I’m just guessing that there are smarter people than me at Cisco working on this type of stuff. Cisco has purchased Postpath. If integrated with WebEx it gives them an interesting new perspective on collaboration, but I’m still not sure that the industry is ready to get away from Outlook, Entourage, etc and to get into using something fully in the cloud. I think for a company full of younglings it might make a lot of sense, given they’re already going to be used to this kind of thing, but then I’m also guessing they’re likely looking toward something like Google Apps. Having said this, the good people of Cisco…
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Unisys and Wipro
Unisys will be laying off 1,300 employees. The economy simply doesn’t seem to be getting better just yet. However, no one has told Wipro that. The Indian outsourcer has agreed to purchase the Citgroup IT services group for $127 Million dollars. I guess my point here is that while times do seem tough that there are a lot of opportunities out there. For example, the federal government will be implementing a pretty massive stimulus package. State agencies are hoping this will help them replace their legacy IT systems, energy companies are hoping to R&D more solutions to reduce the nations dependency on overseas oil. While this will not offer an…
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Nortel Bankrupt
Not quite? But the fact that they’ve been seeking legal advice on bankruptcy really isn’t a good sign. Nortel claims not to have any debt maturity until 2011, but with 2009 right around the corner and company financials not looking spectacular (although not bleak by todays standards) I don’t know that they’ll dig themselves out of their upcoming debt. However, they have taken a move to do so by putting in place a plan to unload their Metropolitan Ethernet division. As one of the industry leaders in Metropolitan Area Network switches (if you look at the Wikipedia page for Metro Ethernet you might notice that their gear is in the…
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A Saturated Cloud Backup Market
It’s not that it all started with Amazon, but they were certainly the ones to mainstream cloud-based storage. Now, there are a variety of services such as Mozy (with CrashPlan) and BackBlaze from some of the smaller, niche players (both of them support the Mac) to Apple (can you say Mobile Me), Microsoft, Amazon (who now supports Windows Server and SQL Server), Google, Symantec, EMC and others for some of the more major players. According to James Staten of Forrester research, the cloud computing bubble will burst in 2010, if not before. At that point, we’re likely to start seeing far more feature rich applications start getting released and one…
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WiMax Enabled Laptops
Lenovo has released the ThinkPad W700, a WiMax enabled laptop. Sprint is pushing Xohm, their WiMax unit heavily as the next big thing: a mobile broadband network. Not nationwide yet, but Lenovo is hoping it will be, with HP, Dell and Acer quickly following. The network is currently running in Baltimore with plans to expand into Washington and Chicago. Speeds are fast enough for VoIP and the cost is about the same as the cellular broadband service, at $30 per month. Is Xohm the next big thing? We’ll see…
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OpenOffice 3.0
OpenOffice.org, the increasingly popular Office-like productivity suite is finally native on the Mac with the latest releases, still in Release Candidate, although hopefully close to a stable full release. Since Sun has bought OpenOffice it’s been looming in the background as a potential Office killer. But OpenOffice has never taken that step. People seem leery about it, not wanting to retrain users, not trusting of a new, weird app. Understandably, most everyone on the planet seems pretty darn used to using Office at this point, and users don’t typically take well to change. The new document formats for Office, .docx (for Word), pptx (for Power Point) and .xlsx (for Excel)…
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Symantec Continues to Beef Up SaaS Solution Offerings
Symantec has purchased MessageLabs for about $700 Million. This move brings filtered services for spam and web traffic to the Symantec Protection Network, a pseudo-Software as a Service arm of Symantec. You will now be able to filter for spam through Symantec products before it enters your environment and then again once messages are in the environment if you want to go that route, for maximum customizable protection. You can also backup online through the Protection Network and establish remote access services. I guess that theoretically you could just let Symantec do all the work, provided you trust they’ll do a good job with it…
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High-Tech Labor Laws of California Swinging Back
From Slashdot: By John Howard (published Thursday, September 25, 2008) California’s high-tech industry has won a significant political and financial victory in the Capitol: An obscure bill was rewritten late in the Legislature’s hectic session at the industry’s behest to eliminate the hourly overtime-pay rule for computer professionals. Organized labor says the action, which targets some 250,000 private workers, is unprecedented in a California state budget and the industry believes it is the toughest such exemption in the nation. http://www.capitolweekly.net/?_adctlid=v|jq2q43wvsl855o|xfl3agauw8dn2r
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Google Chrome Comic Book
I’ve not bothered covering Chrome much on my site because I’m pissy about not having a Mac version of the browser. But, I do find it amusing that Google made a comic book for it: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
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Brocade buying Foundry
$3 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but I can’t think of a company more worth it. Foundry makes amazing Ethernet switches. Brocade makes good Fibre Channel switches and SAN products. Foundry routers are not a shabby lot either. It will be interesting to see whether Brocade uses this to go head to head against Cisco. Juniper has been trying to go head-to-head with Cisco for awhile. Now, with a new Brocade + Foundry and Juniper, Cisco will need to stay sharp or see serious parts of its business get eroded away.