Jeff Burt

Blue Jeans Network is offering IT administrators a tool designed to give them better insights into how their cloud-based collaboration service is being used. Blue Jeans officials on Sept. 18 rolled out Command Center, which offers IT administrators greater visibility into how the Blue Jeans service is being used, how it’s performing and what kind […]

Genband officials want to make it easier for organizations, service providers and developers to build communications capabilities into their Web and mobile applications. The company is rolling out Kandy, a real-time communications software development platform that includes APIs, software development kits (SDKs) and what officials are calling “quick starts”—essentially prebuilt applications that already include communications, […]

Cisco Systems is boosting its broad cloud computing strategy with the planned acquisition of Metacloud, a private company whose offerings enable businesses run private clouds based on the OpenStack platform. The deal, announced Sept. 17 and expected to close in the first quarter of 2015, will add to Cisco’s Intercloud initiative, which was announced in […]

Cisco Systems is leveraging the technology it inherited almost a year ago through the $2.7 billion acquisition of Sourcefire in its new next-generation firewall, which officials said will enable organizations to be more proactive when dealing with such threats as advanced and zero-day attacks. Cisco is combining its ASA firewall technology with Sourcefire’s FirePower Service […]

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff will leave Cisco Systems’ board of directors in November, stepping down two years after being appointed to the post. In a brief filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Sept. 8, Cisco officials said all of the current directors—except for Benioff—will be up for re-election at the networking vendor’s […]

AT&T over the next five years will migrate 150,000 employees at Shell onto a new unified communications platform in a deal that the two companies announced Sept. 16. The managed collaboration service will enable Shell workers in more than 50 countries to communicate with each other through a range of applications—from instant messaging and video […]

Advanced Micro Devices is partnering with Canonical on an integrated solution that is designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy a private cloud environment based on the OpenStack orchestration technology. The two companies on Sept. 16 announced the out-of-the-box OpenStack cloud offering, which pairs AMD’s dense, low-power SeaMicro SM15000 microserver with Canonical’s Ubuntu […]

Brocade officials are hoping to give their network operator customers that are adopting network-functions virtualization greater visibility into their architectures with the acquisition of Vistapointe. Brocade announced the all-cash transaction Sept. 15. No financial details were disclosed. According to company officials, mobile network operators (MNOs) are looking for tools that will enable them to better […]

Fuze in April changed its name from Fuzebox to better reflect what officials said was the company’s role in the consumerization of video collaboration. Now Fuze is extending its cloud-based service from individuals leveraging smartphones, tablets and desktop PCs to groups of people collaborating in offices, smaller “huddle spaces” and meeting rooms. The company earlier […]

Data centers are going to undergo substantial changes over the next few years due to both technological and geopolitical influence, with the results being significant challenges to traditional infrastructure resource providers, such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, according to Gartner analysts. In a report released Sept. 11, the analyst said data centers will be […]

Cisco Systems is bringing its Internet of things expertise to the railroad industry, introducing a solution that is designed to modernize aging networks at railroads, improve safety, drive down expenses and give passengers an improved connected experience. Cisco this week unveiled Connected Rail, a portfolio of offerings from the networking giant and its partners that […]

Intel officials say their vision of a wireless PC experience will start becoming a reality by the end of 2015. During two talks at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 this week in San Francisco, Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the chip maker’s PC Client Group, said Intel’s upcoming “Skylake” 14-nanometer […]