Networking has undergone radical changes in the past few years, and two startup launches this week show the revolution isn’t over yet.Barefoot Networks is making what it calls a fully programmable switch platform. It came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, the same day 128 Technology emerged claiming a new approach to routing. Both say they’re rethinking principles that haven’t changed since the 1990s.Now is a good time to shake up networking, because IT itself is changing shape, says Nemertes Research analyst John Burke.“Everybody pretty much wants and needs their IT services to work continuously and scalably,” Burke said. Enterprises need shorter communication delays, a way to scale networks up or down without months of preparation, and a distributed architecture to prevent breakdowns from one hardware failure. It’s happening because many enterprise applications just can’t stop working without dire consequences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Radical new ideas are hitting network technology these days.On Tuesday, one new startup promised to make switches fully programmable. Another, routing software company 128 Technology, said it would fix the Internet.What 128 is proposing is a fundamentally different approach to routing, one that the company says will make networking simpler and more secure.The Internet was designed just to send packets from a source to a destination, but it’s evolved into a platform for delivering content and services among large, private networks. These complex tasks call for capabilities beyond basic routing, like security and knowing about the state of a session, said Andy Ory, 128’s CEO. He was the founder of Acme Packet, a session border controller company Oracle acquired in 2013. His new company is named after Route 128, the famed Massachusetts tech corridor where its headquarters is located.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)
Non-compete agreements are controversial for many reasons, but what may be worst of all: Even if you are laid off from your job, a non-compete agreement may still apply.California has made non-compete agreements unenforceable, but Massachusetts has not. Some opponents say that's partly the result of lobbying by EMC, which has considerable clout as a major state employer, headquartered in the Boston suburb of Hopkinton.But the pending $67 billion merger of EMC with Dell, and the prospect of merger-related layoffs, is spurring a new attack on non-compete agreements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you think of LinkedIn as a social network or an online recruitment service, then you may well be scratching your head about why Microsoft would spend more on it than it has on any other acquisition. But consider that Microsoft has a graph that covers how you’re connected to people by email, documents, messages, meetings and address books, while LinkedIn has a graph that covers jobs, skills, colleagues, and professional connections. That’s two separate sets of information that would be much more useful together.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already talked about how the Microsoft Graph and the Office Graph are some of the company’s most valuable assets. Think about what you could get by combining those with the graph that represents the professional networks of your employees and partners and adding machine learning that can pick out who and what is actually relevant to you in the sea of all the people and resources you’re connected to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No one argues against the contention that enterprises and, more importantly, their stakeholders (both internal and external) are increasingly demanding access to core systems on a remote/mobile basis. Still, there is much debate about the best way to actually deliver that mobile access.Several schools of thought exist. First, we have the revolutionaries who suggest that existing applications are fundamentally flawed, inflexible and large, meaning they're unable to deliver what enterprise customers need. Proponents of this perspective say enterprises should pretty much take an entirely new look at how they work from a technology paradigm. These organizations take a Netflix-like approach to the problem space, deciding to re-architect from the ground up to meet their needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It might surprise you that Cisco, one of the more acquisitive network companies around, hasn’t yet joined the fray of multi-million and multi-billion dollar virtual and augmented reality acquisitions and investments. Then again, Cisco now can look internally for a growing amount expertise in that field.
Cisco’s recently completed Innovation Everywhere Challenge surfaced the Enterprise Virtual and Augmented Reality (EVAR) team, an ad hoc group with user experience, IT engineering and system analysis chops that was among the Challenge’s three $50K winners. And yes, the team incorporated virtual reality into its live pitch at the competition finals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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
The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe Systems warned users Tuesday that an unpatched Flash Player vulnerability is currently being exploited in targeted attacks. The company expects to deliver a patch as soon as Thursday.
The exploit was discovered by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab in attacks attributed to a cyberespionage group known in the security industry as ScarCruft.
The group is relatively new, but is apparently quite resourceful, as this is possibly the second zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- exploit that it used this year.
The other exploit targeted a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was tracked as CVE-2016-0147 and was patched by Microsoft in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference Monday and announced a metric ton of new features for its products. Most of them target consumers, but there were several announcements that improve productivity and will benefit business users as well. Here are the top five:1. New Phone features
The developer tools for iOS 10, due later this year, will include CallKit, a framework that lets developers of VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) applications make it easier for iPhone and iPad users to take calls sent from communication apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google isn't kidding when it says it's serious about the enterprise. The company announced a pair of new services on Monday that are aimed squarely at helping businesses access information and share it internally, similar to what Microsoft's SharePoint product offers. A new Springboard app gives employees at companies subscribed to Google Apps for Work a unified search box for finding just about anything, including files in Google Drive, emails in Gmail and contacts.The company also unveiled the beta version of a revamped Google Sites, which is aimed at letting less sophisticated users inside a business build websites that can be used to share information internally. The new Sites gives users templates and an easy to use editor. The editor is supposed to help create good-looking sites for communicating things like what a particular team is up to at a company with far-flung offices. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As cyber threats diversify and expand, anti-virus provider Symantec is doing the same. Late Sunday, the company said it would shell out $4.65 billion to acquire Web security provider Blue Coat. Here are five reasons the deal could make sense for Symantec.1. Threats are evolving, Symantec needs to as wellSymantec has been selling PC antivirus products for years but the PC market has slumped and cyber threats are getting sneakier and more malicious. Two years ago, a Symantec executive even declared that antivirus were "dead." Nowadays, dangers such as zero-day exploits and ransomware are affecting businesses and consumers alike, and antivirus products can't keep up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In pictures: 5 reasons Microsoft is buying LinkedInImage by MicrosoftMicrosoft is making its biggest tech acquisition ever, spending $26.2 billion for enterprise-focused social networking company LinkedIn. Why did it do it? On Monday, Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner discussed five compelling reasons. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The really shocking iPhone 7 news this week would be if anything related to Apple’s next big smartphone were announced at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Yes, big improvements to iOS and Siri are expected to be unveiled, and they will be important for iPhone 7, but we’re talking iPhone developments beyond that that might hit the market in the fall.We’re talking about really crucial stuff, like phone color…Goodbye gray, hello blue iPhone 7?
Speculation swirled late last week that Apple is plotting to ditch its Space Gray iPhone color for deep blue (undoubtedly with some grabby qualifier attached). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Silicon Valley startup says it's developed a better lens for smartphone photography -- one that produces clearer images without the distortion often seen in photos from competing lenses.The secret to DynaOptics' Oowa lens is a proprietary manufacturing process that produces what the company calls a freeform lens."What we are able to do with this freeform lens is essentially create a rectangular-like image so that it maps exactly onto the rectangular shape of the image sensor that's in the phone," DynaOptics CEO Li Han Chan said in an interview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is coming to San Francisco next week, giving CEO Tim Cook a chance to get developers fired up over the latest that Apple has to offer.Don’t expect a new iPhone. WWDC is all about software and services, but we'll also get a general update on the state of Apple. Here are some questions Apple needs to answer at the event.How will Siri compete with Cortana and the Google Assistant?
When Siri launched in 2011, it was one of the first virtual assistants of its kind, but it now has competitors from Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Apple needs to show how Siri is better than — or can at least keep pace with — its rivals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Gamers and R&D labs creating new applications for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been the source of enthusiasm for this new category. But most people have only a superficial opinion—or no opinion—about these exciting emergent technologies because they haven’t become relevant in their lives. The two early use cases, games and immersive 360-degree video, represent large future businesses that few people have experienced.Yesterday, Lenovo introduced the Phab2 Pro, which is both an AR device and has all the features of an Android smartphone. It’s a more approachable form of AR because the consumer looks through the Phab2 Pro like a looking glass and doesn’t feel awkward donning a strange-looking headset or visor. It feels normal—like taking a picture or video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.In enterprise IT, disruptive technologies become commercially viable faster than you can say “Moore’s Law.” However, if corporate culture and processes don’t evolve in conjunction with the pace of technology, it can inhibit the benefits of even the most awesome of enterprise apps. One area of IT where corporate culture has stymied progress is cyber security, but the rise of software containers — arguably one of the most disruptive enterprise technologies on the horizon - provides an opportunity to get application security right, or at least make it a whole lot better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here