Cisco frowns on resellers of used network hardware because it doesn’t get a cut of aftermarket sales. Network Hardware Resale (NHR), a prominent reseller, is going a step further by offering an alternative to Cisco’s SMARTnet maintenance service -- a key revenue source for the networking giant.

Symantec today announced an update for Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX. I spoke with company reps last week about the product, which aims to do for ESX what other versions of cluster server do for other hardware platforms and operating systems, namely add overall manageability and high availability.

You know data security breaches are way too common when a company builds a business around customer notification of stolen information.

Web-based communication and collaboration tools are supposed to make physical proximity irrelevant by letting employees work together regardless of where they happen to be. But when it comes to building—and investing in—those tools, it turns out proximity is relevant as ever.

We have to kill the firewall in order to save it. That's the essential message from startup Palo Alto Networks (PAN).

The next leader of the free world may have stood on stage at The Citadel last night, but the real power in the room was YouTube.

An appellate court ruling is expected today on whether temporary logs kept in RAM should eligible for e-discovery. See Eweek's story here.

I moderated a Webcast recently on messaging-based security threats. An analyst on the panel did what analysts always do—provided some very sound advice that happens to be very difficult to implement.

For some time now, solid state drives (SSD's) have been an expensive and not-so space efficient alternative to the classical hard drives. The gap, both in price and space efficiency is closing rapidly.

DEMO continued this afternoon with another spate of vendors, you guessed it, demo'ing their products. The format of DEMO is an interesting one. Each vendor gets six minutes to show off its product, and the time limit is strictly observed. If the product is intended to be used with the Internet, then that's how it's shown. If the vendor runs its program against Amazon and Amazon slows down at that moment, well tough luck. It's a very interesting format, especially for consumer products, but it's another matter for complex enterprise products.

New legislation announced to combat sex offenders smacks more of online politicking than it does of providing real means of protecting our kids.

This week finds me at Demo 2007. Chris Shipley now drives this show, and quite honestly, it's not an obvious fit for Network Computing. The technologies discussed tend toward the consumer side, or at least toward enabling B-to-C business. If one could find a theme in this morning's demos, it would be Web 2.0-ification of everything. Most apps shown were all about improving the end user experience of web based apps. So far there have been a few standouts.

In the bowls, so to speak, of Apple's skunkworks designers are hard at work on, err, the iPottie?

I got a press release today with the following headline: "Genesys Named in Leaders Quadrant of Leading Analyst Firm's Report."

The double use of "leader" immediately jumped out at me. The headline implies that being named a leader by a leader transforms that appellation into something even more powerful.

But what? A mega-leader? A leader of leaders? A double plus good leader?

SAP has made its initial plunge into CRM-as-a-service, with a solid, if unspectacular offering. Can the software giant compete with upstarts like Salesforce.com or SalesNet -- or does it even have to? We take a look at this heated market segment in the Daily Spin.