HP ProCurve Growth Accelerates at Nearly Four Times Industry Rate

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 27, 2008 – HP ProCurve experienced year-over-year port growth for the first calendar quarter of 2008 that nearly quadrupled the growth rate of the networking industry, according to data from a quarterly report by market research firm Dell’Oro Group.(1)

According to the analyst firm’s data, ProCurve, the world’s second largest enterprise LAN networking vendor, grew worldwide port shipments by 28.4 percent in the first calendar quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007. The industry growth rate for this same period was 7.82 percent.

“In the face of a challenging global economy, ProCurve’s impressive growth is based on the ability to provide customers with choice to handle their most difficult deployments, from small offices to global enterprises,” said Mark Thompson, HP ProCurve global director of sales and marketing. “This growth reflects a dramatic increase in the number of customers who are reconsidering their alternatives and looking to ProCurve for flexibility to quickly meet the changing needs of users, applications and organizations.”

Comparing quarter-over-quarter regional port growth in total switched Layer 2 through Layer 7, ProCurve’s port shipments in Asia Pacific grew by 52.4 percent versus an Asian market that declined 5.1 percent. In North America, ProCurve shipments grew at 10.4 percent in a market that declined by 11.8 percent. ProCurve port shipments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew at 14.0 percent in a market that declined 1.0 percent.

In addition, according to Dell’Oro Group data ProCurve’s Power over Ethernet (PoE) worldwide shipments grew 68.4 percent year over year compared to market growth of 26.0 percent. This data sustains ProCurve in the No. 2 industry position in PoE.

In Layer 2 and Layer 3 total Gigabit port shipments, ProCurve quarter-over-quarter growth was 20.8 percent in a market that declined 2.0 percent. Dell’Oro Group data places ProCurve as the No. 2 overall Gigabit networking vendor.

In the Web managed Gigabit segment category, ProCurve grew at a 60.6 percent rate, in contrast with quarter over quarter industry growth of 12.7 percent, boosting ProCurve Small Business Networking switches to the No. 2 position in this segment with a 21.5 market share.

Can you define cloud computing????

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, you've even seen articles about it on this site. But can you provide the true definition of cloud computing? Can anybody!?!?

Well, Joyent hosting got together with some of the big boys in technology and tried to define cloud computing. Interviewees include Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Rafe Needleman, Brian Solis, and Stowe Boyd.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think of the cloud computing phenomenon.

IBM, Google stirring up a cloud environment

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Google and IBM are testing a cloud computing infrastructure that could become an important avenue for them to deliver software and services to consumer and business users.

Google's Eric Schmidt and IBM's Sam Palmisano addressed a gathering of IBM business partners in Los Angeles on Thursday and revealed the two companies have developed a cloud computing environment that runs on Linux and includes Xen virtualization and an Apache implementation of the Google File System called Hadoop.

Last year, the two companies teamed up on a parallel-computing initiative.

The IBM/Google cloud environment is being tested at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University.

The pair isn't the first to test the cloud concept.

Amazon is offering a cloud environment called EC2, which has companies or developers paying only for the capacity they need to run their applications or services that they in turn are offering to users or business partners.

While the two CEOs did not announce any future plans, they said the IBM/Google cloud would eventually be used to support an array of services and applications tailored for consumers and businesses.

Google already has a number of online services for consumers including calendars, photos and Google Docs word processing tools. Google also is positioning Google Docs as a suite of applications for corporate users, including offline capabilities.

IBM recently released IBM Symphony, a set of similar office productivity tools that users can download and run locally and can be tied into other services. It also has a set of social-networking tools that could be offered as a service.

The IBM/Google cloud initiative would compete with Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy and the recently announced Live Mesh, a storage and synchronization framework. Microsoft is attempting to tie the cloud to desktop and devices, and its on-premise business and server applications. In April, the company announced it had begun a beta to test a combination of Office and online services under the codename Albany.

Schmidt was quoted by the Dow Jones news service as saying Google's relationship with IBM is a "key plank" in its strategy "otherwise we can't reach the customers."

Mitel Wins Best of Interop Award 2008

PHOENIX, Arizona, April 30, 2008 — Mitel innovation was recognized by InformationWeek, the leading multimedia business technology brand, and Interop, the leading global business technology event series, today as winner of the 2008 Best of Interop Awards in the VoIP and Collaboration category during Interop Las Vegas 2008.

The Mitel Communications Suite was selected by InformationWeek's panel of expert judges and won against products from Cisco and Siemens. Each year, Best of Interop winners prove to be the key players in the continuing evolution of business technology.

Mitel Communications Suite delivers simplified system installation and management, business process improvement, and a reduction in operating costs by consolidating low-power consumption telephony and server hardware platforms for IT and unified communications applications. Mitel Communications Suite can be combined with the Sun Ray Unified IP Client powered by Mitel, which delivers a secure unified computing and communications environment fully integrated into the world-renowned Sun Ray solution. The combined solution is among the industry’s most energy efficient, providing ongoing capex and opex savings through the elimination of power-hungry desktop PCs and the reduced energy consumption of low power Mitel IP phones.

"With the increase in exhibitors this year, competition was especially tough for the Best of Interop Awards," said Lenny Heymann, Interop general manager. "We congratulate Mitel for their contributions and demonstrating how Interop is the leading business technology event to see the exciting and latest advancements in the industry."

The Mitel Communications Suite, a pre-integrated unified communications solution, allows Mitel’s flagship 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) software and other related unified communications applications (including mobility, unified messaging, teleworking, Mitel Live Business Gateway, and audio and web conferencing) to be integrated as a single seamless communications solution for business, resident on a standard Sun Fire X4150 server. This solution delivers the features and functionality of the advanced Mitel communications solution, while reducing deployment cost, improving the seamless integration of voice applications, and enabling organizations to roll out voice-based solutions on a Sun data infrastructure.

“The work between Sun Microsystems and Mitel blends proven technologies to create a unique value proposition for businesses looking to evolve to unified communications while reducing the number of servers; obtaining secure, centralized management; and lowering their total cost of ownership,” said Paul Butcher, president and chief operating officer, Mitel. “Sun and Mitel are planning a long and successful partnership, using unified communications applications to reshape business practices and to drive business process improvements in a collaborative, mobile world.”

IPv6 exec says sound the alarm

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

The sky is falling on the number of global IP addresses, and IPv6 is the solution, executives from major technology companies said Wednesday.

The exhaustion of available IP addresses using IPv4 brought out the alarmist side of many industry executives. "It's a crisis -- not a market-oriented event," said Akinori Maemora, chairman of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), speaking at the Global IPv6 Summit in Beijing. "We have just three years until IPv4 addresses are depleted. These changes will come suddenly," he said.

The telecom industry is going through "a period of grief" over the end of IPv4, said Tony Hain, IPv6 technical leader for Cisco. "Most people in the world are still in a state of denial" about upgrading to IPv6. "No one will ask for IPv6 until they run out of IPv4 addresses," he said.

IP addresses allow individual devices, including computers, laptops and mobile handsets to connect to the Internet. Using the current IPv4 system, which offers a total of about 4.7 billion possible IP addresses, some countries, including China, will begin to run out of addresses they can allocate around 2010, according to estimates by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

By switching to IPv6, the number of possible addresses increases by billions more. This would also allow a far greater number of devices to connect, allowing features such as the Internet-based remote control of security cameras, and even turning on home appliances from one's desktop at work.

You can see the whole article on Network World's website.

Unified Communications the Next Step for VoIP

Human latency, it's an elaborate term for something that we each experience regularly, the time it takes for someone to return a communication. Whether that communication is via phone, e-mail, text or any other method, human latency costs corporations millions each year.

The latest wave in communications is designed around eliminating human latency by providing a variety of features centered around presence information and mobility features in the workplace. Leveraging existing VoIP networks, communication systems are now providing presence information, real-time chat, on-demand video communication, mobility, and document collaboration to users. These features are referred to as unified communications, every avenue to communicate with someone available at the user's fingertips.

Users can now see the corporate contacts available to speak, chat, collaborate on a project, and video conference all in one interface. Corporate connectivity can even be extended to the mobile device to provide the same information seen at the desktop. These enhancements are allowing people to communicate faster and more efficiently, eliminating the issue of human latency. Some people may look at unified communications as overdoing it, but connecting with the right person at the right time is critical to getting the job done efficiently and ensuring the bottom line.