Articles by Charles King

On its face, EMC's recently acquisition of ScaleIO seems pretty straightforward. The company said the deal will further strengthen its Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO's highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash card solutions, like EMC XtremSF. ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Product Division, becoming an integral part of the ...

Over the past three-plus decades, it's hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than needed, meaning they are drastically underutilized.

Technology vendor partnerships come in two general flavors: 1) strategically transformative relationships that aim to develop and deliver something essentially new; and 2) tactically accretive relationships that strengthen the partners' individual efforts. The first sort typically occurs between companies whose products have little competitive ove...

There's no shortage of partner initiatives at most annual IT vendor events, but that was especially apparent at SAP's recent Sapphire NOW conference in Orlando, Fla. In large part, it's simply the nature of the event beast. Vendors work for weeks or even months on conference-related announcements, hoping to garner the attention of energized, enthusiastic attendees -- some 20,000 of them, in the case of Sapphire NOW 2013...

The Sky HDTV Antenna is available for US$179.99 from Mohu.It's hardly a surprise that cable and satellite television service providers are in trouble. Take decades of complacency, add in mostly awful customer service, mix liberally with resistance to change, and you have an industry heading toward self-inflicted extinction....

The IT industry is no stranger to youth worship, but Yahoo's multimillion-dollar deal for Summly pushes that notion into cradle-robbing -- well, high school-robbing, anyway -- territory. That's because the punchline beneath the headlines is the age of Summly founder. Nick D'Aloisio, 17 -- and a little more than a year short of high school graduation -- appears to have qualified as the world's youngest VC-backed entrepreneur.

From the first day of the tablet computing revolution -- April 3, 2010, when Apple's iPad became publicly available -- users have willingly traded limitations in computing form/function for innovations in access/interface. In part, that was because Apple maintained a careful line between the iPad and its traditional Macbook and iMac products to av...

Taken together, VCE's recently announced new offerings qualify as a generational step forward not only for the company, but also for the cause of converged infrastructures and, most importantly, for VCE customers and partners. Prior to this, the company's Vblocks delivered dramatic improvements in common data center metrics, including operational ...

Business IT solution development generally follows specific trends and overlapping eras. The first, calculation, occurred as digital products and services wholly replaced the adding machines and other mechanical business devices. The vendors that produced them -- including Burroughs, Sperry and IBM -- became some of early IT's biggest players The s...

Facebook's recently announced beta of its new Graph Search resulted in the sorts of stories and headlines one has come to expect from a company whose every move is subject to media dissection. Some were skeptical about the value of the feature, especially its built-in restrictions: leveraging Facebook content alone and excluding well-established search entities like Google and Bing...

CES, the international consumer electronics show conducted every January in LasVegas, is easier to hate than it is to love. Hype drowns out substance. Innovative andinteresting products are easily overshadowed by rooms literally full of craptastic junk.Travel/logistics can be a nightmare -- especially given the surge in attendance to some150,000 this year. And let's not forget the myriad ways that Las Vegasseems to transform reasonable people into doltish twits...

We in IT love inflection points -- events that somehow amalgamate past events and/or indicate how and why the future will be significantly different. The world of personal computing is entering, if not an inflection point, then an inflection process. This is due to the confluence of two converging technologies -- Intel's Ultrabook initiative and Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system.

This year's EMC Industry Analyst Summit included numerous highlights familiar to regular IT conference attendees: a self-generated report card on the previous year's activities and a discussion of plans for the year ahead, for example Few, however, offer the level of access EMC does by holding candid and unscripted Q&A sessions with senior executiv...

It's hard to think of an IT vendor with a stronger leadership position than Intel, but the company is having trouble shaking off the perception that it is on the ropes or headed for disaster in some of its core markets On one hand, Intel's mission-critical Itanium platform suffered when Oracle and HP publicly butted heads in an altercation that end...

The success of ARM-based processors in mobile phones and tablets has had a tectoniceffect across numerous IT markets, but one of their most intriguing opportunities isin data centers. It seems contradictory that a CPU architecture designed for powerefficiency and lightweight applications would be considered for compute-intensiveenvironments. Howev...

The organisms that survive longest are those that most successfully adapt to shiftingenvironments and circumstances. That's a core concept behind the evolution ofbiological entities, and it also applies directly to business organizations, including ITvendors Supporting evidence, both historical and contemporary, is abundant. The vendors that work h...

In commercial IT, "enterprise systems" have long been defined as the technologies that provide large organizations the highest levels of compute performance and critical attributes such as reliability, availability and scalability. But enterprise IT infrastructures have never been about technology alone; they also encompass the common boundaries and linkages between systems and large scale business processes, applications and workloads...

Technologically inclined businesses and other organizations have long enjoyed what Icall IT "trickle down": Continuing, rapid development results in the mainstreamingof hardware, software and services that were originally unthinkably expensive andspecialized. This doesn't mean that higher-end products ever disappear. In fact,the baseline performan...

Chief executive transitions in the IT industry often tend toward melodrama or at least bald quirkiness: The number of ignominious CEO departures at HP and Yahoo could qualify both companies for their own telenovelas. After successfully acquiring Sun Microsystems, Oracle unceremoniously booted CEO Jonathan Swartz, an event he noted by tweeting a Ze...

Hardly a day goes by that one IT vendor or another fails to announce one "fastest/biggest/bestest" achievement or another, attempting to poke in the eye or drive straight into a ditch any and all previous claims. But it is ironic that while there is no shortage of ambition in the technology industry, some of what have become IT's most transformative solutions and services began with little, if any, braggadocio.