Stories by John Dix

VON spreads wings, embraces IP video

The Voice on the Network conference celebrated its 10th anniversary in Boston this week, with founder Jeff Pulver noting that the first show attracted 224 attendees while this one was expected to draw more than 10,000.

Embracing the free culture movement

When was the last time you saw a keynote speaker at a technology conference get a standing ovation? That honour was bestowed on Lawrence Lessig, the opening speaker at the recent LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco, who called on the audience to join his fight to promote what he calls free culture.

LANDesk users cite product benefits

While you would expect a handpicked customer panel at a vendor user group meeting to favor the vendor's product, it was interesting to hear the breadth of benefits cited by LANDesk customers at the company's Interchange conference in Florida last week.

Accept failure, but focus on recovery

Armando Fox believes that, if you can't build fail-proof systems, you should at least build systems that can recover so quickly that service blips become negligible. A Research Associate with the University of California Berkeley's Reliable, Adaptive Distributed systems laboratory (RAD Lab), Fox was one of the leads on the joint Berkeley/Stanford Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC) Project that investigated techniques for building dependable Internet services that emphasized "recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance."

Security: Lots more work to do

A panel of security experts at the RSA Conference last week said businesses still overlook fundamental security questions when buying or building software.

McAfee president on future of security

McAfee is perhaps still best known as a force in antivirus tools, but the company's offerings today range from antispam to host intrusion prevention. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McAfee President Gene Hodges for a company update and his view of how security is evolving.

WiMax just around the corner

With excitement building about WiMax, you might be surprised that, technically, no real WiMax products are available yet. That is, none that meet the 802.16 profile as defined by the WiMax Forum and certified compatible by the Forum's appointed lab in Spain.

MCI unveils managed IP PBX offering

MCI this week used the VON Conference & Expo in Boston to announce a Managed IP PBX service with partners NEC and Cisco. The service is targeted at companies with 200 to 5,000 users and complements other VoIP offerings in MCI's existing Advantage Portfolio, including its Hosted IP Centrex service.

Is this gamble worth it?

Would you undertake a bold new cost-cutting initiative if you knew 28 per cent of companies that had tried it had instead seen costs rise, another 25 per cent never realized any savings and 31 per cent saved 20 per cent or less? Added up, that means 84 per cent of the pioneers that took the gamble did it for returns of, at best, 20 per cent. Only a lucky few did better.

Crunchtime for carriers

Six months ago Skype, the self-described global Internet telephony company, hit a milestone: for the first time ever, the Skype system was used to support one million simultaneous calls.

Linux: Ready, willing and able

Some of the industry's most powerful vendors came to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston last week with a simple message: Linux is ready for prime time.

Opinion: Putting the wraps on smelly phish

Phishing is quickly becoming the single greatest threat to corporate efforts to serve consumers electronically, and with good reason. Undermining trust in online transactions could set the whole movement back years and negate the efficiency and cost gains that companies have realized.

Focus on processes, not the technology

How is it that two companies can spend the same amount on IT and one will get a solid business bounce out of the investment and the other will see nowhere near the gain?

Adding data centre capacity block by block

If you're thinking you might reclaim some space in the data centre when you migrate to blades, think again. Blade densities are so great they typically overpower data centre cooling capabilities.

A fresh look at the lowly copier

The noise around enterprise content management is getting louder, what with EMC Corp.'s recent acquisition of Documentum Inc. and other vendors rushing to sort out their content and life-cycle management stories.

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