Stories by Stephen Lawson

A new access point for the hospitality industry from Cisco’s Meraki division can work with Bluetooth beacons so hotels know where guests are on the property.

5G and its multi-gigabit cellular speeds probably won’t exist until 2020, but one corporate customer of AT&T -- Intel -- is about to taste what it may be like.

As part of Oracle, cloud software provider NetSuite plans to localize its products for many more countries while expanding its data-center capacity, sales operations, partner channel and other assets to reach customers in those new areas.

Like a man eager to show off his new watch, Google is encouraging anyone running IT operations to ask it for the time. The company will let anyone use its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, a move to help IT shops cope with the next “leap second,” which will be tacked onto 2016.

A report by the internet advisory group BITAG on Tuesday identified common security problems in home IoT products and recommended steps vendors should take from now on.

The internet of things is so complex that some enterprises would rather turn to one vendor to determine the business case for an IoT deployment, design the system, roll it out and operate it as a service. At least that’s what IBM believes.

Tighter security will soon be mandatory for IoT devices that use the popular Z-Wave wireless protocol. Starting next April, the Z-Wave Alliance will require all products to include its S2 (Security 2) framework before they can be certified as Z-Wave compliant.

It turns out GE Digital’s acquisition of ServiceMax on Monday wasn’t its only recent move to expand its industrial IoT expertise. Two deals for small startups, completed recently and announced on Tuesday, add other interesting technologies.

Dividing up data and processes between private data centers and the cloud can be complicated, especially in IoT. On Tuesday, GE Digital introduced a system for enterprises to spread out IoT tasks to be more effective.

General Electric’s US$915 million acquisition of field service management company ServiceMax on Monday should help enterprises combine what GE does for industrial products and assets with more tools for those who work on them.

Satellite service provider Globalstar has dropped its controversial plan to launch a wireless network in the U.S. in part of an unlicensed band that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth use.

InfiniBand is set to hit 200Gbps (bits per second) in products that announced Wednesday, potentially accelerating machine-learning platforms as well as HPC (high-performance computing) systems.

On Tuesday at the Structure 2016 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced its most powerful modular data-center switch yet, and AT&T gave an update on its huge migration from dedicated servers to a software-based architecture.

On Monday, the French global carrier Orange launched its virtualized network services program, called Easy Go Network. It joins AT&T, Verizon and other operators that are selling or developing such programs.

Nyansa, a startup that launched earlier this year with a cloud-based service to pinpoint the sources of enterprise network problems, is now adding a tool to analyze how individual applications are performing.