Scot Petersen

SANTA CLARA, Calf.—It’s been five years since Marc Andreessen wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed “software is eating the world.” By now, we can consider networking just about chewed and swallowed. We are beginning to realize how much software-defined networking is changing everything. As ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar puts […]

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a software developer. There are lots of jobs and business opportunities for developers, but thousands of new applications reach the market each day with inadequate attention to built-in security flaws. Cloud computing, containers, new programming languages and continuous integration and delivery tools […]

LAS VEGAS—David Kenny, the freshly minted General Manager of IBM Watson, took the stage at the InterConnect conference here Tuesday dressed in jeans and sneakers with his shirt untucked. I had to check my badge to see that I was, indeed, at an IBM conference. Kenny, the former CEO of The Weather Company, which IBM […]

NEW YORK—When Matthew Pick, technology manager for engineering at HBC Digital, tried to explain containers and Docker to his wife, she would refer to them as his “Tupperware and pants” projects. He was deep into figuring out how to roll out a container initiative for Hudson’s Bay Co., the parent of retailers Saks Fifth Avenue, […]

Trying to predict what will happen in the next 12 months in the IT industry is like trying to predict if rookie NFL running back David Johnson will score 46 fantasy points and save your season. After all, this is a game of skill, not chance, right? So let’s first turn to the experts. Gartner […]

LAS VEGAS—Amid the growth of cloud computing and software as a service, the enterprise data center seems like it has lost its place to become a repository of outdated modes of operation and aging equipment ripe for replacement. The general impression is that the enterprise data center as we know it is dead. Long live […]

LONDON—By now, we have seen all the big numbers. Market research estimates claim 50 to 75 billion—or more—devices will be connected to the Internet by the year 2025, generating $11 trillion in potential value to the global economy. But what do these numbers really mean? Ten years is a long time. Even if we consider […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Real change takes a long time to play out, even in this era of Uber and unicorns, hyper-growth and “failing fast.” Cloud computing is the new paradigm, obviously, but whose cloud computing vision will prevail over the long term is still up for debate. Oracle has some bold opinions about that future, and this […]

When trying to understand the implications of a major event like Dell’s $67 billion buyout of EMC, sometimes it helps to look to the past before looking forward. First, go back to IBM’s $3.52 billion acquisition of Lotus in 1995. At the time that was the most money ever paid for a software company. That […]

LAS VEGAS—While the rest of the world’s cloud service providers are still getting their shops in order, Amazon Web Services keeps widening the gap between itself and everyone else. At the annual re:Invent here this week, AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy presented the usual superlative numbers of revenue growth (up 81 percent year over […]