Jeffrey Burt

DALLAS, Texas—Cisco Systems is introducing a virtual assistant technology on its cloud-based Spark collaboration platform that is the fruit of the vendor’s acquisition earlier this year of artificial intelligence vendor MindMeld. The Cisco Spark Assistant is an enterprise-class voice assistant that is designed to help companies facilitate more effective meetings and can be used not […]

VMware, building on the strength of its NSX network virtualization technology, is buying VeloCloud Networks as it extends its ongoing networking competition with Cisco Systems into the fast-growing software-defined WAN market. VMware officials announced the deal Nov. 2, saying it will enable the company to build out its network virtualization portfolio and add branch networking […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—For most of its history, Arm has been known for the highly-efficient chips that helped drive the development and popularity of the smartphone and fuel the mobile device movement that steamrolled rival Intel. While that maturing market is still important to the company, since its acquisition last year by Japanese IT giant SoftBank […]

Cisco Systems’ planned $1.9 billion acquisition of cloud communications vendor BroadSoft is the latest step by the vendor to shift its business model to one better suited to the cloud-centric nature of modern enterprises and also marks the continued consolidation in the crowded unified communications market. On Oct. 23 Cisco officials announced the company’s intent […]

Qualcomm officials are introducing its latest mobile chip platform while at the same time talking about the gains the company’s made in the fast-approaching 5G wireless world. The company Oct. 17 unveiled its Snapdragon 636 processors, which promise as much as a 40 percent performance improvement in devices and a 10 percent increase in gaming […]

Intel has taken a big step in the increasingly crowded quantum computing space with the introduction this week of a 17-quibit test chip that company officials say includes a unique design that will deliver a greater yield and performance than other offerings. Intel is working with a company in the Netherlands, QuTech, as it looks […]

Mobile chip maker Qualcomm is being fined $773 million by Taiwanese regulators who claim the vendor is using its dominant position in the mobile baseband modem market to harm competitors, the latest issue at the company over its business model around products and patents. In a ruling this week, Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) ruled […]

NEW YORK CITY—Executives with Dell Technologies are looking to leverage the full scope of the company’s wide-ranging product portfolio to push an aggressive strategy for the internet of things. In a media event here Oct. 10, CEO Michael Dell and other officials unveiled a program that includes the creation of a new internet of things […]

LAS VEGAS—NetApp is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to bring more capabilities to Azure to make it easier for enterprises to migrate more workloads to the public cloud. The expanded collaboration with Microsoft was announced on Oct. 2 at NetApp’s Insight user conference, which is moving ahead under the pall of the country’s largest mass […]

For much of Polycom’s quarter century of existence, two constants for the company have been its conference phones and its partnership with Microsoft. The company has used its conference phones as the foundation of its MSR line of systems to run Microsoft’s Skype video communications technology, and has integrated Skype for Business and Office 365 […]

Cypress Semiconductor is introducing a new processor platform that company officials say will bring ultra-low power WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity to a range of internet of things systems, from wearable devices to smart home products. The company’s Cypress CYW43012 processors, announced Sept. 25, are built on a 28-nanometer manufacturing process, which will drive down the […]

Oracle is rolling out the latest generation of its SPARC platform and unveiling systems powered by the new processors and aimed at such workloads as databases, Java and in-memory analytics. Company officials are boasting significant performance improvements, not only over the previous generation of SPARC chips but also Intel x86-based Xeon processors. They also touted […]