As any Star Trek fan knows, getting crew members and supplies from one place to another is as easy as using a “transporter beam.” While it still might seem like science fiction to fans and non-fans alike, most of us will start to see enterprises (the lower case kind) “beaming” physical products and replacement parts to their customers through wide area networks within our lifetime. More...

For those of us who spend our days focused on the bits and bytes of the enterprise WAN, it’s easy to lose sight of the upper layers of the OSI model. That said, software is not only redefining convergence across the enterprise network, it’s redefining entire industries.

Netscape co-founder and leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen penned an essay in the Wall Street Journal  late last year entitled “Why Software Is Eating the World.” His theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More...

In the cloud computing space, Salesforce.com is once again showing that it has vision about how the workplace of tomorrow will change. At the end of 2009, Salesforce.com acquired a company to bolster the site’s social capabilities. The social fabric now known as Salesforce Chatter was a result of that acquisition. Now, Salesforce.com has just purchased another company known as Rypple. As a result of this and similar moves by enterprise application providers, I suspect Fortune 500 executives will flock rapidly to a new buzzword: “gamification.” More...