS a few weeks before upgrading to see if anything was going to be a problem for me but I didn't find anything major so I went ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
EMC’s VCE division wants to take the engineered systems approach it’s honed with its Vblocks into next-generation mobile and cloud applications.On Monday, it introduced the VCE VxRack System, a hyperconverged platform designed to scale out to thousands of racks of computing and storage capacity. Where Vblocks are designed to run traditional business applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning), VxRack is built for a new era.The Vblock coverged architecture has been a success among customers looking to run traditional mission-critical enterprise applications. It was the founding product of VCE, which was formed in 2009 as a joint venture among VMware, Cisco Systems and EMC, and it remains VCE’s flagship, the company;s CEO Praveen Akkiraju said on Monday at EMC World, where the VxRack System was announced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has acquired startup Timeful, whose iOS app uses machine learning to help people plan their days.People link Timeful to their calendars and then enter tasks, projects, events and hobbies into the app. For example, a user can tell Timeful he likes to jog four days a week, wants to finish painting a room by the end of the month and has a work presentation due on Friday.Timeful’s algorithm will use this information to create a schedule tailored to a person’s needs and preferences. The more information that is entered into Timeful and the more people use the app, the better it becomes at learning users’ activity patterns, schedules and habits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
May the Fourth be with youImage by Lucas Films Inc.May 4 is International Star Wars Day, the unofficial holiday where we celebrate the Force, X-wings, Ewoks and women wearing their hair in the shape of their favorite breakfast pastries. But how do you give your week that particular galaxy-far-far-away flavor? Some suggestions follow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
EMC says enterprises like its XtremIO all-flash storage array, so in version 4.0, the company is offering more of it.The latest software for the product it introduced in 2013 will let customers tie together more systems in a cluster and also include new features for replication, copy management and other capabilities. It’s due out by the end of June.XtremIO 4.0 is a free software upgrade that will automatically boost scaling ability for clusters already in the field. Users who want to invest in new hardware will have another way to increase capacity, by using a new, higher capacity version of the X-Brick, the basic building block of an XtremIO system. Customers will be able to order that product by the end of June, though EMC hasn’t said how much it will cost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has appointed Chuck Robbins, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, as CEO, replacing long-time chief executive John Chambers.
Robbins will take over as CEO in late July. Chambers, who has been Cisco’s CEO for 20 years, is moving to the role of executive chairman on July 26. He will continue to serve as chairman of the board at the company.
Chambers, in a statement, called Robbins a “very strong leader” who has great knowledge of the company. Robbins joined Cisco in 1997 as an account manager and he now leads the company’s global sales and partner team. Before joining Cisco, he held management positions at Bay Networks and Ascend Communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here