Sean Michael Kerner

Networking vendor Brocade is expanding beyond its traditional confines as a storage vendor to make its play in the broader networking market. Brocade (NASDAQ:BRCD) today is announcing new switching and application delivery gear, which come as the result of its 2008 $3 billion acquisition of networking vendor Foundry. The new networking gear is the first […]

From the ‘how much money can one company loose?’ files: Nortel Networks issued its first quarter 2009 financial report this morning and it’s not a pretty sight. The company is still losing money — lots of money — though there are (surprisingly) a few bright spots. Nortel reported that it lost $507 million ($1.02 per […]

From the ‘how to make faster GUIs‘ files: Networking vendor Blue Coat (Nasdaq:BCSI) is out today with version 9 of their Reporter application, which ‘reports’ on web activity generated by way of their Blue Coat appliances. The new software boasts new role based controls, but the real bit that caught my eye during the demo […]

From the ‘who needs a browser when you have a desktop‘ files: I’ve been following and using  Mozilla Prism since 2007 when it first appeared as a Mozilla Labs project.The idea is simple: bring online applications to the desktop. With Prism you can take any online site and create an desktop version that will run […]

From the ‘manual updates don’t work‘ files: Browser vendors all update their software often to patch for security issues. The problem is that not all browser users update to the latest versions quickly, if at all. A new study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Stefan Frei and Google’s Thomas Duebendorfer looked at how […]

From the ‘ahead warp factor five Mr. Sulu‘ files: Google is an innovative kind of company known for keeping an eye on the future. They’re taking that mission very literally now with the inclusion of Stardate notations for the Google Calendar. Stardate is the calendar system in Star Trek (which hit the big screen last […]

While most technology vendors are seeing revenue declines as a result of the recession, VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) is reporting a revenue gain for its first quarter of 2009. It’s secret? Growth in domain name sales. VeriSign reported that revenues in its naming business, which includes .com and .net registrations, grew 17 percent on a year-over-year […]

OpenOffice.org today released version 3.1 of its office productivity suite, with claims of enhanced features, improved performance and better graphics. OpenOffice is a critical component of the open source ecosystem, providing a free alternative to Microsoft Office for both Windows and Linux users. With the new release, developers are aiming building on the success of […]

From the ‘open source leadership changes‘ files: Open source vendor SugarCRM’s founder and CEO John Roberts has resigned his post. Roberts founded SugarCRM in 2004 and I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with him on numerous occasions over the last five years. Roberts will be replaced by interim CEO Larry Augustin (of SourceForge fame). […]

From the ‘not dead yet‘ files: Vignette, a company well known for its web content management systems is being acquired by Open Text for $310 million. It’s a news flash I saw late yesterday and it really got me to thinking about the state of CMS today. Ten years ago, Vignette was the brand name […]

When the going gets tough, Cisco’s CEO gets talking — talking tough, that is. Even as the economic downturn continues battering the IT sector, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) chief John Chambers said the company remains on-track with a number of high-profile efforts that will put his company on a collision course with other giants of the enterprise, […]

The Ruby on Rails (RoR) open source framework is about to get more modular and faster — thanks to some benefits of its recent merger with Ruby rival Merb. With the upcoming RoR 3 release, Rails will be poised to deliver new features and functionality to the popular framework’s users, which has won converts among […]