Scot Petersen

SAN FRANCISCO—As they say about friends of friends—a customer of a customer is a customer of Salesforce.com. That was the message at the company’s Dreamforce ’15 mega conference, which took place in San Francisco last week for 170,000 attendees. The message that the company was projecting to customers in attendance was your customers are just […]

SAN FRANCISCO—In a reverse of the ubiquitous safety warning, “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” hybrid cloud computing, the talk of VMworld 2015, is still farther away than it appears. VMware made several product announcements here this week that seemed to put hybrid cloud computing within reach for most enterprises. This is an […]

LAS VEGAS—Black Hat 2015 showed that security technology is better, smarter and faster than ever before, but still one step or more behind the bad guys. If one step doesn’t seem like a lot, it is. There are up to 500,000 “malware events” happening every day. Security companies like Trend Micro are collecting hundreds of […]

Networking professionals gathering in Santa Clara, Calif., for the second OpenDaylight Summit July 27 to 31 will get a look at how far the software-defined networking (SDN) platform has grown and matured—and how far it has yet to go. In terms of growth, OpenDaylight’s third release, Lithium, which came out last month, is comprised of […]

NEW YORK—Amazon Web Services keeps hitting home runs for developers as it grows AWS beyond its infrastructure-as-a-service base. Since the re:Invent conference last November, the company has continued to sharpen its focus around the enterprise and application development. Last week, from the AWS Summit in the Javits Center here, AWS announced general availability for three […]

When it comes to energy conservation, sustainability and saving the planet, a lot of people are getting on the bandwagon, even Pope Francis. But when it comes to enterprise data centers, not so much. A recent survey by IDC of data center power and cooling trends in the enterprise shows that, unlike their big brothers […]

LAS VEGAS–For Hewlett-Packard, it seems, breaking up really isn’t that hard to do after all. First of all, it’s actually happening. The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and the consumer PC and printer company HP Inc. are going to be operationally separated on Aug. 1, right on schedule, officials said this week at the HP Discover 2015 […]

VANCOUVER, British Columbia—There was a lot of news that came out of the OpenStack Summit, held here last week. New products, reference implementations and application interface announcements were plentiful. The best news, however, was that there were other hot technologies that everybody wanted to talk about, particularly Docker, Kubernetes and other container technologies. Among the […]

LAS VEGAS—Some companies are always going to be identified with their original or core technology. With Microsoft, it’s Windows; for IBM its mainframes; and Oracle will always be known for its relational databases, even though those companies make billions of dollars selling other types of products. EMC, for that matter, has always been a “storage” […]

LAS VEGAS—Discussions about software-defined networking at Interop last week ranged from “SDN rules!” to “What is SDN again?” More than once the answer to the question about what separates one SDN solution from another was, “you tell me.” It’s odd that software-defined networking has been around for so long (at least in Internet time), yet […]