Jeff Burt

Riverbed Technology is ramping up its Steelhead WAN optimization capabilities with a new appliance and enhancements to the company’s software platform. The moves, announced July 29, will make it easier for IT staffs under pressure from the rise of cloud computing, rich media applications and distributed business-critical applications to more easily and cost-effectively accelerate the […]

MediaTek, which is known for making ARM-based chips for smartphones and entry-level to midrange tablets, is going after the high-end tablet market with its latest product, the MT8135. Company officials, who reportedly are working on an eight-core ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC), said the new offering not only will leverage ARM’s Cortex-A7 architecture, but also will feature […]

Cloud computing, unified communications and BYOD promise to bring big benefits to organizations, from greater collaboration and productivity to improved efficiency and lower costs. However, the trends, which are hitting the data center at the same time, also pose some significant challenges, not the least of which is gaining enough visibility into the networks to […]

Michael Dell’s decision to raise the bid to buy his namesake company and to postpone for a second time the shareholder vote on the proposal is a clear indication that the CEO is unsure whether he has enough votes to get it passed. Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners announced July 24 […]

Hewlett-Packard is turning to longtime hardware partner NEC to help push forward its vision of running x86-based blade servers alongside its Itanium-based Integrity systems. The two vendors, which have been working together since 1995 on high-end, mission-critical systems based on HP-UX—HP’s Unix-based operating system—are expanding their focus to include x86 systems running Microsoft’s Windows and […]

Embrane officials are keeping their attention in the software-defined networking space on the applications rather than the underlying hardware infrastructure. With the latest release of heleos, the company’s network services platform, Embrane executives want to make it easier and faster to allocate network functions to an enterprise application, and then to keep those with the […]

Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson is leaving the company on a high note. On the same day that the networking vendor announced strong second-quarter financial numbers, Johnson, who has led Juniper for the past five years, announced he will resign as soon as a replacement is found. In a July 23 conference call with analysts […]

Andrew Miller’s resignation as president and CEO of Polycom helped drive down the videoconferencing vendor’s stock price and kicked off an investigation of the company by a shareholder rights law firm. Polycom, the second-largest videoconferencing vendor behind Cisco Systems, announced July 23 that Miller, who had been with the company since 2009 and became president […]

Intel Outlines Its Strategy for Re-Architecting the Data Center by Jeffrey Burt Diane Bryant Lays Out Intel’s Data Center Strategy The efforts Intel is making—from its workload-optimized silicon and extension into areas such as networking and storage to its custom chip-making efforts and Rack Scale Architecture—are designed to push the industry toward software-defined infrastructures, Bryant […]

Michael Dell, after months of debate and a week of wooing shareholders, is set to learn the future of his namesake company when investors return to Texas July 24 to vote on his $24.4 billion bid to buy the company and take it private. In the mode of a politician in a close race, a […]

Cisco Systems is bolstering its security solutions by spending $2.7 billion to buy Sourcefire, a move that will add bring greater anti-malware capabilities to the networking giant and could be a harbinger of more deals in the industry, according to analysts. Cisco officials announced the deal July 23, saying the addition of Sourcefire’s network security […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The much-needed transformation of the data center will go through Intel, which has the innovations, manufacturing capabilities and broad product portfolio that others do not, according to company executives. The giant chip maker may be trying to make inroads into new markets like mobile devices on the client side, but officials are determined to […]