Networking: Interviews

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.

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop/s, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse shared the company's WiMAX plans last week at CTIA Wireless. The plan to build a fourth-generation wireless network is a risky one, but Hesse explained to Denise Dubie why it's a smart strategy for Sprint.

The Internet engineering community will be eating its own dog food tonight. For one hour, the 1,250 network experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting will be able to access the Internet only through IPv6. The IETF created IPv6 in the mid-1990s, but this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol has not yet been widely deployed -- even by the technology's biggest proponents here. Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan talked with IETF Chair Russ Housley about the group's IPv6 experiment, why the transition to IPv6 is taking so long, and whether the IETF leadership is starting to panic about IPv4 addresses running out. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

It's perhaps no small coincidence that Cisco makes a major announcement just days before Juniper does or hosts an important event. The day before Juniper unveiled its EX line of Ethernet enterprise switches last month, Cisco introduced its new data center switch, the Nexus 7000. This week was no different, as Cisco unveiled its next-generation ASR1000 edge routers just as Juniper held its annual analyst conference in Southern California. Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy stole some of Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu's time at the conference to gauge his thoughts on Cisco's new router as well as a range of other topics.

WeFi is hoping to do for Wi-Fi connectivity what Facebook has done for social networking.

IBM and Google might seem like polar opposites in the world of technology, yet the companies have a budding partnership over cloud computing that seeks to combine the best features of business computing with the Internet. Steve Mills, the senior vice president and group executive for IBM's software business since July 2000, explained the goals of the IBM-Google relationship to Network World Senior Writer Jon Brodkin in an interview this week at IBM's New York City offices. Mills also discussed new opportunities in China, software-as-a-service's impact on the IT market, and the pros and cons of IBM's diversified software portfolio.

Juniper's entry into enterprise switching with the EX line is rooted in extending a common operating system across the switching, routing and security domains of an enterprise network -- something that's lacking in what's viewed as a mature market dominated by Cisco. Juniper CEO Scott Kriens shared his thoughts on the company's opportunity -- and what it means for Cisco's current competitors -- with Network World President and CEO John Gallant and Managing Editor Jim Duffy at this week's EX launch in New York.

December is a relatively slow time of year at MLB Advanced Media, the company that brings you the official Major League Baseball Web sites. From pitch-by-pitch accounts of games to streaming audio and video -- plus news, schedules, statistics and more -- it has baseball covered. Doing so requires serious horsepower, so much so that the company's Manhattan data center is pretty much tapped out in terms of space and power, according to Ryan Nelson, director of operations for the firm. Strategic use of virtualization technology enabled him nevertheless to forge ahead with implementing new products during the 2007 season, and promises to smooth a shift to a new data center in Chicago in time for the 2008 season.