Scot Petersen

ORLANDO, Fla.—The tale of the large, established enterprise IT vendor in the 21st century is now quite familiar. Enterprise resource planning giant SAP made sure it stuck to the story line at its Sapphire user group conference here this week. Digital transformation? Check. Modernizing data centers and applications? Check. Having the cloud your way? Check. […]

NEW YORK—Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, a former National Security Agency director, had a gloomy message for corporate IT security managers: You are on your own in the cyber-security war. That was one conclusion from a provocative talk by Hayden at a customer event held by security vendor Centrify here May 11. “Your government is and […]

LAS VEGAS—The future of computing was being played out on both ends of the Strip here. On one end, at EMC World, Michael Dell introduced the new tech giant “Dell Technologies” and its enterprise subsidiary, Dell EMC, pending ratification by shareholders this summer. On stage at the Sands Convention Center, Joe Tucci looked misty recounting […]

Bryan Cantrill is a busy man these days. The CTO at cloud infrastructure provider Joyent is a member of the Technical Steering Committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, formed last summer to promote the development and adoption of container technologies. He also spends a lot of time on the road evangelizing containers and the […]

When I hear answers to the question, “What is OpenStack?” I hear echoes of Morpheus trying to explain to Neo, “What is the Matrix?” Morpheus can only talk in metaphors. The Matrix is a dream world, a battery, control. All are true, but none quite captures what it really is. OpenStack likewise is defined in […]

LAS VEGAS—SAS Institute took some major steps toward moving its data analytics apps to the cloud this week at its SAS Global Forum. The Cary, N.C., analytics vendor announced SAS Viya, a microservice-based platform for running SAS analytics tools that will become the foundation for all SAS applications in the future. Viya is not the […]

LAS VEGAS—We are in the age of software-defined everything—networking, storage, infrastructure, data centers. Now get ready for software-defined television. “SD-TV” is not hype. It’s a reality that’s coming soon to television studios and living rooms near you. It’s happening on two fronts. First, as was apparent all over the million square feet of exhibit space […]

SAN FRANCISCO—To hear its executives explain it, Google has been doing cloud computing a long time. The company just waited until recently to build a business around it. For years, Google was doing fine running the world’s biggest search engine and raking in billions of dollars in advertising. But as it grew it realized it […]

SANTA CLARA, Calf.—It’s been five years since Marc Andreessen wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed “software is eating the world.” By now, we can consider networking just about chewed and swallowed. We are beginning to realize how much software-defined networking is changing everything. As ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar puts […]

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a software developer. There are lots of jobs and business opportunities for developers, but thousands of new applications reach the market each day with inadequate attention to built-in security flaws. Cloud computing, containers, new programming languages and continuous integration and delivery tools […]

LAS VEGAS—David Kenny, the freshly minted General Manager of IBM Watson, took the stage at the InterConnect conference here Tuesday dressed in jeans and sneakers with his shirt untucked. I had to check my badge to see that I was, indeed, at an IBM conference. Kenny, the former CEO of The Weather Company, which IBM […]

NEW YORK—When Matthew Pick, technology manager for engineering at HBC Digital, tried to explain containers and Docker to his wife, she would refer to them as his “Tupperware and pants” projects. He was deep into figuring out how to roll out a container initiative for Hudson’s Bay Co., the parent of retailers Saks Fifth Avenue, […]