Stories by John Dix

Apple tops the $100B+ tech club

Ten years ago Apple posted revenue of $5.3 billion, a mere gnat compared to the IBM elephant which topped all tech companies with sales of $85.8 billion.

Out with SOPA, in with cloud

Count us among the critics of SOPA and PIPA, the two ill-conceived bills that were intended to protect American firms against copyright infringement by foreign websites.

Bang for your IT buck

By all accounts the economy is stronger now than it was 12 months ago, but it is also clear that companies are still moving cautiously, and for the bulk of IT that means continuing to do more with what you have, which is at least better than doing more with less.

Tower, tower, come in tower

It is hard to put your finger on any one thing that sums up developments in the world of IT this year, but a speaker at one of Network World's recent IT Roadmap conferences had an interesting analogy that seems apt.

What's next with hypervisors?

The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools and the latter are often pressed into service in different ways, say nothing of the fact that the whole market is evolving quickly.

The water pump alarm

If nothing else, the now disputed "hacking" of an Illinois water utility has brought the spotlight back to shine on the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.

Corralling complexity

It has been referred to as Moore's Flaw: The IT complexity that results from the inexorable innovation driven by Moore's Law.

Getting a handle on complexity

Everyone knows complexity is a foe of IT. But how bad is it, and how do you tell if your decisions are making it better or worse? Peter Leukert, CIO of Commerzbank, one of the largest banks in Germany, set to find out. Leukert, who runs the financial service giant's 3,800 member centralized IT group, built an IT Complexity Model to get a handle on the problem, and then turned to consulting firm Capco Partners to help get other financial service firms involved. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Leukert and Mat Small, Partner with Capco in New York, for a briefing on the effort.

Assessing the APT threat

Do security vendors secretly create the attacks their tools are designed to ward off? Of course not, but that old chestnut hints at a broader suspicion about whether the current state of security is really as bad as the security firms make it out to be, especially when it comes to the latest poster child: advanced persistent threats.

A BlackBerry user's first impressions of his new iPhone 4S

I've been a BlackBerry user for years but finally decided I needed a device that provided a better Web browsing experience so just made the leap to an Apple iPhone 4S and thought I'd share some impressions.

Nudging IT forward

There is basic agreement on the nirvana vision for the next-generation data center, but the tricky part is getting there from here.

The OpenStack juggernaut

The OpenStack collaborative industry effort to build an open source cloud platform is to be applauded for the remarkable gains it has achieved in a short amount of time. Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in July last year, the organization is now backed by 120 companies, including the likes of HP, Dell, Intel and Cisco, and has already issued four major code releases, the last of which, Diablo, just came out last month and has already been downloaded 50,000 times.

The new Novell

Novell, which was acquired by The Attachmate Group in April, wants to regain its status as an IT icon and will try to do so by focusing its efforts on its core assets and rebuilding relationships with its huge installed base. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Novell President Bob Flynn and VP of Product Management and Marketing Eric Varness for a briefing on their rebuilding plans.

Communicate the value, not the tech

As we close out 2010 and welcome 2011 it is clear we're at an interesting juncture in IT, with new opportunities stretching out before us. The key will be what we make of the opportunities and how we position our efforts to capitalize on them.

Cisco bets state-of-the-art data center on UCS

Cisco bet big on its UCS products for data centers – and now it's going "all in" with a massive, resilient and green data center built on that integrated blade architecture.