Stories by: Phil Hochmuth

The IEEE wants to make idle or underutilized Ethernet connections more energy efficient, which could mean huge electrical cost savings for large enterprises. The trick: finding a way to seamlessly throttle between 10Mbps and 10Gbps.

3Com this week plans to make a fresh run at Cisco and Juniper with an enterprise network strategy focused on embedding security, management and VOIP services from itself and others into its routers and switches.

Two companies that distribute the Asterisk VOIP platform released products last week aimed at getting small and midsize businesses up and running quickly with the open source IP PBX.

The growth of Macintosh desktop clients in enterprises will be more of a hindrance to Linux desktop growth than Windows, one analyst firm says in a recent report.

The Linux Professional Institute is preparing the latest version of its certification test for January, with some help from Novell, which of course, has a long history of its own in certification and education efforts with the venerable Certified Novell Engineer program.

Telemarketing calls: we hate them. But the business of calling people at inopportune moments is big business; the so-called outbound dialing market will reach over US$200 million by 2011, Frost & Sullivan predicts.

Open source router company Vyatta debuted earlier this year with a Red Hat-style alternative to Cisco and Juniper offerings: the Open Flexible Router, an open source-based WAN router and firewall stack, freely downloadable, with service and support offerings available for purchase. Since then the company has generated buzz in the network industry, while releasing products such as a pre-installed appliance-like version on Dell servers. Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell and chief strategy officer Dave Roberts recently told Phil Hochmuth what Vyatta is, and is not, and what it hopes to become. (The following is an edited transcript.)

A tool that is being used widely by the embedded Linux community for creating mobile phone and other small-device operating systems could also be adopted as a way for Linux IT professionals to archive and store old data and records.

Black Duck Software recently released a new version of its open source license compliance and management tool. It's aimed at companies that develop products where multiple pieces of open source code are blended together. The tool can also help large enterprises or corporations that are writing their own internal or customer-facing applications using open source code.

As open source router startup Vyatta is scheduled to formally launches its first appliance this week, one early adopter is using the Linux-based gear to replace Cisco technologies.

Novell's new CEO Ronald Hovsepian and current CTO Jeffrey Jaffe have a lot to talk about, as the company refocuses on open-source software following an executive shakeup in June. Both executives gave some insights on Novell's strategy to use the majority of its resources -- support, marketing, sales, product development and some US$1.4 billion in cash reserves -- to become a full-fledged Linux company. The CEO and CTO also talked about why everyone should have a Linux desktop pilot running.