Vendors from Aryaka and Pertino to Cisco and incumbent carriers wish to shake up your wide area world. Here’s why you’ll want to allow them to. The cloud’s capacity to upend long-standing IT practices — and vendor business models — knows no bounds. Having changed how it organizations deliver applications and infrastructure, cloud services at the moment are changing the way in which they design, deploy, and manage wide area networks. That change is coming none too soon for respondents to the InformationWeek 2014 Next-Generation WAN Survey. Though 68% of respondents see demand for WAN bandwidth increasing (versus 34% who said so in our 2012 survey), just 15% are bringing new services or more capacity online now. Given the lead time to provision WAN links, we wonder just why they’re waiting. Enter a brand new wave of vendors, from newcomers reminiscent of Aryaka, Glue Networks, and Pertino to titans similar to Cisco, all trying to the cloud to seriously change your WAN. Through the use... Read More »

Open Compute Project picks up key new members, sets more ambitious goals, and shows its multi-faceted, multi-chip side at annual summit. 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The Open Compute Project founded by Facebook has made rapid strides in what have been a narrow sphere of influence. The cloud is an x86 world, and, in its first three years, OCP has put out several motherboard and server designs for cloud projects. The early adopters has been primarily big financial services companies, reminiscent of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, and Goldman Sachs. On the Open Compute Project Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., OCP showed it usually is able to grow beyond one industrial segment into others, resembling online gaming and pharmaceuticals, and expand the reach of open-source hardware in different ways. OCP broadened its technique to licensing, in addition. The hardware designs come in under an Apache Software Foundation-variety of license, where... Read More »

UK agency’s effort to gather facial images via Yahoo chat sessions brings in too many other body parts. 9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy (Click image for larger view.) The Five Eyes, a term used to explain the transnational intelligence-gathering alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the united kingdom, and the united states, will be more aptly named the Million Eyes, to mirror more accurately the agencies’ ability to access webcam communications. The UK’s GCHQ intelligence service, with the aid of the NSA, reportedly grabbed snapshots from millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chat sessions in recent times, about 7% of which contained “undesirable nudity.” On Thursday, in line with documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian published information about an intelligence-gathering program called Optic Nerve, which began in 2008 and continued a minimum of through 2012, designed to check facial recognition technology and to spot persons of interest. [Should Google Glass users learn self-defense? Read Google Glass Prompts Attack, Woman Claims.] Optic Nerve... Read More »

VMware shows strong profits in fourth quarter, renewed strength because it spending revives. Commoditization? What commoditization? VMware concluded 2013 with strength: Its fourth quarter was up 15% over the year-ago period, and revenue for the complete year was up 13%, to $5.21 billion over 2012. These numbers disguise greater than they reveal. VMware continues to go upstream at an accelerating pace into virtual datacenter and personal-cloud management. That isn’t just a revenue producer for the corporate today, but a trademark that, because it budgets strengthen, VMware is able on the way to yield growing revenue far into the longer term. The other view — that VMware is in a market that’s being commoditized — is thrown into doubt by the fourth-quarter figures. For example, without its Pivotal divesture, those numbers would had been up 17% for the year and 20% for the quarter. By moving Cloud Foundry, Spring, Greenplum, and RabbitMQ into Pivotal, VMware got both lower-yield open-source products (and the headcount related to them)... Read More »

Unlikely partners team to present Desktop-as-a-Service on Google Chromebooks. Will pricing lure users to head faraway from Windows XP systems? 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) VMware has teamed up with Google to produce virtualized Windows desktops on Chromebooks. The move comes at a time when many enterprises, uncertain of what desktop to adopt next, have delayed moving off Windows XP or moving to Windows 7 or Windows 8. VMware and Google executives claim companies can save $5,000 a head over other PCs with their joint arrangement. Which can entice the estimated 29% of enterprise users still running Windows XP. Microsoft has announced it would end technical support for XP on April 8. VMware and Google announced the partnership at VMware’s Partner Exchange show this week in San Francisco. Windows applications haven’t previously run on Chromebooks, a skinny Web client whose slimmed-down Linux operating system was designed primarily to display feedback from applications running on Internet servers.... Read More »