Author Archives: George Leopold

George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

Docker Acquires Cloud Pioneer Unikernel Systems

January 22nd, 2016 Comments Off

Industry consolidation around an emerging application container ecosystem gained momentum this week with Docker Inc.'s acquisition of U.K.-based Unikernel Systems, a developer of lightweight operating systems used to deliver distributed applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but ...

Hazelcast Platform Targets Cloud, App Container Rollouts

January 21st, 2016 Comments Off

In-memory computing specialist Hazelcast Inc. rolled out the latest version of its "data grid" that includes support for new cloud management and application container deployments along with a higher density memory store for web-scale application deployments. Hazelcast, Palo Alto, ...

Puppet Labs Secures Rainy Day Loan, Plans Expansion

January 20th, 2016 Comments Off

Global economic turmoil is prompting some IT executives to hedge their bets in the new year as they monitor China's slowdown while trying to divine whether stock markets are undergoing a "correction" or something worse. Among those taking a ...

‘Social Good’ Startup Captricity Raises $35M to Expand Automation Platform

January 19th, 2016 Comments Off

While most enterprises we cover are focused on scaling their infrastructure and with it their growth, a small but growing number of "social good" enterprises are looking for ways to leverage information technology to solve less sexy but equally ...

Tech M&A Frenzy Seen Accelerating in 2016

January 15th, 2016 Comments Off

Two thousand and fifteen was a banner year for technology mergers and acquisitions, and market watchers predict that trend will accelerate in 2016 as buyers look beyond consolidation to expansion as technologies converge. Driving the M&A frenzy is technology ...

Getting a Handle on ‘Shadow IT’

January 14th, 2016 Comments Off

Shadow IT, the systems and solutions used inside organizations without explicit approval, are becoming a fact of life for most organizations. Indeed, industry studies estimate that nearly 30 percent of IT spending occurs outside the IT department, a total ...

IBM Maintains Patent Lead, But Here Comes Amazon

January 13th, 2016 Comments Off

Intellectual property has become the coin of the realm for technology enterprises. Hence, companies like IBM and high-flying global competitors like Samsung tout their growing patent portfolios as market indicators of unrelenting innovation—and future technology licensing deals. About this ...

New Security, Automation Tools Emerge for Containers

January 12th, 2016 Comments Off

New approaches to automating the management of open source software, especially emerging Linux-based application containers, are arriving at a steady pace from key open-source players and startups formed over the last several years to make enterprise DevOps teams' task ...

Operational Analytics Seen Boosting IT Performance

January 11th, 2016 Comments Off

The case is being made for applying big data technologies to the management of IT infrastructure, especially DevOps and cloud deployments. The concept, also known as "advanced operations analytics," is being used to boost service performance, improve security and ...

Amazon Enters Chip Business with ARM Platform

January 8th, 2016 Comments Off

Amazon.com crashed the semiconductor sector this week, announcing that its Annapurna Labs Inc. subsidiary would offer an ARM-based platform-on-a-chip targeting network-attached storage and networking applications. The new chips dubbed Alpine are based on 32-bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 architectures. ...