In an article published on the BBC News site in October '09, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, confessed that the "whack-whack" (//) in a web address was actually "unnecessary." He said that he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle." Well, 20 years ago, Sir Berners-Lee revealed his pair of forward slashes and they have been whack-whacking everything in sight since. All major media have succumbed to the transformative powers of the mighty "//." It was only a matter of time before books would find themselves being double slashed.

A full-scale assault is under way. Wal-Mart and Amazon used the double slashes to initiate a price war that sent the price of hardcover books below $10. Not to be outdone, Barnes and Noble raised a pair of slashes to join Sony and Amazon in the digital reader battles. Amazon and others further whack-whacked books by moving the e-reader software onto smart-phones. Amazon has started swinging the double slash at text books as it targets the Kindle reader at academia. Google is whack-whacking books and periodicals in the public domain with its Google Books while HP is re-whack-whacking the same imaged books with a print on-demand service. In case you were wondering, those reprinted books from digital images of the original hardcover books can be purchased through //www.amazon.com. Meanwhile, Internet Archive's BookServer will attempt to make even more books available directly to individuals through laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. Libraries, once the gate keeper of the "Book stacks" are now wrestling with how to lend books via the "eBook Stacks". Finally, The New York Times posed the question "Will books be Napsterized?" and described how people snatch free copies of digital books from on-line users at file-storage sites.

Are books standing on the plank newspapers, music, and videos have walked? The double slashes are quite efficient at whack-whacking and reducing physical media to digital bits. It seems unlikely books will survive the assault as physical stores give way to digital stores and the weight of paper yields to the wait-lessness of downloads. But weight alone is not enough to break the spine of the book. The whack-whacking of books by eReaders is derived by uniting capabilities and redefining the reading experience with instant, additional information. Simply pressing one's finger on a word or phrase makes it highlight-able and note-able for future reference; searchable for dictionary meaning, placed into context via Wikipedia or searchable via Google, Bing or Yahoo. It appears that data centers and not mega centers will ultimately house endless collections of fiction and nonfiction. Mobile 3/4G will replace I-80 as the road taken to pick up a good read in the future.

It remains to be seen if Apple's iPad will accelerate the demise of the printed word. It is clear we will read more books digitally and store those eBooks on virtual shelves. As it becomes easier to pull a book off of the "shelf" from anywhere, the requirements for security, performance and availability increase. A spike in demand requires immediate response to satisfy customers, shopping carts must be secure and the store must remain open 24x7x365. We've designed the ServerIron ADX family 9 to meet the scalability, security and availability our customers require and their customers expect. When you sit between the reader and a bestselling book, you have to securely complete the transaction and begin the download immediately. Products like the ADX1000 with SSL acceleration are built to move the book from the shelf to the reader quickly.

In 1455, Gutenberg automated the printing process and sowed the seeds of mass media, enabling the growth of newspapers and books that lasted over 450 years. Now, in the time it took Rip Van Winkle to sleep, we're watching the presses grind to a stop. In 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee began joining hypertext to the internet. In that same year John Grisham's first novel A Time to Kill was published in hardcover. It is ironic that 20 years later Grisham's latest novel Ford County would be whack-whacked by the Wal-Mart Amazon on-line price war. “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent, in a recent New York Times article.

So, perhaps the hassle of the "//" lies in the hands of the beholder. If the slashes get you down next time you buy, download, stream, or read something from the web, just yell whack-whack! Hopefully doing so will make you feel a whole lot better.

I am excited that Brocade was named to the FORTUNE’s 2010 list and I am proud of  the hard work, commitment and dedication of our employees in their relentless  drive to make Brocade extraordinary. Here is a video blog on this significant  milestone.

Other useful links from the Fortune article include:

• Brocade on FORTUNE 100 List
• Brocade Ranked #10 in List of 25 Top-Paying Companies
• Brocade’s Creative Recession Solution

Enjoy,

Mike

Last month, I packed my oversized bag and took off around the world. Starting on the East Coast, I first got my temperature level reset as I hit the arctic cold winds in New York and Boston. Fortunately, I was greeted with very warm welcomes from our business partners as I met with a number of them for strategic discussions. When we launched the Alliance Partner Network Program (APN) in May, we committed to a couple of key cornerstones of the program around quality and return on partnership and we got numerous “thumbs ups” and even applause from partners on execution to date.

Many of our conversations with partners focused on the topics of convergence, virtualization and cloud computing and I was pleased to hear that partners have a lot of appreciation for our open ecosystem approach and feel comfortable with Brocade’s direction and vision.  Even The VAR Guy confirmed that for me in a write-up on his site. By the way – don’t ask me – I am not allowed to say who he is.

From the East Coast, I jetted off to Middle East with Dubai being my first stop. I was really hoping to escape the cold, but it was raining in Dubai, so no luck there. Business partners in Middle East do not beat around the bush and I had many a good discussion around addressing very specific market issues such as network infrastructure investment. The key takeaway here is that Brocade’s technology leadership is widely recognized in the Middle East and most partners are curious about how we will invest and continue to grow in the region. For more on this, check out this piece that appeared in Arabian Business.

Next stop: Istanbul, the city on the Bosphorus Strait that runs between Europe and Asia. We kickstarted the relationship with a new distributor for Turkey and met a full set of new resellers in this exciting, fast-growing marketplace in Europe. Here, we received a ton of positive feedback on our Professional Services (PSP) and Support Delivery (SDP) Programs, which provide a means for partners to provide services-based offerings to end customers. As a side note, we will continue to invest in those areas and programs, especially for the international markets. As I’ve mentioned, Istanbul is a fast-paced city and the taxis are no exception – there’s no other place where you’ll feel the need to write your last will and testament after five minutes in a taxi.

From there, I went to Warsaw, Poland, where I was back in the cold with snow in abundance. While the food is heavy to compensate for the cold, the conversations with partners were equally substantial and it seems that our strategy for Eastern Europe is proving successful and partnerships are coming along strong.

Final summary of the trip:

1) I definitely beat Phileas Fogg and Passpartout as far as trip length, but admittedly the transportation methods have slightly improved over the years.

2) As a vendor, the one thing you need to know, realize and address in your strategy is that requirements by geography and even territory differ greatly and while having one common program is a good thing, there does needs to be some level of localization. The more time you spend understanding the market, the higher your credibility with partners.

3) Partners want one common thing: Best-of-breed technology in an open, flexible architecture.

4) Vertical, proprietary solutions degrade partners from solutions players back to product movers and no channel partner wants to go there.

What can I say?  What a wonderful world of Channels!

With  a quill in hand as he wrote his masterpieces, the world's greatest poet and  playwright could not have dreamt that his works would one day be read on a back  lit screen on a tablet marked ‘Amazon’.  No offence to the ‘leather bound  printed form factor’ which will always have a certain appeal to noveau riche as  a blatant show of discerning taste and intellectual  sophistication.

Vanity aside, you can buy a digital version of Hamlet or  Merchant of Venice for a mere US$2.39 on the Amazon store and download the  electronic book wirelessly onto a portable e-reader Kindle. Joining the e-book  reader device club are Barnes & Noble’s The Nook, Bookeen’s Cybook Opus from  Germany and the latest member  from Sony Japan – The Daily Edition Reader.

Far  from demeaning these classical works, digital distribution by e-book sellers  such as Amazon opens up a new world for readers. The delivery is convenient - no  cables, computer just a cellular network. There is no waiting time for stuff to  show up on screen. Amazon's promise is that a book will be downloaded in no more  than 60 seconds.  Of course, the best technology is useless without content… and  content thankfully does not have a supply side problem! Amazon today offers some  350,000 e-books for download on the digital Kindle, each of which stores up to  3,500 books on the most expensive version.

In  this explosion of creation and distribution of digital data, Petabytes of  storage will need to be transferred at multiples of ten gigabits per second as  providers go about delivering over a network. While the ebook readers of our  time will blaze the trail in creating the thinnest, lightest devices with the  clearest fonts, quickest searches and the fastest download speeds but the  backend infrastructure has to be robust enough to deliver the SLAs that the  providers will advertise!  In other words a reliable and scalable network  infrastructure that efficiently and seamlessly helps connect the storage  repositories that hold digital format of hundreds of thousands of books and then  moves and manages this content from within a datacenter over a service provider  infrastructure working its way through a campus network onto the e-book reading  device in the hands of a voracious reader any place… any  time.

Next,  what about rich media?

If a  line of text has the size of several bytes, then images in colour often come in  hundreds or thousands of bytes while a video clip might range from tens of  megabytes to a full length feature film that runs a gigabyte. For a book with  lots of pictures, multiply that by a magnitude of a hundred. Then multiply again  by a million books, and you have an enormous storage requirement in the hands of  providers. To get it into the hands of the readers in seconds, not only a bigger  pipe but intelligent switching of data traffic will be  critical.

Finally, imagine you doing all that stuff while waiting  in the airport lounge or sipping a cool martini watching the sunset on a beach.  No hurry. No rush.  Totally oblivious to zillions and zillions of tiny bit of  data zapping across the networks.

Brocade’s guiding  principles for developing LAN and SAN products to fit these demanding  environments that involve hundreds of thousands of information repositories and  millions of end devices is what Extraordinary Networks is all about.  The growth  of e-book readers like the Kindle and other ‘super smart’ hand held devices is  just another manifestation of mankind’s unquenchable thirst for more information  available ubiquitously and seamlessly.

The  years ahead will require a total revamp of the existing architecture of the  network as the current infrastructure creaks and breaks in the face of this  immense demand.

The  paradigm of the ‘Network’ is all but ready to shift – every paradigm shift  heralds the advent of new ‘Players’ who lead the field…We are in the right place  with the right proposition to be just that.

As we  take time to reflect this past year, spending quality time with family and  friends this holiday season, may I wish you and your families Season’s

Greetings, a Merry Christmas and a Fantastic year ahead!

**All brands, products, or service  names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify,  products or services of their respective owners.

If one thing in this world is certain it’s that whatever plans you make, something will ultimately happen to scupper them... the Titanic’s designer was confident that his design was fool-proof, but the iceberg proved him wrong.  The best one can do is try to think of every conceivable variable and take appropriate actions to counter them.  However, not everyone thinks like that.

In modern business, there are risks around every corner.  Some are known (i.e. playing the stock market, entering new markets etc.) and some are not (i.e. the financial meltdown).  However, there are many risks that should not be risks at all.  What am I talking about?  For every company on the planet, one of their key assets is their data.  From the local delicatessen to the multinational retailer, data is the lifeblood of any organisation.  Protecting that data is imperative and is a risk that should never be taken.  However, some companies have failed to do this and the repercussions have been immense.

In 2009, there have been a number of high-profile data breaches, ranging from mobile operators, government departments to retailers, and in a lot of the cases individual employees have been to blame.  To err is human, but when it comes to risking the lives of the general public then such risks are unacceptable and the blame has to lie with the company more than the employee.  Let’s take the example of Health Net, a US-based health care firm, which ‘lost’ an external hard drive containing financial and medical information on about 1.5 million customers.  The data was not encrypted and the information on the drive also included social security numbers for customers spanning Arizona, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.  Come on guys... surely it’s common sense to encrypt data, especially when it’s so sensitive?!

This is where I have trouble understanding some companies.  Whether in the public or private sector, it’s a company’s responsibility to protect its information (even more so when that includes privileged information on the public) but it seems that some firms don’t agree with me.  There are hundreds of end-point security solutions on the market that ensure, for example, laptops, USB drives and portable hard drives can be encrypted, but it seems from what’s happened recently that IT departments prefer to play Russian Roulette with their data.  This is insane!  If my privileged information was lost because of an organisation’s hap-hazard approach to security I would be outraged.

So what can be done?  Apart from lobbying businesses to show more common sense and encrypt end-point devices, the most prudent approach is to encrypt data at the heart of the organisation – the network.  Policies have to be put in place to protect sensitive information, so why not start at the heart of the business.  By encrypting data at rest, companies can mitigate risks and ensure data integrity at all times.  It also sends a positive message to employees; the business takes data security seriously so you should too (or find new employment).  Brocade’s fabric encryption solutions can help businesses address network security issues and promote best-practice throughout their organisations.

As consumers, we need to be more vocal.  I am sure the 1.5m Health Net customers are shouting from the roof-tops right now, but that’s after-the-fact.  Consumers need to lobby businesses to take preventative actions and secure data before the inevitable happens.  If we don’t, data losses will carry on unabated.  KPMG’s Data Loss Barometer predicts that 190 million people around the world will have fallen foul of data loss incidents by the close of 2009*.  If you don’t want to be added to this statistic do your bit and speak up before it’s too late.

* Source: http://www.whatpc.co.uk/financial-director/comment/2253738/read-weep-4899599