Scot Petersen

Trying to predict what will happen in the next 12 months in the IT industry is like trying to predict if rookie NFL running back David Johnson will score 46 fantasy points and save your season. After all, this is a game of skill, not chance, right? So let’s first turn to the experts. Gartner […]

LAS VEGAS—Amid the growth of cloud computing and software as a service, the enterprise data center seems like it has lost its place to become a repository of outdated modes of operation and aging equipment ripe for replacement. The general impression is that the enterprise data center as we know it is dead. Long live […]

LONDON—By now, we have seen all the big numbers. Market research estimates claim 50 to 75 billion—or more—devices will be connected to the Internet by the year 2025, generating $11 trillion in potential value to the global economy. But what do these numbers really mean? Ten years is a long time. Even if we consider […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Real change takes a long time to play out, even in this era of Uber and unicorns, hyper-growth and “failing fast.” Cloud computing is the new paradigm, obviously, but whose cloud computing vision will prevail over the long term is still up for debate. Oracle has some bold opinions about that future, and this […]

When trying to understand the implications of a major event like Dell’s $67 billion buyout of EMC, sometimes it helps to look to the past before looking forward. First, go back to IBM’s $3.52 billion acquisition of Lotus in 1995. At the time that was the most money ever paid for a software company. That […]

LAS VEGAS—While the rest of the world’s cloud service providers are still getting their shops in order, Amazon Web Services keeps widening the gap between itself and everyone else. At the annual re:Invent here this week, AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy presented the usual superlative numbers of revenue growth (up 81 percent year over […]

SAN FRANCISCO—As they say about friends of friends—a customer of a customer is a customer of Salesforce.com. That was the message at the company’s Dreamforce ’15 mega conference, which took place in San Francisco last week for 170,000 attendees. The message that the company was projecting to customers in attendance was your customers are just […]

SAN FRANCISCO—In a reverse of the ubiquitous safety warning, “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” hybrid cloud computing, the talk of VMworld 2015, is still farther away than it appears. VMware made several product announcements here this week that seemed to put hybrid cloud computing within reach for most enterprises. This is an […]

LAS VEGAS—Black Hat 2015 showed that security technology is better, smarter and faster than ever before, but still one step or more behind the bad guys. If one step doesn’t seem like a lot, it is. There are up to 500,000 “malware events” happening every day. Security companies like Trend Micro are collecting hundreds of […]

Networking professionals gathering in Santa Clara, Calif., for the second OpenDaylight Summit July 27 to 31 will get a look at how far the software-defined networking (SDN) platform has grown and matured—and how far it has yet to go. In terms of growth, OpenDaylight’s third release, Lithium, which came out last month, is comprised of […]

NEW YORK—Amazon Web Services keeps hitting home runs for developers as it grows AWS beyond its infrastructure-as-a-service base. Since the re:Invent conference last November, the company has continued to sharpen its focus around the enterprise and application development. Last week, from the AWS Summit in the Javits Center here, AWS announced general availability for three […]

When it comes to energy conservation, sustainability and saving the planet, a lot of people are getting on the bandwagon, even Pope Francis. But when it comes to enterprise data centers, not so much. A recent survey by IDC of data center power and cooling trends in the enterprise shows that, unlike their big brothers […]