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News

• WelTec students represent NZ in Cisco competition

  Zeb Rawnsley and Aaron de Silva, students at WelTec, will represent New Zealand in networking and taking on the world, after winning a Cisco Networking competition.

• Cisco to cut 6500 jobs in cost-cutting blitz

  Cisco Systems will cut about 6500 jobs as part of an effort to focus its business and reduce operating expenses by $US1 billion per year, the company has announced.

• SAP's HANA in-memory analytics engine now available

  SAP's HANA (high performance analytic appliance) in-memory computing engine went into general availability on Monday, giving the vendor a flashy new weapon against the likes of Oracle's Exadata data-processing machine and others in a highly competitive market.

• Transforming IT to show cost of services

  Recently, we brought together 60 CIOs and IT leaders from the Fortune 1000 for our bi-annual "CIO Technology Business Management Council" meeting. The purpose of this event was to provide participants with an opportunity to learn from their peers about how to transform their IT organisation into a services oriented organisation and run "IT like a business."

• Microsoft and tablets: A failure to launch could hurt

  What are the implications if Microsoft fails or falls behind in the tablet PC race, which at its current pace, is a decent possibility?

• Dell in talks to buy storage vendor Compellent

  Dell said Thursday it is in advanced talks with storage vendor Compellent Technologies regarding a merger that would call for Dell to pay US$27.50 per share, or roughly $876 million, for the company.

• The trouble with supply-chain best practices

  Best Practices: It's an often overused term that can apply to literally any decision-making process: parenting quandaries, personal finance questions, buying a house, getting a job, or selecting a puppy breed.

• Let go of really old technology

  Four out of five Cisco enterprise customers have to shore up their wireless networks, says Chris Kozup, director of mobility solutions marketing at Cisco. Many were caught unprepared to handle the sudden swell of mobile devices -- iPhones, Androids and now iPads -- during the last couple of years, he says.
  "We're going from a period of three years where we saw growth of about 1 billion WiFi-enabled devices to, say, five years where you're seeing a growth of about 7 billion," Kozup says. "Apple has led the pack by really delivering a mobile browsing experience that consumes bandwidth at data rates obviously better suited to a WiFi network."

• Cisco's Hansen to lead ANZ partner marketing group

  In an effort to support partners, Cisco NZ has hired eight new staff around the country in sectors such as virtualisation and telepresence.
  The vendor is also creating a commercial and partner marketing group within its ANZ business, led by marketing and operations manager Suzanne Hansen. She will continue to be based in Auckland.

• How to become the most important IT company

  By almost any measure, Cisco Systems, Inc. is the biggest fish in the networking pond. Thanks to more than 130 acquisitions, a brisk pace of internal development and a much-discussed new organisational structure that the company is using to attack a slew of new markets, Cisco's reach extends from the consumer to the enterprise and deep into service provider networks. The company offers everything from personal video cameras to high-end telepresence systems, set-top video boxes to, lately, servers for the data centre, in addition to more traditional network gear like routers and switches.
  But Cisco's real ambition, as articulated by its high-energy CEO, John Chambers, is to become the most important IT company of all. In this installment of IDG Enterprise's 'CEO Interview Series,' Chambers talked with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Scot Finnie and InfoWorld.com Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr about the market transitions fuelling Cisco's bold strategy, what it means for enterprise customers and how the company will compete head-to-head against the industry's biggest players.

• Striving for innovation

  ICT companies should be alert for innovation and new business opportunities, but they must beware of spreading themselves too thinly, says Guido Jouret, chief technical officer of Cisco’s emerging technology group.
  Jouret describes the unit he heads as an “international incubator”, specifically tasked with spotting major new areas of business worthy of investment. It acts as far as possible like a private venture-capital organisation, he says, applying strict criteria of relevance, viability and likely return on investment to any new territory before it recommends investment of Cisco’s capital.

• The technology for power users

  What it is: Telepresence is a high-definition room-to-room video conferencing system marketed by vendors such as Cisco, Polycom and Hewlett-Packard.
  Lawyers at DLA Piper used the technology to hammer out the details of a patent dispute. One legal team gathered in San Diego, another met in Palo Alto eight hours up the California coast. They spread documents out on their tables, brewed coffee and chatted for several hours as if they were in one room. The roll-out, begun in July, was so successful that most offices are now clamoring to add the technology, says Donald Jaycox, the DLA Piper CIO.

• Datacraft deepens Cisco relationship

  IT services provider Datacraft is going after the CIO market with Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS).
  It signed an exclusive local partnership with the vendor this week. UCS offers networking and virtualisation in one platform.

• Cisco reduces meeting costs for AT&T

  Conducting its customer regional advisory council by Cisco Telepresence saved AT&T
  more than 62 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide and its customers US$100,000.

• Adventures in managing virtualisation

  Evan Jafa, CIO of First American, says getting your virtualised servers set up and running right really is just the start of any IT leader's virtualisation work. And that if you don't think holistically about virtualisation, you're in for a rude surprise.