Articles by Charles King

IBM's recent Information On Demand (IOD) 2011 conference came at the tail end of a particularly tumultuous year or so for the company's primary system vendor competitors HP fired one CEO (Mark Hurd), gained a new one (Leo Apotheker), fired him and gained another (Meg Whitman), all while publicly discussing selling or spinning off its largest busine...

Last week, Calxeda launched its ARM-based "EnergyCore" Server on a Chip, which the company said consumes as little as 1.5 watts -- the first server CPU to achieve this milestone. This makes EnergyCore ideal for workloads such as Web serving, Big Data applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming, and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory scalable databases, the company said.

Anyone who attended last year's McAfee Focus conference was likely struck by the strangeness of the event. Since Intel had announced plans to acquire the company just a couple of months before Focus, McAfee was officially in "quiet" mode -- unable to discuss literally any and every business and product issue that might in any way influence the deal or the company's share price. In other words, at an event designed to spotlight McAfee's innovation and value, its executives' and employees' lips were legally, effectively sealed.

Given the sheer volume of commentaries following the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs, I hesitated to add my own voice to the chorus. Like most folks, I didn't know Jobs personally. Like many, the closest I ever got to him was by being in the audience during his Macworld keynotes, including the memorable 1999 introduction of the candy-colored Apple iMac G3.

Coming just weeks before the beginning of the holiday shopping season so crucial to its consumer OEM/ODM customers, Intel's annual Developer Forum (IDF) tends to highlight the spun sugar and sweet delights the market can expect in the shorter term. However, as IDF 2011 in San Francisco recently proved, it is the longer-term strategies and technica...

VMworld 2011 occurred a couple of weeks ago, but the energized crowd of 19,000-plus attendees and the raft of VMware and partner announcements that accompanied it make it worth revisiting. I'll start by considering VMware's central position in two of the IT industry's most dynamic sectors: virtualization and cloud computing. Virtualization and clo...

Aug. 12, 2011, marked the 30th birthday of the IBM Personal Computer (PC) -- an event marked in numerous congratulatory and cautionary articles and blog posts. In the days since then, PC-related news has remained thick on the ground. Most shocking, perhaps, was HP's announcement that it was "looking at options" (i.e. sale or spinoff) for its PC bu...

IBM Global Services (IGS) is an organization the company's customers love to use and its competitors love to hate. That is, when they're not trying to copy it. From a revenue standpoint, there's certainly a lot to love. IGS' two central organizations -- Global Technology Services (GTS) and Global Business Services (GBS) -- together account for wel...

Intel's recently announced plans to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems, a privately held fabless Ethernet semiconductor company, may seem counterintuitive to some. Founded in 1999, Fulcrum develops integrated, standards-based 10- and 40-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch silicon designed to deliver low latency and workload-balancing capabilities, along with superior network speeds.

When the first EMC-sponsored study aimed at determining the size, scope and implications of digital information growth appeared five years ago, its IDC and University of California, Berkeley, authors employed restraint with the title, "The Expanding Digital Universe." In the follow-up study two years later, "Expanding" morphed into "Diverse and Exploding." The newest iteration, published last month, stretches the guiding concept even further with the notion of "Extracting Order from Chaos." ...

Part of the charm of living with a decimal number system is the importance attributed to birthdays ending in "0." Decade by decade, celebratory gravitas tends to accumulate and peak when a subject hits the centenary. Though 100th birthdays are far more common today than they've ever been before in human history (thanks to better diets and modern healthcare), reaching the centennial milestone is still nothing to sneeze at.

As mobile computing has evolved from the exception to the norm, many vendors have attempted to imbue their products with a certain high-end cachet. Some succeeded beyond measure and expectation, even with devices that were initially technologically flawed. Others have developed products which initially seemed destined for commercial success but were abandoned in a matter of weeks when they failed to find an immediate home among consumers...

The IT industry loves the concept of "innovation," but many vendors' hearts largely belong to just the most conventional sorts of wisdom. That adoration takes a number of shapes: Stone Age business models; dusty Neolithic technologies and architectures; fossilized go-to-market strategies. In point of fact, such vendors are more similar to staid industries and companies, where dependability trumps progress, than they might like to think.

The buzz around cloud computing has been so steady for so long that industry observers should be forgiven if they were lulled to sleep. But events of the past couple of weeks served as a cold water wake-up call that may have obscured cloud's supposedly bright future The first was an unplanned outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenter in Nor...

Dell's announcement of new solutions and investments around its Virtual Era data center strategy provided clear insights into the company's future plans and direction. The new solutions include the following: vStart...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise" inspires many proselytizers and true believers, ...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise" inspires many proselytizers and true believers, ...

The IT industry purely loves digital information and with good reason. Creating, storing and archiving documents consisting of 1's and 0's provides the foundation for thousands of business computing solutions and billions of dollars in annual sales. While the gospel of the "all-digital enterprise" inspires many proselytizers and true believers, ...

HP's recent Strategy Summit in San Francisco provided a coming-out party for the company's CEO Leo Apotheker before 350-plus IT industry analysts, and he wasted little time setting an agenda. Information, Apotheker said, represents the world's "most valuable commodity," reinforcing HP's plan's to support "seamless, secure, context-aware" information access to connected devices of every kind.

Last week saw a pair of announcements that could profoundly affect the way that companies plan, deploy and manage their datacenter infrastructures. On the scale-up side of the house, at the SHARE conference, CA announced that it has installed a new integrated IBM zEnterprise mainframe (z196) and BladeCenter Extension (zBX) system. The company plan...