Charles King

Tech vendors are so relentlessly focused on the future that it’s sometimes easy to forget the pragmatic demands that drive them. Sure, many customers and partners are curious about what vendors see on the horizon. But most are more concerned about the here and now and how vendors are helping them keep their organizations up, […]

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area comes with requisite baggage, including usually lousy traffic, often stifling crowds and suffering both the scorn of folks in other places and the continuing inflow of folks from other places who can’t wait to live here.  Then there are the natural disasters California is prone to. Earthquakes top […]

Since the earliest manifestations of the Internet of Things (IoT), managing individual buildings or multiple sites and facilities has been a key use case. Why so? In a nutshell, effectively monitoring and improving the efficiency of HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning), lighting and other systems and equipment can pay real dividends to owners of those […]

Follow technology news long enough and you often see an odd discrepancy: press releases that minimally address or largely skip over the businesses and use cases that new IT solutions are supposedly designed to support. Instead of illuminating their practical business benefits, these announcements focus largely or entirely on abstract new features and “speeds/feeds” technical […]

It’s no surprise that personal computers and personal computing have continuously evolved during the past four decades. But due to the new innovations Microsoft and Intel continuously delivered, the dominance of Wintel PCs among businesses and their employees has never been seriously challenged. Sure, a handful of alternative vendors and compute models have successfully found […]

Contrary to the opinions of some commentators, it’s hardly a disaster for IBM that Cray was chosen by the Department of Energy (DOE) to build its next-gen El Capitan supercomputer at the agency’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Nor was the DOE’s choosing Cray to develop the Frontier system for the Oak Ridge National Lab […]

Surprises are generally frowned upon in business technology, mainly because the unexpected usually portends bad news for IT staff and data center owners. But occasionally surprises are harbingers of positive news or progressive developments that benefit businesses and the vendors on which they rely. AMD’s new second-generation EPYC 7002 series processors fit comfortably into that […]

For many years, durability was the defining point for business notebooks. Products were designed and built for constant use, to stand up to literal knocks and accidental drops, and to easily connect to networks and peripheral devices. That situation changed significantly in 2006 and, again, in 2008 when Apple introduced the MacBook Pro and MacBook […]

In IBM’s recent announcement closing its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the company said the deal: positions IBM as a leading hybrid cloud provider, accelerates its high-value business model and extends Red Hat’s open-source innovation to a broader range of clients; will preserve Red Hat’s independence and neutrality. Red Hat will operate as a […]

While the term “cloud computing” was coined in an internal document by Compaq in 1996 and its underlying concepts have been around since long before that, it is a mistake to think of cloud as something fully formed or entirely mature. Instead, cloud solutions continue to evolve and follow the rapid commercial transformation that began […]

There are numerous ways to quantify the performance of supercomputers. In fact, Top500.org, the organization that publishes semiannual lists ranking the world’s most powerful supercomputing installations, includes data ranging from architectures to processors to accelerators to interconnects. Vendors’ contributions to specific systems are provided, as well as how their solutions fared in terms of overall […]

The success of corporate acquisitions is never guaranteed. Too many things can go wrong. Deals often look better on paper than they do in real life. Planned strategies falter. Hoped-for synergies are DOA. Executive power plays cause long-range damage. Key employees feel unloved and seek greener pastures. Plus, there’s simple poor planning or execution. An […]