Jeff Burt

AT&T is looking to accelerate the development of its software-defined network, setting a goal of virtualizing and controlling more than 75 percent of its network using the new architecture by 2020. In a post on the company blog, John Donovan, senior executive vice president of technology and operations at AT&T, calls it “an ambitious target,” […]

Supercomputer maker SGI will get more than $30 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to deliver an ICE X system to its Air Force Research Laboratory to help speed up development and testing time for scientists and researchers. The $30 million contract was part of an overall $65 million the Department of Defense’s (DoD) […]

Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Networks reportedly have resumed talks that could result in greater cooperation between the two networking vendors if not an outright merger. According to a Dec. 18 report in German online news site Manager Magazin, the two companies restarted talks this fall, less than a year after previous discussions were called off. Closer […]

Intel’s struggling mobile chip efforts reportedly are about to get a boost from Lenovo. Lenovo early next year will announce two new smartphones , with both using not only a low-power 64-bit Atom processor but also a cellular modem chip from Intel, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. One of the smartphones […]

Interest in standards groups for the Internet of things continues to grow. A day after the 5-month-old Thread Group announced its membership had passed the 50 mark, another organization, the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), said Dec. 17 that 15 vendors—including Hewlett-Packard, GE Software, Lenovo and Siemens—had joined the group, bringing its member total to more […]

Cloud computing company Rackspace, which has relied heavily on Intel to power the bulk of the servers running in its data centers, is now embracing IBM’s OpenPower efforts. Rackspace has been working with the OpenPower Foundation in the background for about 18 months, but is announcing its involvement now and its intention to build a […]

ShoreTel is bringing the new mobile-enabled video conferencing capabilities offered in its on-premises solution to its cloud customers. The unified communications (UC) technology vendor in August released ShoreTel Mobility 8, which among other offerings extended the video conferencing features available in its desktop solutions to mobile devices. Now the company is expanding that even further […]

The Thread Group, one of a number of industry consortiums that is developing a connectivity standard for the Internet of things, has a lineup of more than 50 members and will see the first Thread-enabled products hit the market in 2015. Group officials on Dec. 16 announced that the number of members has grown rapidly […]

Plexxi officials want to make it easier for organizations to adopt software-defined networking. Plexxi, a startup in the increasingly crowded software-defined networking (SDN) space, is unveiling three starter kits aimed at agile data centers, cloud environments and big data applications. Company officials said the goal of the starter kits is to give businesses and service […]

Riverbed Technology, which has been under pressure for more than a year from investor Elliott Management to reduce its costs and return more money to shareholders, is being bought by private equity firms and will be taken private. Riverbed officials announced Dec. 15 that the company will be sold to Thoma Bravo and the investment […]

When IBM and several partners launched the OpenPower Foundation in 2013—and with it, the promise of Power-based scale-out systems built by companies other than Big Blue—the question arose as to whether the tech giant was too late to the market. Cloud- and Web-based companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft—organizations that run huge scale-out data […]

Cray continues to rack up the supercomputing contracts, with the latest one a $30 million deal for two supercomputers and two storage systems at a U.S. Navy site in Mississippi. The system vendor on Dec. 15 said the contract with the Department of Defense calls for the installation of two XC40 supercomputers and two Sonexian […]