Author Archive for Allan Leinwand
By Allan Leinwand
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Friday, July 24, 2009 |
12:00 AM PT |
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By Allan Leinwand
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Friday, July 17, 2009 |
5:15 PM PT |
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Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build out its next generation of data centers to host its cloud computing offering, Windows Azure Platform. While the company is clearly innovative in its data center designs and plans, the true reason behind its push toward the cloud may be its ability to turn a commodity product –- bandwidth –- into high gross profits. A quick analysis that we here at Panorama Capital did shows that the commodity business of selling the transfer of bytes may be one of the most profitable parts of running a cloud service. Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Saturday, February 7, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
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When Cisco Systems announced plans to enter the enterprise server market, no company stood up and took notice more than Hewlett-Packard — the HP ProLiant line of servers, after all, is a force in the enterprise market; Cisco’s entrance was essentially a declaration of war on its former partner. To paraphrase one of my favorite characters on “Lost,” “They changed the rules.” Now, HP must change the rules again, for in order to win this war they are going to have to first win numerous strategic battles, and for that they’ll need to start shopping. Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Wednesday, December 3, 2008 |
9:29 AM PT |
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By Allan Leinwand
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008 |
4:25 PM PT |
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The prospect of outsourcing servers and storage to the cloud has an irresistible lure of operational simplicity and cash efficiency for today’s application developers. Cloud computing vendors help operate social networking applications, micro-blogging sites, global gaming networks and a plethora of applications that we use everyday. Yet, as successful and economically desirable as clouds have been for many organizations, outsourcing servers and storage causes a serious emotional and operational dilemma for the hardened breed of systems administrators called server huggers. Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Friday, October 17, 2008 |
9:30 AM PT |
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Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a great dancer. Yet I have recently become a proponent of a technology strategy that I have coined the “cloud two-step.” The cloud two-step is the way enterprise IT departments are going to dance their way to better infrastructure economics for their organizations during the current downturn.
Before we talk about specific two-step moves, it’s important to realize that the economic crisis has forced enterprise IT departments to stop or severely limit their spending. While this may help the enterprise stay afloat, it also requires that those departments find imaginative and cost-effective ways to serve technology needs. Put another way, they need to find the cheapest way to provide two commodity resources: storage and processor power. And providing flexible, cost-effective and outsourced storage and processor power is the value proposition of cloud computing that makes the CIOs of Fortune 1000 companies stand up and take notice. Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Thursday, October 2, 2008 |
5:00 PM PT |
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There has been a rumor rustling around Silicon Valley for a number of months that Cisco Systems is on the verge of acquiring EMC. Such a move would make a lot of strategic sense for Cisco, but this rumored mega-merger of technology giants may have to wait for the U.S. economy to recover before becoming a reality.
If Cisco were to acquire EMC, it would have an enormous impact on the technology landscape and etch in granite the combined company’s role as the hub around which the rest of the enterprise data center industry revolves. It would also place the firm at the forefront of the ongoing synergy between storage and data networking, a trend observed back in July, when Brocade Communications Systems agreed to buy Foundry Networks for $3 billion dollars.
And it would give Cisco control over VMware, the leader in enterprise virtualization software, and help move it further up the technology stack from being a data networking vendor and into enterprise software. Last month at VMworld, Cisco announced the Nexus 1000V switch, an integration of their switching software with VMware ESX (this was not what I predicted, but it was a step toward my prediction).
Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Saturday, September 27, 2008 |
5:00 AM PT |
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The current economic meltdown and its effects, which are expected to be felt for at least the next year, require entrepreneurs to find investors with deep pockets and a long-term investment horizon starting from a company’s earliest days. In other words: venture capital. Continue »
By Allan Leinwand
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Friday, September 12, 2008 |
4:00 PM PT |
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There’s buzz around Silicon Valley that there will be a big announcement made at VMworld next week in Las Vegas. I think Cisco Systems will announce support of VMware virtual machines on their networking hardware. And if I’m right, it will have numerous ramifications, not only for the two companies, but the networking industry overall. Continue »