Stories by: John Dix

On the face of it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed seems to address the long-held notion that encouraging private and public sector concerns to share security information will improve our general security.

Are you faced with the need to do a software portfolio analysis but find the prospect daunting given the scattered nature of your operation? A new SaaS-based offering from Cast might fit the bill.

Belief in OpenFlow-based software-defined networking is coalescing rapidly, the latest evidence being the overflow crowds at last week's Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., and new details about a Cisco startup that has been formed to address the opportunity.

Many companies haven't bothered to flesh out their unified communications strategies because 1) it can be hard to calculate ROI, and 2) the deployment effort is often daunting given so much custom work is required to piece together the various components that make up an integrated UC system.

Mark Adams, vice president of IT at HireRight, is living the dream -- the chance to completely rethink the infrastructure for a $300 million software-as-a-service employment screening service company. While the nucleus of the 1,600 employee company has been around for 30+ years, a three year acquisition spree resulted in data center sprawl, leaving the company with 10 facilities, including company owned and collocation and disaster-recovery sites, some of them overseas. Now HireRight is three quarters of the way through a consolidation effort with a heavy emphasis on cloud. Adams gave an update on the company's modernization progress to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

John D'Ambrosia, Chief Ethernet Evangelist in the CTO Office at Dell (he came onboard when Dell bought Force10), is a founder of the Ethernet Alliance and currently serving as its chairman. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with D'Ambrosia for an update on the Alliance and Ethernet advances.

Security is a top concern for potential cloud users so the formation of the Cloud Security Alliance was welcome news when the organization emerged in 2009. And while many vendors have since joined CSA, precious few service providers have stepped up to take part in its Security, Trust and Assurance Registry.

Joshua McKenty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Piston Cloud, what he calls The Enterprise OpenStack Company, was in on the ground floor of OpenStack's creation, working as he was on the Anso Labs team at NASA to build a compute cloud on top of open source platform Eucalyptus. The team eventually gave up on that and wrote Nova, which NASA uses today to power its Nebula Cloud environment, and Nova was ultimately contributed to the OpenStack project, which it formed with Rackspace. McKenty left NASA after Anso was acquired by Rackspace in 2010, and formed Piston Cloud in 2011 with co-founders Gretchen Curtis (also of NASA) and Christopher MacGown of Rackspace. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McKenty for a deep dive on why OpenStack matters and where Piston Cloud fits in.

One expected benefit from the shift to the cloud is the emergence of a refreshing new crop of innovative software suppliers.

Siemens Enterprise Communications, which has been rebuilding itself here in the U.S. for the past several years, will punctuate the idea that it deserves another look with the announcement Monday of Version 7.0 of its OpenScape UC suite that enables the VoIP platform to support up to 500,000 users.