Cisco this week stepped deeper into the venture capital world by announcing Decibel, an early-stage investment firm that will focus on bringing enterprise-oriented startups to market.Veteran VC groundbreaker and former general partner at New Enterprise Associates Jon Sakoda will lead Decibel. Sakoda had been with NEA since 2006 and focused on startup investments in software and Internet companies. [ Now see 7 free network tools you must have. ]
Of Decibel Sakoda said: “We want to invest in companies that are helping our customers use innovation as a weapon in the game to transform their respective industries.”To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises are inundated with information about IoT platforms’ features and capabilities. But to find a long-lived IoT platform that minimizes ongoing development costs, enterprises must focus on exceptional user experience (UX) for 5 types of IoT platform users.Marketing and sales literature from IoT platform vendors is filled with information about IoT platform features. And no doubt, enterprises choosing to buy IoT platform services need to understand the actual capabilities of IoT platforms – preferably by testing a variety of IoT platforms – before making a purchase decision.To read this article in full, please click here
SD-WANs have been available now for the past five years, but adoption has been light compared to that of the overall WAN market. This should be no surprise, as the technology was immature, and customers were dipping their toes in the water first as a test. Recently, however, there are signs that the market is maturing, which also happens to coincide with an acceleration of the market.Evidence of the maturation of SD-WANs can be seen in the most recent IHS Markit Campus LAN and WAN SDN Strategies and Leadership North American Enterprise Survey. Exhibit 1 shows that the top drivers of SD-WAN deployments are the simplification of WAN provisioning, automation capabilities. and direct cloud connectivity—all of which require an architectural change.To read this article in full, please click here
Despite the increasing popularity and convenience of ecommerce, 92% of purchases continue to be made off-line, according to the U.S. Census. That’s putting enormous pressure on retailers to meet new consumer expectations around real-time access to merchandise and order information. In fact, 85.3% of shoppers expect retailers to provide associates with handheld or fixed devices to check inventory and price within a store, a nearly 51% increase over 2017, according to a survey from SOTI.To read this article in full, please click here
As someone who’s spent his whole career working in offices, not factories, I had very little idea what a modern “smart factory” powered by the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) might look like. That’s why I was so interested in Tempo Automation’s new 42,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco’s trendy Design District.Frankly, I pictured the company’s facility, which uses IIoT to automatically configure, operate, and monitor the prototyping and low-volume production of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), as a cacophony of robots and conveyor belts attended to by a grizzled band of grease-stained technicians. You know, a 21stcentury update of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times making equipment for customers in the aerospace, medtech, industrial automation, consumer electronics, and automotive industries. (The company just inked a new contract with Lockheed Martin.)To read this article in full, please click here
As someone who’s spent his whole career working in offices, not factories, I had very little idea what a modern “smart factory” powered by the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) might look like. That’s why I was so interested in Tempo Automation’s new 42,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco’s trendy Design District.Frankly, I pictured the company’s facility, which uses IIoT to automatically configure, operate, and monitor the prototyping and low-volume production of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), as a cacophony of robots and conveyor belts attended to by a grizzled band of grease-stained technicians. You know, a 21stcentury update of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times making equipment for customers in the aerospace, medtech, industrial automation, consumer electronics, and automotive industries. (The company just inked a new contract with Lockheed Martin.)To read this article in full, please click here
Efficiency is the name of the game in today’s fast-paced digital world; and whether you’re leading a team—or an entire company—you should always be looking for new and creative ways to get more done in less time. That’s the goal, right? While there are plenty of pricey tools like Slack and Skype that promise to fine-tune your productivity, few are as quick and impactful as Glip, and it won’t cost you a dime.To read this article in full, please click here
The global edge computing market size is projected to reach $3.24 billion US by 2025 (according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc.). While this research underscores the speed and volume at which edge computing installations are growing, it masks the idea that many organizations still consider themselves in the early adoption phases of this technology. Before companies plan the move to widespread rollouts, they are seeking answers to significant deployment questions.To read this article in full, please click here
The lp command on Linux systems offers a range of printing options that allow you to print documents using a variety of options. In this post, we take a look at some that offer interesting possibilities.The recent Printing from the Linux command line post covers printing in double-sided and portrait mode. In this post, we'll look at printing:
Multiple pages per sheet
Specific pages or page ranges
Pages with borders
Multiple copies
[ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ]
How to print multiple pages per sheet
With lp, you can print as many as 16 pages of a document on one side of a single sheet of paper. To specify the number of pages to print on a page, use the lp -o number-up=# command (e.g., lp -o number-up=16 mydoc). If your document doesn't contain as many pages as you've requested in the layout, that's OK. The page will simply have an empty area.To read this article in full, please click here
The need for safe, reliable, and easy-to-use communications tools has given rise to unified communications (UC), a strategy that integrates multiple communications modalities under a single management and security umbrella. The result is more effective communication, improved collaboration, and a boost to security and regulatory policies. Now that mobility is the primary networking vehicle for end users, it’s time for IT departments to make mobile unified communications (MUC) a priority.The most important benefit of MUC is the ability of organizations to finally leave behind the uncontrolled, untracked mish-mash of consumer-centric, carrier, and third-party communications tools traditionally applied over the years. Communications are a critical organizational resource; MUC is a much easier vehicle to manage and scale, and MUC offers the visibility and control that’s essential to enterprise IT deployments. These advantages will enable MUC to become the dominant provisioning strategy and mechanism for organizational communications over the next five to 10 years.To read this article in full, please click here
Walking into Amazon Go store is stepping into the future. You scan your Amazon Go app and the gates open before you. You can pick up a healthy salad for lunch, a quick snack, or dinner. You just drop the items in your bag and walk out. Seconds later, you get a receipt for your purchase. It’s truly frictionless retail. Beyond the magic, there is technology: a foundation of digital signage, cameras, smart shelves, wayfinding, point-of-sale, CRM, connectivity, and much more.Amazon Go is not alone: Numerous companies are trying to stay competitive by bringing these new experiences to their clients.Why Use 802.11ax as an IoT PlatformAt Aruba, we’ve been providing high-performance secure Wi-Fi connectivity to mobile devices for many years. With the addition of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios into our access points, we opened up new opportunities that include wayfinding, geofencing, and asset tracking.To read this article in full, please click here
As IIoT grows in prominence, so too does its status as a target for malicious hackers – particularly given its increased impact on the physical world; the latest and potentially most dangerous is called Triton.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
The upper limits on fiber capacity haven't been reached just yet. Two announcements made around an optical-fiber conference and trade show in San Diego recently indicate continued progress in squeezing more data into fiber.In the first announcement, researchers say they’ve obtained 26.2 terabits per second over the roughly 4,000 mile-long trans-Atlantic MAREA cable, in an experiment; and in the second, networking company Ciena says it will start deliveries of an 800 gigabit-per-second, single wavelength light throughput system in Q3 2019.High-speed laser
MAREA, translated as “tide” in Spanish, is the Telefónica-operated cable running between Virginia Beach, Va., and Bilbao in Spain. The fiber cable, initiated a year ago, is designed to handle 160 terabits of data per second through its eight 20-terabit pairs. Each one of those pairs is thus big enough to carry 4 million high-definition videos at the same time, network-provider Infinera explains in an Optical Fiber Conference and Exhibition published press release.To read this article in full, please click here
With the increase in compute density making air cooling less and less feasible, liquid cooling is going mainstream. For data centers. Overclockers have been doing it for years.For the most part, liquid cooling involves piping in cooled water to a heat sink attached to the CPU. The water then cools the heat sink, and is pumped away to be circulated and cooled down.But there are some cases where immersion is used. That is where the entire motherboard is submerged in a nonvolatile liquid. Immersion is used in only the most extreme of cases, with the highest compute density and performance. For a variety of reasons, it isn’t widely used.One startup that hopes to change that showed its wares at the Open Compute Project Summit 2019, which ran last week in San Jose. The OCP has a special project called Advanced Cooling Solutions to promote liquid cooling and other advanced cooling approaches.To read this article in full, please click here
The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (1018) floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing, the Aurora supercomputer will cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this month, I wrote that “even as smartwatch shipments continue to grow, significant industrial and business use cases for these internet-connected devices have yet to appear.”And then a few days later, as if on cue, International Data Corporation (IDC) put out a press release about the latest edition of the Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. The release quoted Ramon T. Llamas, research director for IDC's Wearables team, saying, "Two major drivers for the wearables market are healthcare and enterprise adoption.”To read this article in full, please click here
SD-WAN vs. WAN Optimization
Optimization of applications and data traffic has been an integral part of the WAN since its inception. WAN optimization accelerates application traffic by overcoming latency and reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN by applying techniques like protocol acceleration, deduplication, compression, reduced latency and caching to dramatically increase the amount of available bandwidth.Today, enterprises are rapidly adopting SD-WAN as a preferred solution when rearchitecting their WANs. SD-WAN is transforming the way networks support enterprise applications, dramatically increasing application performance by intelligently controlling and more efficiently utilizing all available WAN transport resources.To read this article in full, please click here
It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the company’s core products.Most recent is a milestone release of the company’s NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMware’s primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.To read this article in full, please click here
The IEEE's latest standard, 802.11ax, has been designed inside and out for high efficiency. Also known as Wi-Fi 6, 11ax promises real-world performance improvements that will keep today’s mobile users and IoT devices connected and happy. To achieve that, over 50 features have been proposed as part of the 11ax standard. Once adopted into the standard, they will be rolled out to the market in phases – Wave 1 and Wave 2, just like with 802.11ac.Multi-user Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) are two of the most significant technical enhancements in 11ax. Both MU-MIMO and OFDMA are multiuser technologies that enable simultaneous bidirectional communication between an access point (AP) and end users. So how are they different?To read this article in full, please click here
The incredible power and automation offered by today’s more advanced SD-WAN platforms is transforming how enterprises are building and managing their networks. Operations that were once massive resource-intensive projects for network teams, have now been reduced to mere minutes of work. Need to change how an application operates across 1000+ locations, modify QoS settings across every site in your network or enforce a common security policy simply? Just point and click.What’s been missing from this incredible transformation is how the power of automation can be extended to ecosystem partners. Today is the day we’re going to change all of that.To read this article in full, please click here