Jeff Burt

Big Switch Networks, one of the earlier startups in the nascent software-defined networking spaces when it launched its first products in 2012, last year began moving away from its network overlay roots to embrace a strategy around networking software running atop programmable bare metal hardware. The company on July 22 launched a new flagship product […]

More than 1 million Chromebooks were sold to schools in the second quarter, the latest indicator of the surging popularity of the low-cost notebooks. The news, announced by Google officials July 21, came a week after analysts at NPD Group said in a report that Chromebook sales between January and May in the commercial channel […]

Activist investor Elliott Management, which earlier this year made headlines by pressing Juniper Networks and Riverbed Technology to make changes in how they operate, reportedly is now preparing to push data storage giant EMC to spin off virtualization pioneer VMware. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Elliott Management has acquired more than […]

Hewlett-Packard is looking to make the most of the $4 billion market opportunity that opened up when IBM announced in January that it was selling its x86 server business to Lenovo. Soon after the announcement was made, HP officials launched a program called Project Smart Choice—complete with a Website—designed to attract IBM server customers that […]

Alcatel-Lucent’s renowned Bell Labs is opening a small office in England that will focus its research on real-time cloud delivery of video to various connected devices. The new Cambridge facility is the second such “antenna” office that the research lab has open in recent months, following on the launch of another one in Israel in […]

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman is now chairman of the company’s board of directors, replacing Ralph Whitworth, who announced earlier in the week that he was stepping down from the position for health reasons. HP also announced July 17 that Klaus Kleinfeld, chairman and CEO of metals company Alcoa, has been named to the board, pushing […]

Advanced Micro Devices is continuing to reap the benefits of having its processors in all three of the major game consoles. AMD officials reported July 17 that its Graphics and Visual Solutions business saw revenues in the second quarter jump 141 percent over the same period last year, driven in large part by sales of […]

Oracle is rolling out its latest Exadata database system, which officials said is aimed at such new workloads as database in-memory and is powered by an Intel Xeon E7 v2 chip customized for the software giant’s converged solution. Oracle officials on July 17 unveiled the Exadata Database Machine X4-8, which they said offers up to […]

Unisys will help Pennsylvania consolidate its seven data centers into a single cloud environment in a contract that will be worth as much as $681 million over the first seven years. Under the terms of the deal, Unisys will host the state’s IT environment in a hybrid cloud out of one of its own data […]

The AllSeen Alliance, which is one of several open-source consortiums working to develop standards for the Internet of things, is adding eight new members to a lineup that includes such tech heavyweights as Microsoft, Qualcomm, Cisco Systems and Symantec. The new members include six technology vendors and a specialist in electrical and digital infrastructures for […]

Broadcom is targeting both enterprises and homes with enhanced baseband processors that can be used in small cells in 3G, 4G LTE and WiFi networks. The company is sampling three systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in its BCM617x5 portfolio—the third generation of its low-power small cell baseband chips—that officials said will have over twice the capacity and faster […]

Fujitsu Laboratories researchers say they have found a way to reduce the number of network switches in cluster supercomputers by as much as 40 percent without impacting performance. The company has created a new communications algorithm designed to more efficiently control transmission sequences that, when combined with a multilayer full mesh topography, helps reduce the […]