Cisco plans to beef up its SDN [software-defined networking] technology by acquiring Embrane, a startup with an architecture for virtualized network appliances.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cisco is already an investor in Embrane, which is based in Santa Clara, California, near Cisco headquarters. The acquisition is expected to close within three months.M&A: 2015 enterprise network & IT mergers and acquisition trackerEmbrane’s Heleos platform can deploy software-based appliances such as firewalls across a pool of commodity servers, using more or less computing power as demands rise and fall. It lets cloud service providers quickly deploy new, differentiated services, the company says. With open APIs, users can integrate Embrane’s technology with third-party billing and orchestration tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You win some, you lose some. Microsoft this week dropped support for ARM processors from its Surface tablets with the Surface 3, but adoption of the chip architecture in Chromebooks is growing.Chromebooks from little-known companies HiSense and Haier went on sale this week for US$149, and come with an ARM-based chip made by Rockchip. These are the least expensive Chromebooks, which usually cost $200 and up.Asus also announced a new ARM-based 10.1-inch Chromebook Flip hybrid, which can be a tablet and laptop and will ship in a few months starting at $249. Acer announced a Chromebase, a 21.5-inch all-in-one PC with Chrome OS and an ARM-based processor from Nvidia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s a common theme that spans functional areas within the organization: data remains stuck in silos, making it all but impossible for decision-makers to get a glimpse at the big picture. Zeroing in on marketers’ experience of this problem, Oracle on Wednesday rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers.Among the new features unveiled at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event this week in Las Vegas are Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect.Oracle ID Graph is designed to help marketers connect the many identities a consumer may have across channels and devices and understand that they all belong to the same person.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services has made its WorkSpaces virtual desktops less annoying to use with a feature that resumes the previous session after it detects an interruption.Today, if users close a laptop lid or lose the network connection, their session will be interrupted and they may be disconnected and have to log back in. But thanks to the auto session resume feature, that’ll be a thing of the past.It might seem like a small upgrade. But if Amazon wants the use of its WorkSpaces to take off on a larger scale, it’s small things like that it has to get right. The default time for resuming a session is 20 minutes, but it can be extended to a maximum of four hours or disabled by the administrator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Desktop devices running Chrome OS haven’t exactly found much traction, but that hasn’t stopped Acer from developing an all-in-one PC built for the Google operating system.On Wednesday, Acer announced its upcoming Chromebase device, just after Google and its partners unveiled a range of new Chrome-related products slated to launch soon.Acer’s Chromebase is set to arrive in the second quarter in North America and Asia Pacific. The all-in-one has a 21.5-inch 1080p touchscreen display and an Nvidia Tegra K1 quad-core processor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office may have dropped its investigation of software firm Autonomy earlier this year, but that doesn’t appear to have done much to allay HP’s ire. HP—which acquired Autonomy in 2011—has confirmed that it plans to sue Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former CEO and CFO, for $5.1 billion.HP filed a Claim Form against Lynch and Hussain on Monday alleging they engaged in fraudulent activities while executives at Autonomy, an HP spokeswoman said via email. “The lawsuit seeks damages from them of approximately $5.1 billion.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The IT department at the nation’s Copyright Office needs more than a little work.A report out this week from the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office points out a number of different technical and management woes that see to start at the top – with the CIO (a position that has a number of problems in its own right) and flows down to the technology, or lack-thereof.As the nation’s copyright center it is imperative that it operate efficiently to effectively protect all manner of written and recorded material but according to the GAO it doesn’t.+More on Network World: CIA: A world without Google Maps or satellites?+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s Surface 3 is the first announced device to use Intel’s new Cherry Trail Atom chips, but you can expect therm to show up soon in other devices too. So what are the chips capable of and what should we expect?The Surface 3, which went on sale Tuesday, highlights some of the capabilities of Cherry Trail, officially called the Atom X5 and X7. The chips can run full Windows 8 and Windows 10 and are better at graphics than their ‘Bay Trail’ predecessors. But they also have limitations. They won’t do so well at compute intensive tasks such as video editing, which remain the domain of Intel’s faster Core processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft wants laptop diehards to switch over to its lightweight Surface 3 tablet, which will offer PC-like performance and be eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10 later this year.The Surface 3 tablet has a 10.8-inch screen with a 1920 x 1280-pixel resolution, and can double up as a laptop with a keyboard attachment. The tablet provides 10 hours of battery life when playing video.With prices starting at US$499, the tablet is positioned by Microsoft as a nimbler, less expensive version of the faster Surface Pro 3 tablet, which starts at $799. Surface 3 will ship in 26 countries starting in May, and an LTE version of the tablet will be available through carriers later this year, Microsoft said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Organizers of the upcoming Indy Big Data Conference are feeling the impact of the tech industry's anger over Indiana's new "religious freedom" law and want state lawmakers to correct the law -- quickly.The Indy Big Data conference, set for May 7 and designed to focus on "mining big data for big profits," has been losing sponsors in flurry of activity."Over the past 48 hours we have had seven national sponsors back out of the Indy Big Data Conference 2015 as a direct result of the Religious Freedom Act," said Christine Van Marter, the CEO of Conference Ventures, in an email statement. "This law is having an immediate and definite negative impact on technology in the state of Indiana."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hungry for a bigger piece of the Internet of things market, IBM will invest US$3 billion over four years to establish a new business unit dedicated to providing IoT systems and services to enterprises.“We’re only at the very beginning of an amazing revolution. If we thought we were dealing with big data now, we haven’t seen anything yet,” said Erick Brethenoux, IBM director of analytics.IBM General Manager Chris O’Connor will oversee the new unit, which will initially court enterprises in travel, logistics, insurance, public utilities, transportation and retail, Brethenoux said.IBM will also tailor a new cloud service, the IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform, providing a way for enterprises to build their own data-driven systems, Brethenoux said. Over time, it will also develop specialized packages for specific fields like the insurance industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With all the photos, videos, apps and tunes you have, the storage on your smartphone may not be enough. With that in mind, Intel is researching new ways to up the storage capacity in mobile devices and PCs without hurting the size or price of devices.One effort underway at is to stuff more bits in a single cell, which could increase data storage capacity in mobile devices and PCs by as much as fourfold. Intel is trying to cram four bits in a storage cell, an improvement over the three bits that can be put in a single storage cell currently."This could enable denser devices in a broad range of mobile and compute applications," said Bill Leszinske, vice president of strategic planning and marketing for non-volatile memory solutions at Intel, in an email.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network management is a sticky issue when it comes to implementing software-defined networks and network virtualization.Lack of visibility into the underlying infrastructure has been cited by vendors and consultants as an inhibitor of SDN adoption. Traditional tools were designed for legacy networks, not the software overlay abstraction that SDN critics say shields operators from network behavior and anomalies.But with the release of more SDN controllers and applications comes the emergence of tools to manage the virtualized network. Two of the more popular SDN management tools are TAP monitoring applications and network packet brokers (NPB), which negotiate network traffic from multiple SPAN ports and manipulate it to allow more efficient use of monitoring devices like TAPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pebble Time breaks Kickstarter record with over $20 million raisedPebble won record support from the Kickstarter crowdfunding community in its second trip to the well, for its next-generation Pebble Time smartwatch, CNN Money reports. It raised $20.3 million from 78,463 people in a campaign ended Friday, making it the most-funded Kickstarter campaign ever by a $7 million margin. When it ships in May, the device will go up against the Apple Watch but offer a week between battery charges (rather than a day) and a lower price of $199.Tim Cook speaks out against “religious freedom” lawsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Flexiant ConcertoPricing: Until March 31, 2015, pay $15 a month to deploy and manage 10 concurrent virtual machines (VMs) in any supported cloud. For $65 a month, deploy and manage 50 concurrent VMs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel’s chips dominate servers in data centers, but the possible acquisition of Altera could help the company provide a wider variety of custom chips designed to speed up specific applications, analysts said on Friday.Intel is in talks to acquire Altera, which has a market capitalization of $10.4 billion [B], according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Intel and Altera declined to comment on negotiations or any deal.Altera makes FPGAs, which are specialized chips that can reprogrammed to run specific tasks at much higher speeds than CPUs. Intel makes Altera’s FPGAs in its factories and has also mentioned plans to use FPGAs with its server chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A jury has found mostly in favor of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in a historic lawsuit accusing one of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capital firms of sex discrimination.The jury found against Ellen Pao on three out of four claims, including whether her gender was a factor in Kleiner Perkins’s decision not to promote her, according to reporters tweeting from the courtroom Friday.There was some confusion after the verdict was read, however, because the jury of six men and six women did not reach a sufficient majority on one question: whether Kleiner Perkins retaliated against Pao by terminating her employment after she complained that she was discriminated against.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For this self-driving car, the roadside hazards included traffic jams, undisciplined bystanders—and centuries-old cannons.That’s what you get when you demonstrate your latest technology at the National Army Museum in central Paris, as French companies Safran and Valeo did on Friday.Safran, a defense contractor, and Valeo, an automotive parts manufacturer, kitted out a Volkswagen CC with radar, lidar and all-round cameras for their demonstration, and let it loose on a winding track around the museum grounds. They wanted to show how close the European automotive industry is to its goal of having self-driving cars for sale in 2020.There were no wheel-spins or clouds of dust: This was a simulated urban environment with traffic lights, slow-moving or stopped vehicles ahead, and speed limits of 20 km/h or less. The car glided to a halt a few meters behind a stopped vehicle, moving on as soon as the way was clear; respected stop signals; and slowed gently at a variable sign indicating the speed limit had dropped to 10 km/h. When the curious crowd spilled into the road at the circuit’s finish line, the car pulled up cautiously a few meters short of the line.To read this article in Continue reading
With Apple’s latest MacBook and Google’s newest Chromebook just out and featuring the new USB Type-C connector, we’re on the lookout for peripherals that use the interface, and storage devices appear to be first out of the gate.Because the Type-C connector can be used to recharge laptops, it may ultimately do away with the need to carry bulky power adapters. Like older USB technology, Type-C will also connect monitors, external storage drives, printers, cameras and other peripherals. One beauty of the system is that cables have the same connector on both ends, and can be inserted into ports without worries about which side is up or down.Storage devices will eventually benefit from Type-C’s USB 3.1 protocol, which can transfer data at 10Gbps (bits per second), double that of USB 3.0. But the first peripherals we’re seeing support only USB 3.0 speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
BlackBerry surprised Wall Street by getting its bottom line back into the black in the fourth quarter, but sales shrunk significantly again, putting in question CEO John Chen’s assertion that the company’s turnaround is on track.BlackBerry is trying to become less dependent on hardware, counting instead on software such as the BES12 enterprise mobile management platform, which can be used to manage not only the company’s devices but also iOS, Android and Windows Phone smartphones.During the quarter, which ended Feb. 28, software revenue grew 24 percent on a sequential basis and 20 percent year-on-year to US$67 million, the company said Friday morning before the U.S. financial markets opened.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here