HP CEO and Chairman Mark Hurd resigns amid sexual harassment claims after settling a suit with a former reality TV contestant, leaving the high-tech giant to search for another leader.

By Denise Dubie

It’s not often that my professional world collides with some admittedly questionable personal interests, but last week when news broke that HP CEO Mark Hurd stepped down following a sexual harassment suit filed by a former contestant on a reality television show, I experienced a bit of whiplash.

Read Time’s take on the news -- Corporate Scandals: Why HP Had to Oust Mark Hurd

View Time’s slideshow on Top 10 CEO Scandals

Because I keep up on gossip rags almost as much as high-tech mags, I realize no industry leader – or government official, athlete or actor – is safe from a sex scandal, but to learn that HP’s chief was leaving for potentially philandering with an employee and not something more related to questionable accounting practices did surprise me some. (Nothing specific to Hurd, but generally high-tech CEOs get caught and punished for being creative with accounting and not necessarily for schmoozing the assistants.)

Continue reading "HP’s dilemma: The high-tech CEO, the reality TV star and a potential PR nightmare" »

Trade show attendees often see the show floor as a place to pick up free stuff, see product demonstrations and take in the local, er, scenery, but others say the booth-babe practice is sexist.

By Denise Dubie

The phenomenon of the ‘booth babe’ pleases most trade show attendees, but some observers object to the offensive and sexist nature of the practice of packing your booth with attractive, scantily-clad women who for the most part know very little about the company, technology or product they are helping to sell. But for many vendors the bevy of beauties brings at least some boys into their booth, hopefully willing to listen to a product pitch while they admire the, um, staff.

A recent post by Network World blogger Michael Morris caused a bit of discussion on that site as well as chatter across social media network Twitter. He held a contest immediately following Cisco Live to identify the hottest booth babe at the show. BlueCat won Morris’ contest this year, and I have to admit the vendor’s choice of theme and costume has landed on more than a few of my show “reporter’s notebooks” over the years. The company usually goes all out on equipping its show booth and apparently it pays off, if winning such contests is any measure of success. One Twitter commenter claimed that employing “booth babes” resulted in “1,000s of useless leads vs. legitimate prospects that can turn into purchases.”

For many, booth babes are seen as what they are: an obvious ploy to lure show attendees into a vendor’s booth. That certainly doesn’t mean the intelligent attendees at such shows don’t thoroughly enjoy the presence of booth babes or even mind that there is a product pitch waiting for them after they snap a picture. And for many others, employing attractive young ladies to stand around half-naked to be ogled by as one person put it “lusty geeks” is archaic and sexist.

Continue reading "The ‘booth babe’ debate" »

by Patrick Ancipink, Vice President of Product Marketing, Service Assurance

It’s last week’s news but it’s got long-term benefits, so in case you missed it CA announced a definitive agreement to acquire Nimsoft, an IT performance and availability monitoring vendor that has done some very clever engineering and has cracked the code on serving the “emerging enterprise” segment in a very repeatable way.

Let’s call out the elephant in the room: Nimsoft has capabilities in several of the same categories as the CA Service Assurance portfolio, namely performance and availability. While true, the existing CA product lines in this category (crossing eHealth, Spectrum, Wily, NetQoS…) are architected for very large and complex enterprise, government and service provider environments. Nimsoft has a bull’s eye on the emerging enterprise—think of companies between $300M and $2B in annual revenue—and has focused for the last several years on the technology, sales channel and partners to become a compelling player in that IT ecosystem.

Sure, there’s bound to be a little overlap as some large companies don’t share the enterprise management needs that their revenue might lead you to believe. And there are some emerging enterprises that have very complex technical and scaling requirements and need a solution you might think only a Fortune 500 company could use.

So before you ask – “What you talkin’ bout CA?” – we think Nimsoft will enable CA to proudly reach a whole new variety of customers with a solution and approach designed for their specific needs.

“In Mordor where the shadows lie…”
The Lord of the Rings

We keep hearing and seeing it, including on Twitter a week ago: “CA is a place where good software goes to die a slow, painful and horrible death.” Really? Well, it’s been nearly six months since CA acquired NetQoS. No foul Orcs have threatened to torture, maim and kill us. We have neither seen nor felt the fires of Mount Doom. No mob of CA employees has come at us with pitchforks (Oh wait, wrong work of fiction…).

On the contrary, CA has welcomed us and our software as a key component of its Service Assurance vision: To help IT teams deliver optimal service levels by mapping transaction, infrastructure, and business value into one complete picture of service delivery. In fact, technology from the NetQoS Performance Center is quickly finding its way into broader Service Assurance projects focused on common views and workflows.

From our experiences, we see CA as a dynamic, fluid organization not afraid to shake things up in the name of giving customers what they need. From a new CEO to a new CMO to fresh faces and thinking at all levels, there is a sense of excitement and innovation that those of us from the NetQoS fast-growth culture like to see. CA’s CTO Don Ferguson, named to the post last September, recently launched his blog on CA.com with the name “Life, the Universe, IT Management & Everything.” This isn’t your stodgy CA of old.

We at NetQoS welcome change and the chance to have our solutions be an integral part of a broader, more complete offering for customers.

Have there been hiccups? Sure: There are with any acquisition. Spending a half hour on the phone with the internal IT support staff just to have employee passwords changed is no fun. Our e-mail systems are still not integrated. And we’ve lost a few employees who feel they thrive in smaller environments: They have chosen to take jobs at start-ups in Austin or elsewhere. And that’s okay. Most of us see great opportunity at CA.

So we are not like Gollum or other creatures unfortunate enough to have been caught by the evil that lurks in Mordor: Beaten, stretched, and morphed into a shell of their former selves. This isn’t your father’s CA. In our case, it’s a place where good software goes to flourish and fulfill the promise the NetQoS co-founders dreamed up at a kitchen table nearly 11 years ago this month.

A study by L.E.K. consulting, a business strategy and marketing consulting firm, recently conducted a survey on media consumption habits; and what they found turned out to be a bit of a shock. 

According to the survey, 32% of users listen to an average of 5.8 hours of Internet radio a week.  That’s huge.

The reason it is huge is because unlike a lot of high-throughput downloads; streaming radio tends to be a constant drain on bandwidth.  Sure, a 5GB file is a lot to transfer, but it saturates the available bandwidth in the pipe for a limited amount of time.  On the other hand, 160mbps streaming audio improperly configured into a high QoS priority knocks out 160mbps of your total bandwidth.  Multiply that stream by the number of users streaming; and you can see why a new interest in streaming Internet radio is something to take note of. 

The other major thing from the report worth mentioning is that “e-readers,” like the Kindle, have been encouraging people to consume more written words – digitally downloading them.  While only 10% of consumers own e-readers, 48% of those who do report reading more books, and only 7% decreased their book reading.  This also extended to magazines and newspapers as well. 

Why?  According to the survey, 40% said that e-books are more affordable, and that drives their consumption, while 47% indicated that “more interesting books were being released.”  Considering that the publishing industry hasn’t hit a halcyon boom, it’s more likely that e-books enable readers to more easily find books they would be interested in, through searching, recommendations, etc.    

What’s interesting about this shift is that we’re increasingly in a world where if the medium can be digital, the medium will be digital.  And this requires thinking about the network in ways that a lot of enterprises haven’t thought about the network before. 

It used to be that the network was what enabled computers to talk to each other – it still is, of course – but the language of computers was dull and uninspired; in the beginning, only business apps transmitted through the network, because the business apps were what the network was used for. 

But to most end users today, the network isn’t just for one limited purpose.  It’s not even for a variety of purposes.  The Internet is the tube which gives us information, entertainment, conversation, and sustenance, in the form of productivity.  It is, quite frankly, the most important thing in many people’s lives. 

So the stewards of the network have to consider that they hold an awesome responsibility, and that it might be time to stop thinking of the network as just a business tool, and instead, think about it as the circulatory system of human culture. 

Hold on – I think I just had a hippie moment brought on by high stress levels and lack of sleep.  It’s okay though.  I’m sure you get the idea. 

Our friends over at GeeksAreSexy recently posted a review of the “10 steps to a better IT support process.” There’s probably not a lot of information there for people who already work in IT, but it does a good job of giving people outside of IT a picture of what the IT helpdesk has to go through.

“When users call for support, they usually feel helpless and may sound irritated over the phone. Always be polite towards them.”

And while there are always going to be technical support issues stemming from user error or hardware failure, these tips underscore a very important lesson. By the time the problem reaches the helpdesk, you’ve already got a ticked-off end-user.

And if that’s your first, last, and only method of finding performance problems, you’re leaving the important troubleshooting to the end user. The end user doesn’t have training in network performance problems, and even if he or she did, they wouldn’t have the information in the network’s performance because they don’t have either the tools or the access to see the network problem from the datacenter’s perspective.

And we’ve talked about this from the enterprise view – that is, that knowing about performance problems before the end-user calls the help desk leads to better customer satisfaction and a quicker mean-time-to-repair, but we often forget that there’s someone down at the help desk taking the abuse to begin with. And they have enough on their plates.

The helpdesk – the front lines of IT – deal with the problems that border on the absurd so that the network engineers can use their brains to figure out the difficult, challenging problems. They’re the guys sending out e-mails like:

“The copier on Mary’s fax machine is for the use of the Student Services secretary only. This policy is in effect even if every copier within a 40 mile radius is defective and both of your legs are broken in four places….”

“I replaced the printer in room 123. If you print to this and need immediate printing capability, write me an email. Any others will be added once the printer is put into the system. I apologize for the inconvenience, but the current printer was destroying everything it printed. The new printer is set to automatically duplex print jobs, let me know if this is a problem.

Also, If you have been printing out pictures of your abnormally large biceps, please stop and do that at home. You are making me jealous and insecure.”

The helpdesk – fighting stupidity on the front lines so that we don’t have to.

Registration for the ninth annual NetQoS Symposium is now open.  If you’re familiar with Symposium, you know it’s where we have educational sessions, engaging speakers, hands-on product labs, and tons of networking opportunities.  Er, that is, people networking. 

Symposium is great for broadening your understanding of how to use our products to monitor and manage your network performance.  While basic operation is simple, there are little subtle tricks of the trade that you might only pick up from our instructors or your peers. 

Furthermore, you’re able to voice your ideas out to your peers and get critiques from the experts in the field.  We love this peer feedback too – a customer notices a problem that they have, another customer suggests a solution, and we have a feature that we might want to add to the roadmap. 

And this year, you will also hear how the NetQoS products are being integrated with other CA products like eHealth and Wily.

Symposium goes far beyond talking about our products; it’s also a way for our customers to learn new skills related to all aspects of network management.   

Plus, it’s at Barton Creek Resort – always a fun time, and the weather in Texas in May is almost always wonderful.

So you can register here.  Normally, I would post something about “hoping to see you there,” except that technically, I resigned last week, and I won’t be an employee of the company in May.  That means, I’m going to be counting on you guys to attend and tell me all about it!

You’ve probably heard by now about how Google, in retaliation to unauthorized intrusion into Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents by what they believe is the Chinese government, Google has decided to stop working with the Chinese government and stop filtering the Google search results for google.cn, which could lead to pulling out of China completely. 

The last time anyone as big and influential as Google had to pull out of China due to pressure from the communist government, they formed Taiwan.

It’s becoming such a huge deal that the U.S. State Department is getting involved.  Hopefully this won’t escalate into full-out nuclear warfare between the two countries.  At least not till January 26^th, when I arrive in nuclear-free New Zealand.  Although that’s not likely to happen, considering that the United States owes China so much money that China can’t afford to have us default on the loans…

Google’s official blog tells their side of the story. 

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

What lessons can we gain for network performance from this debacle?  Simply this: Don’t get into business agreements that compromise your business ethics for the sake of some temporary reassurances of safety.  Or in other words, if the people you’re dealing with seem to be making unreasonable demands, chances are they’ll commit unreasonable acts in the future.

The Mattel Corporation, makers of Barbie, have produced an online poll asking people to vote on the next occupation of “teenage-fashion model doll” Barbie. Choices are “Environmentalist,” (although a doll made entirely out of plastic might be a poor spokesperson for this career), Surgeon, Architect, News Anchor, or, drumroll please: “Computer Engineer.”

Seriously.  Go vote for “Computer Engineer.” Whether you believe Barbie’s influence on young girls to be positive or negative, you cannot deny that there is an influence.  And Computer Engineer will go a long way towards correcting the “Math class is tough” version of Barbie.

But of course, Barbie wouldn’t be Barbie if she didn’t come with accessories.  In addition to the usual computer engineer accoutrements – laptop, pocket protector, jeans for crawling under desk, sneakers for getting around quickly, and a collection of slightly witty t-shirts (especially appropriate would be this one, for “self-rescuing princess”), may we humbly suggest the following:

• Spray-On QoS




• In this instance, QoS stands for “Quality of Suntan.”


• “Five,” her new pet cat.


• A freakishly monstrous third arm growing out of her neck.




• For the three-way handshakes, of course. 


• TCP




• Tea and Crumpets Party. With real lunch packets from Barbie’s new server.


• A Perl Necklace




• This gold-laced necklace extends to a small jewel containing a crystal image of a camel; with the words “#!/usr/bin/perl print "Hello, world!\n" wrapped around it.


• Plasma Sword (Lucas owns the trademark on “lightsaber.”)




• Because, let’s face it, there’s always a plasma sword hanging around a computer engineer’s office somewhere.


• Ethernet Hair Spray




• A geeky version of Aquanet to keep Barbie’s hair voluminous even at 3am in the datacenter.


• Barbie’s Dream Datacenter




• The entire 3-story Dream Datacenter is over 3 feet tall and fully furnished
  
• Realistic sounds like the humming of big iron and air conditioning, thousands of hard drives reading, and a diesel generator.
  
• Gourmet-style vending machine with plenty of storage comes with all the popular conveniences
  
• The third story has a portable ship container, removable for on-the-go complete datacenter play
  
• Raised flooring
  
• A password station and biometric scanner, which prevents cheap Barbie knock-offs from entering the facility.


• End User Ken

Of course, Barbie already has a leg up. We’re just getting into virtualization now, but Barbie has been living a virtual life in a virtual world since the 1960s.

Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA Technologies and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)