Check Point Software’s unusual appliance strategy
Check Point Software is the traditional leader in the firewall market, having seized large market share in its early days by innovating convenient, GUI-based policy management tools. Except in niches,...
View ArticleCrossbeam Systems — the future of appliances?
Crossbeam Systems is the closest thing I’ve found to what is – at least tentatively — my vision of the appliance future. It offers a blade-based computing box that differs from standard boxes in the...
View ArticleGuide to my recent research on computing appliances
My recent flurry of research into computing appliances was spurred by a column I just submitted to Network World. In that column there’s a URL – pointing to this post – promising a guide to more...
View ArticleSean McGrath correctly predicts the future of enterprise SaaS
I was proud of coming up with the idea to blend SaaS and appliances, but it turns out Sean McGrath beat me to it.
View ArticleIBM and Microsoft seeing a (virtual) appliance future?
Microsoft recently hired an IBM Fellow named Don Ferguson to be an office-of-the-CTO type. In his last blog post at IBM, he outlined the top ten issues he saw in his area over the next five years. #1?...
View ArticleAppliances — my conclusions! (For now, at least)
Network World today posted my column predicting a rosy future for computing appliances. A lot of the supporting research has been posted in this blog recently; here’s what was a preliminary summary and...
View ArticleCheck Point caves in
Not long ago, I wrote of Check Point Software’s unusual appliance strategy. While a lot of their sales were on partners’ Type 1 appliances – custom boxes with standard parts — the only appliances they...
View ArticleHave analytics vendors rediscovered ease-of-deployment?
Business intelligence (BI) used to be characterized by speed and cost-effectiveness — short sales cycles, low-cost departmental purchases and deployments, evasion of IT departments’ strangleholds of...
View ArticleWhen and why to virtualize
In one of the best Slashdot threads I’ve seen in ages, a number of posters chime in with their personal experiences of virtualization. (Usage hint: Set the general threshold = 5 to filter out the...
View ArticleCheck Point Systems UTM-1 and Crossbeam Systems – resolving the confusion
When Check Point Systems first briefed me on their new midrange UTM-1 appliance, they neglected to mention that their hardware designs were first worked out by Crossbeam Systems. Actually, it turns out...
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