Networking: Interviews

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

Microsoft is expanding its work with enterprise telephony vendors to make its Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 work more closely with office phone systems.

Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization, is on the big stage with a hot technology. The lights are on him as he prepares for next year's delivery of Windows Server Virtualization, which first was a feature and now is an add-on to Windows Server 2008. Neil, who joined Microsoft four years ago as part of the Connectix acquisition, recently talked with Network World Senior Editor John Fontana about critics, competition, licensing and feature delays.

Citrix's announcement that it would acquire XenSource demonstrates the company's plans to support the most relevant application delivery technologies possible, company officials say. The software, according to Citrix Chief Strategy Officer Wes Wasson, will not only enhance Citrix's desktop and server products, but also be put to use in the company's application-networking tools also acquired with NetScaler and Orbital Data. Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie talked with Wasson yesterday to learn more about why Citrix made this move now and what it means to corporate IT customers.

Adding more value is a key focus for D-Link and its channel this year. In the third and final part of an interview with ARN's NADIA CAMERON, local managing director, Domenic Torre, talks about its distribution strategy, future product direction and how he sees the networking competitive landscape changing.

Cisco introduced its Services Oriented Network Architecture less than two years ago, and now the company says the SONA concept in action will reduce corporate costs and move customers toward virtualized services, including security, voice, mobility, applications, management, processing and storage -- with the network as the common facet. Bill Ruh, vice president of Advanced Services at Cisco, recently discussed with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about why network engineers should be already be incorporating the principles of SONA into their network design and how Cisco's services-oriented architecture (SOA) would help them better architect and navigate tomorrow's next-generation networks. Can you give me a bit of background on SONA?

D-Link is among a host of networking vendors trying to nab a share of the SMB market. In the second part of an in-depth interview with ARN's NADIA CAMERON, local managing director, Domenic Torre, shares his thoughts on how the company has fared in the commercial market to date and how the vendor plans to win market share by tackling key vertical markets.

In the first part of an in-depth interview with ARN's NADIA CAMERON, D-Link managing director, Domenic Torre, talks about how it has grown its product line-up and partner programs to address the business market.

Vint Cerf is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of the TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet. In 2005, he and Kahn received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The US$8.2 billion buyout of Avaya by Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group will change how the VOIP vendor will operate and interact with customers. Avaya Chief Operating Officer Mike Thurk discussed where the company goes from here with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth.

The Open Grid Forum, a standards organization focused on Grid Computing, counts EMC, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft among its members. Mark Linesch has taken leave from HP, where he had been vice president of the adaptive enterprise program, to head the organization. He discussed advances in storage-grid standards, the differences between storage grids and clusters, and the convergence of server and storage grids with Deni Connor.