The XSi Data Center Blog:

Cisco is salivating over the news from Huawei's VP Eric Xu that "Huawei is no longer interested in in the U.S. market anymore." As you may recall Huawei has had difficulty with the U.S. government's hardline stance towards Huawei due to its Chinese military ties. Xu said that Huawei is downward revising its 2017 enterprise sales to $10B which is below its prior goal of $15B. Huawei finished 2012 with enterprise sales of $1.9B. This is sure to boost Cisco's stock price.

The October 2012 report on Oversight in IT spending from the GAO was recently discussed in an article by Jack Moore. The GAO slammed many agencies for failing to provide reporting on how they spent billions on IT functions.  Clearly many agencies simply ignored Congressional reporting mandates, which make IT management at the top level nearly impossible.

While 2012 was nothing short of a technology miracle, 2013 promises to be even better.  A few months back we posted an article on the extraordinary job Cisco did at the Olympics this summer as the official network provider.  In fact, more than 4.8 billion people watched the event, with digital viewers outnumbering traditional television viewers for the first time in history, clearly showing how technology dependent we have all become.  Undoubtedly, the impressive technology trend will continue in 2013.

Legal savant and comedian Stephen Colbert on 11.26.12 did a segment on a literal “Text Book Case” argued in October in front of the Supreme Court pitting textbook manufacturer Wiley & Sons against an entrepreneurial foreign student Kirtsaeng.  Colbert uses his genius to deftly explain the issues and consequences of how a ruling in favor of Wiley would make many used transactions, including garage sales, illegal.   Take 5 minutes to watch the segment.

DNA tagging technology, recently described by Fox News has clear potential to help electronic supply chains police their own goods. The sooner this technology is deployed by manufacturers supplying to major markets, and not just to the DOD, the better.  End users should be aware that this technology exists and demand that their vendors utilize this process. (Or alternatives with similar advantages)

Cloud services, be they private clouds, public clouds, or even traditional hosted services are themselves just as vulnerable as ordinary data centers to infrastructure problems of water, power, access, and adequate disaster backup.  Hurricane Sandy has taken an unexpected toll on Cloud services, highlighting the importance of picking the physical location of the underlying assets.

Remember back to your glorious childhood sibling fighting days?  Your mom would come in, break up the fight, and make you say you were sorry?  Well, Oracle released a statement last week that sounded a whole lot like a clenched-teeth, mommy made me say it apology.  Oracle’s statement went something like this:

Software vendors have a long history of trying to control and limit the use of their products in the aftermarket consistently thwarting their resell-ability.  We recently posted in Oracle Losses EU Software Resale Battle how the European Court of Justice on Tuesday July 3, 2012 ruled that used software licenses may be resold by individuals or companies.  Forbes has caught wind of the same story and we'd like to share it with you...

Microsoft’s announcement of their Surface tablet on Monday has sent a buzz through enterprise IT departments.  Those who have been eagerly awaiting a Microsoft-compatible tablet for business uses now have a solid solution in sight.  This imaginative and intelligently designed device may be the most innovative PC the world has ever seen.

In what seems to be a battle to the end, Oracle and HP are going to trial in the Itanium lawsuit at the end of this month.  Both sides attempted to convince Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge, James Kleinberg, to hand them a win before trial. But Kleinberg denied those motions in a tentative ruling on Tuesday, May 1st.  He urged both sides to “give serious consideration to settlement,” and called the case, “extremely challenging,” adding that he did not know how it would turn out.  Oracle lawyer Dan Wall said at a court hearing that a settlement “isn’t going to happen.”