One of the biggest drivers of the converged network is “big data,” as enterprises capture massive amounts of data from every customer interaction and analyze it to predict future sales. One company managing this data really well today is Netflix.

I originally registered for Netflix streaming for research purposes. I have spent a lot of my career developing algorithms to capture the relationship between countless variables that drive business productivity.More...

It used to be that web videos were short. Many believed that was because of shorter attention spans. But we are finding that just isn't true. The truth is that short videos were just a technology and financial limitation. I personally no longer have a TV and my kids watch only web-based video content (a TV dial would be as foreign to them as a rotary dial telephone). All this has implications for the enterprise network. More...

I have written before about how gamification will become an incentive for convergence by tying  all the systems and processes together in the cloud and creating a game-like application environment. One example is a company that is trying to gamify getting out of bed. Actually, not a company so much as a hackathon team. More...

Cisco recently announced its Open Network Environment, or Cisco ONE, strategy. The new architecture is the foundation by which Cisco networks will eventually be provisioned entirely through software APIs, otherwise known as cloudbursting, which I have discussed  before. More...

Some of you may recall when network nodes required 75 ohm terminators on outlets that were not in use. I am talking of course about analog distribution networks using RG-11 or RG-6 coaxial cable. On a typical network, there might be 30 or so drops in a huge building serving 1,200 people. That was a ratio of network nodes to people of about 1 to 40. How times have changed. More...

If you haven’t seen Google Glasses yet, there’s a good video on YouTube that demonstrates the technology. Basically, Google Glasses converges your smartphone with eyeglasses. The idea is that everyday people can benefit from a heads-up display similar to what fighter pilots use in their cockpit. Officially, the initiative is called Project Glass and the technology is referred to as augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). More...

One still-emerging area of our converged world is connecting the myriad endpoints within our reach into the network. We’ve all heard of wide area networks (WANs) and local area networks (LANs), but you’ll soon be hearing more about Body Area Networks (BANs), thanks to a recent FCC decision authorizing the redeployment of spectrum. More...

One key driver of convergence is the cloud. As more and more enterprise workers interact with data in the cloud, there is less and less to tie them to their desk and to their legacy PCs and laptops.

Google recently entered the storage and collaboration market with Google Drive, which is one more nail in the coffin of the legacy enterprise network. Initially, Google Drive is accessible from PCs, Macs or those mobile devices that happen to run Android. More...

I’ve written before about how enterprise applications are changing. Trends such as gamification, which have nothing to do with playing around, are influencing business apps. John Cox, on his Network World blog, recently penned “What enterprise mobile apps can learn from mobile games,” and his perspectives add some gravity to the idea that convergence isn’t just about bringing wireline and wireless together, or deskphones and mobile  phones together, it’s about creating a seamless  application experience for all applications of technology. That includes making them fun, easy to learn, and intuitive. More...

Network World recently reviewed some research by Forrester that outlined five  rising and five declining security technologies. There was one clear trend in every technology mentioned: everything is moving toward the cloud.

With security, it may not be obvious why security can be much more efficient in the cloud, but a lot of it has to do with what you can see from a bird’s eye view. Spam filters are a good example. Non-cloud filter paradigms examine each email in isolation, trying to determine if each is legitimate. In the cloud, a mail filter can look at all of the email that is being sent through its services, easily identifying the number one characteristic of spam: if it was concurrently sent to thousands and thousands of people. More...