Sean Michael Kerner

**UPDATED** From the ‘read the fine print‘ files: If the rumor (and TechCrunch) are to be believed – Facebook is going Open Source. Kinda/sorta. The root of the leaked news is that the Facebook Platform which allows third-party developers to build applications for the social utility’s users will move to an Open Source license. The […]

From the ‘everybody loves popularity contests‘ file: Research firm The InfoPro has an interesting study out on who enterprise IT buyers consider to be the most exciting networking vendor. The winner?  Cisco by a wide margin. The study involved over 130 one-on-one hour-long interviews with Fortune 1000 companies. Over 50 percent of whom ranked Cisco […]

Networking vendor SonicWALL (NASDAQ: SNWL) is set to announce an update to its SSL VPN firmware next week. Version 3 of SSL VPN isn’t for everyone. It’s designed for small and medium-sized enterprises. As the numbers of remote workers continue to grow the need for secure remote access solutions shows no signs of slowing down. […]

In one corner of the Internet traffic delivery world is Akamai, with its own network for in-the-cloud traffic acceleration. In the other corner is Citrix, with its NetScaler hardware for accelerating traffic. Until this week, while many enterprises used both network acceleration titans in tandem, there had no formal relationship between the two. That now […]

Answer: At least $30 million. Flock – which is a pimped version of Firefox for social networking – has just raised another $15 million in financing. This is a Series D financing that was led by Fidelity Ventures (Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures and Shasta Ventures, also participated). Total financing to date for Flock is […]

I just got an early heads up that code analysis vendor Coverity will announce on Tuesday May 27th that it is acquiring software build management vendor Codefast. Coverity and Codefast are both privately held and financial details are not being disclosed. According the unreleased press release that I obtained, Codefast’s products will be integrated into […]

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a wonderful model for enterprises and end users that don’t want to deploy software on their own infrastructure. But what happens if you want to set up your own SaaS business and don’t want to just pass of customers to a big SaaS vendor? That’s the general idea behind […]

From the ‘don’t count your chickens till they hatch‘ files: Firefox 3.0 is not yet officially out the door but Mozilla developers already have a plan — and a timeline – for Firefox 3.1. The draft plan — as it is currently being floated on the Mozilla developer lists — is for Firefox 3.1 to […]

Though the next major release of Red Hat’s flagship Enterprise Linux is still likely more than a year away, Red Hat continues to offer incremental updates, with the latest delivering new features and support for both server and desktop users. The Red Hat 5.2 release comes on the heels of the company’s NYSE Linux win […]

From the ‘standing in line for new tech‘ files: I woke up a little earlier than normal this morning and headed over to my local Wal-Mart to get a Nintendo Wii Fit. It was 7:30 AM when I got there (the store didn’t open till 8 AM) and there was already a line out front. […]

At the heart of the Internet is DNS , the system that translates domain names into IP addresses. For the last two decades, the world of open source DNS has been dominated by a single technology — BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). Now VeriSign, the company that runs that .com and .net domains, is aiming […]

There was a time when users’ identity information was siloed within enterprises, shared only with explicitly defined partners. With the emergence of broad-based authentication schemes like OpenID and Windows CardSpace, those silos are breaking down today, while the need for a more expansive, enterprise-grade mechanism for managing identity federation has become paramount. That’s where the […]