News digest | IPNET

Cisco buying Flip video camera maker for $590 million

flip Cisco Thursday announced its intent to acquire privately held Pure Digital Technologies, creator of the Flip video camcorder for consumers, for $590 million in stock.

Pure Digital is a “pioneer” in developing consumer-friendly video with mass-market appeal, Cisco says. The acquisition of Pure Digital is key to Cisco’s strategy to expand momentum in the media-enabled home and to capture the consumer market transition to visual networking, the company said in a statement.

In addition to exchanging $590 million in stock for all Pure Digital shares, Cisco will provide up to $15 million in retention-based equity incentives for continuing employees. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2009.

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…

Cisco’s UCS: A closer look

Cisco is claiming its new Unified Computing architecture will save IT departments 20% cheaper on their hardware costs and 30% on IT running costs, compared with traditional systems.Launched on Monday, March 16, the Unified Computing System unites computing, network, storage access, and visualization resources in a single energy efficient system, the company said. This puts it into direct competition with IBM, HP and other hardware vendors for the first time.

According to Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, this are the pluses and minuses of the new Cisco product:

Pluses

Innovative packaging that requires less rack space, power, and cooling than a standard blade server.

Designed for tight integration with server virtualization and the network.

a. Cisco Virtual switch (i.e. VN-Link) replaces VMware switch. This links virtual and physical networking policy and management.

b. Cisco adds extra memory to its server platforms, which enables it to increase the ratio of virtual servers hosted on each physical server.

Cisco manages the entire UCS virtual data center with one management platform. Cisco management can be integrated with other management platforms from vendors like BMC.

The overall strength is in integrating and improving both storage and network I/O. In this regard, Cisco could have a significant performance advantage in large data center deployments.

Minuses

Extremely proprietary architecture. Heck, Cisco is implementing its own version of Ethernet (What is more standard than Ethernet, for heaven’s sake?) to consolidate storage and network I/O. The “real” standards won’t be in place for another year or two.

This is a brand new arena for Cisco where its market share is 0 percent. With Dell, HP, and IBM well established in this market, expect enterprise CIOs to proceed with extreme caution.

The advantages of this architecture are minimal in a mixed environment. Today, all enterprises have other servers, and heterogeneous server support is not a core feature of this announcement.

Systems management has always been a Cisco weakness. HP and IBM are much better positioned here.

Brought to you by NetworkWorld.tv and FirstDigest

CeBIT 2009: End-of-show report

cebit_2009 CeBIT 2009 got off to a powerful start and ended on a successful note, boosting optimism in the world ICT industry. A majority of the 4,300 companies from 69 countries drew fresh optimism from being here at CeBIT. A huge number of exhibitors and visitors are now leaving Hannover with a renewed sense of buoyancy as well as bulging order books and a solid foundation for new business. The show had lived up to their expectations.

More than 400,000 visitors – a drop of just under 20 percent on the previous year’s figure – came to CeBIT 2009 to generate new business. A marked increase in the trade visitor ratio however meant their expectations were often exceeded. Companies who came well-prepared reported a jump in significant business leads of more than 20 percent ted. This CeBIT has been a good investment for exhibitors and visitors alike, delivering real benefits to everyone.

The percentage of visitors from abroad remained steady at 20 percent. A decrease in attendance from Asia was offset by increased attendance from the Americas and the Middle East.

The spotlight this year was on higher efficiency and lower costs in all areas of business IT.

The next CeBIT will be staged from 2 to 6 March 2010 in Hannover.

Ernst Raue, the Deutsche Messe Managing Board member in charge of CeBIT, on Sunday in Hannover.
“The organization of a trade fair with a truly global impact, involving the participation of 4,300 exhibitors and more than 400,000 attendees – particularly in times like these – is a real achievement for us and the industry as a whole, underlining the drawing power of CeBIT.” We are once more seen as a dynamic event. Several companies who decided against having their own stand this year have expressed a clear interest in rejoining the event in 2010.

Source: www.cebit.de

Sharp turns like Cisco’s have a long history

Cisco If Cisco announces its first blade servers on Monday, as expected, the news may well herald a major expansion of the dominant networking company’s business. But even though it’s the most hotly anticipated move in a long time for an IT vendor, this isn’t the first case of a company taking a big gamble on entering into a new business.

Potentially game-changing shifts have taken many forms, and none is directly comparable to Cisco’s plan or its historical context. But there are some lessons for Cisco in how those strategies have played out, according to industry analysts.

It may be hard to remember, but Intel didn’t make any chips for servers until the Pentium Pro was unveiled in 1995. The company had remained focused on PCs while giants such as IBM and Sun Microsystems built both the central computers that ran enterprise applications and the processors at the heart of those systems. PCs were used for some departmental functions such as printing, but they weren’t true servers. Leveraging its PC chip development resources and large-scale PC economics for server CPUs turned out to be a very good move for Intel and IT as a whole, spawning the industry-standard servers that dominate data centers today.

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…

Authentication with a twist

fujitsu_logo People mistrust fingerprint devices, mostly because they associate fingerprinting with criminal activity. The average citizen thinks that the fingerprint registration could be stolen and used to implicate them in a crime. It can’t, of course, but that doesn’t change their perception. The same problem faces facial scanning/recognition software which has been used (unsuccessfully) to identify wanted criminals at sporting events. Retina scanners simply scare people – they don’t want anything being shined into their eye. So what can we do?

The smart folks at Fujitsu have come up with a new system to read a biometric. It’s non-intrusive, isn’t likely to be featured at a crime scene on a TV series but does provide a unique signature with little effort on the user’s part.

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…