Networking: Interviews

Charles Giancarlo spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and was widely considered a likely heir to Chairman and CEO John Chambers before he left last year for investment company Silver Lake Partners. Then Silver Lake orchestrated a private-equity buyout of Cisco rival Avaya, and Giancarlo stepped in as interim president and CEO. In January, former JDS Uniphase chief Kevin Kennedy will take over day-to-day operations as president and CEO, and Giancarlo will become chairman. Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service spoke with Giancarlo on Tuesday after he delivered the opening keynote at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

On Monday, Meru Networks announced virtual ports, a technology designed to make Wi-Fi networks as reliable as wired Ethernet. IDG News Service interviewed the CEO of Meru, Ihab Abu-Hakima, on a visit to London.

Amid the current economic doldrums, Juniper just posted third quarter revenue (up 29 percent to US$947 million) and earnings (US$148.5 million, up 75 percent). Barely seven weeks into the job, new CEO Kevin Johnson, a 16-year Microsoft veteran, spoke with Jim Duffy about what's driving the company's momentum.

Interim Avaya CEO Charles Giancarlo is winding down his tenure at the helm as the company narrows down a permanent replacement for former CEO Lou D'Ambrosio, who stepped down earlier this year for health reasons.

Edward Amoroso is the chief security officer at AT&T in the US, as well as a professor who has written several textbooks on information security. Amoroso spoke with Jon Brodkin last week in Boston, where he delivered a keynote about network security during Forrester's Security Forum.

VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

John McCool took over for Jayshree Ullal when the longtime and very visible Cisco data center chief resigned in May. McCool is no stranger though -- he came to Cisco in the Granite Networks acquisition during the industry's Gigabit Ethernet boom in the 1990s. Weeks into his new job as senior vice president of data center, switching and security, McCool shared some of Cisco's plans and visions with Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

Wendell Odom, Cisco press author, instructor and blogger was recently a repeat guest for Network World chat. Attendees asked him the best ways to build a home lab, which certifications still have power in the market, and strategies for most easily passing the hardest exams.

It's been three months since Padmasree Warrior left Motorola to become Cisco's CTO. Since then, she's not been available for interviews -- until now. Jim Duffy caught up with her at the Cisco Live! customer conference in the US.

Diane Greene is the president, CEO and co-founder of VMware, a pioneer of x86 server virtualization and one of the most innovative companies to hit the IT world in the past decade. Greene was in Boston last week with her VMware team, briefing analysts on new technologies that haven't been made public yet. She took some time out to speak with Network World's Jon Brodkin about a range of topics.