Stories by John Dix

Rich Narasaki is global manager, digital marketing in the GE corporate global brand marketing group and, as such, works with and supports the digital strategy efforts of the company's eight primary business divisions. While not a member of the IT team, Narasaki works with IT and marketing constantly, so Network World Editor in Chief John Dix tracked him down to get his perspective on how digital strategy plays out in such a huge operation.

Nathan McBride joined AMAG Pharmaceuticals in 2008 with an ambitious goal: to rebuild IT using as little internal infrastructure as possible. He succeeded.

In this Network World Digital Spotlight, "Harnessing Gigabit Wi-Fi," we do a deep dive on the latest Wi-Fi developments.

Fidelity Investments is one of the world's largest providers of financial services, with assets under administration of $4.7 trillion, and it didn't get there by using yesterday's technology. In fact, the company has a standalone group, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology – more commonly referred to as Fidelity Labs -- whose job it is to take the long view, to examine technologies years before they become mainstream and help the firm get a leg up.

Using the cloud to complement on-premise IT resources is one of the nirvana states envisioned for cloud computing, letting you architect for normal workloads and then burst to the cloud when necessary.

Technology advances have made it easier to detect subtle, anomalous end-user behavior, such as installation of unusual apps on endpoint devices, or suspicious deviations from baseline activity. This roundtable discussion examines methods to build monitoring, control and context into enterprise insider threat protection efforts – both when dealing with privileged users and regular employees.

Do private Clouds work? You bet they do, says Cisco, which has more than two years of experience under its belt with its Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) Cloud. 

Contact centers are changing rapidly with the arrival of cloud technology and the ability to interact with customers over new social channels, including Twitter. The transformation has implications for everything from how companies deal with customers to the role agents play and how internal groups are best organized. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with the CEO of LiveOps, Marty Beard, for his take on where we stand and where we're headed.

Rack and stack that network and then walk away and leave it alone. VMware's NSX technology will provide all the control necessary going forward, says Steve Mullaney, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Networking & Security Business Unit.

The University of Florida is just putting the wraps on a remarkable year of IT upgrades. The school, which has a 2,000-acre campus and more than 900 buildings, installed a new supercomputer in a new data center, installed a 100Gbps link to Inernet2, and upgraded its Campus Research Network from 20G to 200Gbps while adding support for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix got the lowdown on all of the developments from Erik Deumens, director of research computing.

One gauge of industry progress on the software-defined networking front is the momentum of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the user-lead group that is spelling out the core SDN standards and championing the cause.

For an inside look at the goals, expectations and plans of the ONF's recently created Migration Group and how it hopes to help companies make the transition to SDN, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up via e-mail with the chair of the group, Justin Joubine Dustzadeh, CTO & VP of Technology Strategy, Networks, Huawei.

The recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York City attracted 400 participants, some of whom attended in-depth tutorial sessions about software defined networking (SDN) on day one, and others that stayed for the members-only closed door sessions on day two (vendors and press excluded). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Nick Lippis, who co-founded the SDN user group with representatives from Fidelity Investments, for his assessment of what was learned.

Jesse Rothstein, who was the lead architect of F5's flagship product line, founded ExtraHop in 2007 to develop products to derive IT operations intelligence from data gleaned from the network. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Rothstein for an update on the company and what it has learned about things like virtual packet loss (hint: it can be the bane of highly virtualized environments).

Riddle this: All your core performance metrics are glowing green, but customers on the other end of the network are still cursing your service. How can IT get to the root of the problem?