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Cisco is the dominant vendor in enterprise networking, and under CEO Chuck Robbins, it continues to shake things up. Its most recent mega-acquisition is its $28 billion purchase of Splunk, a bold move that adds revenue opportunities in observability, data analytics, AIOps, and genAI. And in the security arena, Cisco is building out its platform-based approach to enterprise security with elements such as its new Hypershield AI-native architecture. Meanwhile

Cisco’s Quantum Summit brought together quantum computing experts last week from around academia, government, and industry and highlighted the progress we’ve seen over the past few months. “Significant progress has been made, particularly in the realm of distributed quantum computing,” says Inder Monga, executive director at the Energy Sciences Network and one of the speakers at last week’s event. Quantum networking has the potential to link quantum chips, computers, and enterprise data centers toget

There’s always plenty written about which networking technologies will be hot as a new year kicks off. Rather than join this crowded space, I want to look at 2025 from another perspective: Instead of what will be hot, who will be hot? It’s pretty obvious that networking is going to change, but the vendors are as big a force as the technologies, maybe even bigger. From a vendor perspective, if we think of networking as the playoffs we have in American football, the competition is between three teams. Team one, which we might call the home team, has only one player, which is

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on the performance of cloud providers and ISPs. Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, including our 2024 report,

The use of Linux containers has shown no sign of slowing down since their emergence in the early 1980s. One exciting thing to look forward to in 2025 and beyond is the integration of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) as in RedHat’s RamaLama project, which aims to make it easy for developers and administrators to run and serve AI models. When first launched on a system, RamaLama determines whether GPU support is available (and falls back to CPU support if it isn’t) and then uses a container engine – such as Podman or Docker – to download a containe

Cisco security researchers this week detailed a number of threats they are seeing from bad actors trying to infect or attack AI’s most common component – the large language model. Some techniques used to hide messages or attacks from anti-spam systems are familiar to security specialists: “Hiding the nature of the content displayed to the recipient from anti-spam systems is not a new technique. Spammers have included hidden text or used formatting rules to camouflage their actual message from anti-spam analysis for decades,” wrote Martin Lee, a security engineer with Cisco Talos, in a blog post

AMD on Monday issued two patches for severe microcode security flaws, defects that AMD said “could lead to the loss of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) protection.” The bugs were inadvertently revealed by a partner last week. The most dangerous time for this kind of security hole is right after it is disclosed and before patches are applied. Due to the nature of microcode patches, enterprise users now have to wait for OEMs and other partners to implement the fixes in their hardware-specific microcode. “This places more burden on ha

President Donald  Trump continues to use tariffs like a club to get his way,  and is threatening to place tariffs on computer chips made in Taiwan, warning the additional charges could reach as high as 100%. In particular, he is threatening to place tariffs on chips made by TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer.  “In the very near future, we’re going to be placing tariffs on foreign production of computer chips, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals to return production of these essential goods to the United States,”

A challenge for enterprises that operate large-scale network infrastructure has long been how to maintain performance while updating critical systems. The Linux Foundation’s networking division (LF Networking) is helping to address that challenge with the L3AF project, which is based on eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology. With the new L3AF 2.1.0 update, the technology is gaining a series of improvements including: enhanced observability features, application container improvements, and expanded network interface management functions. “L3AF is an op

News of Broadcom’s plans to acquire VMware triggered concerns among customers, partners, and industry watchers, many of whom recalled Broadcom’s track record with prior high-profile acquisitions, including network switching vendor Brocade in 2016 for almost $6 billion, software firm CA Technologies in 2018 for $19 billion, and Symantec’s enterprise security business in 2019 for $10 billion. So far, the $60 billion Broadcom-VMware deal has led to some layoff