Very cool - Vyatta is named Startup of the Week by Information Week!

Router-huggers unite, here's a post for you.... :)

Intel enters the 10GigE adapter market in an aggressive way. Look out below - 10 Gig Ethernet is now a commodity. You can read my post on this here.

A pervasive theme at Interop this year is using inexpensive and powerful hardware for networking. Hard for me to argue there! You can read the post over at GigaOm here.

Is it time for a virtualization engineer? Here are my thoughts on this topic, posted over at GigaOm.

Interesting news from Ostatic that Argentina may be the first country to regulate that all government offices use open source. For those that know me well, you know that my godson is from Buenos Aires and that I've spent my fair share of time crossing 9 de Julio. I have lots of good memories of BA and this news just reaffirms my desire to spend more time in this great country eating milanesas and alfajores de Havanna.

Nothing gets me revved up faster than a double shot of espresso than more the stupidity of the music business. You can read my latest rant on this topic over at GigaOm. You really don't want to see me after the espresso :)

As a venture capitalist looking at investments for the enterprise data center space, it is clear that there are multiple contestants in the fight to control this market over the next few years. The question facing CIOs today is - who do you trust to control your next enterprise data center?

read more

Kelly Herrell is famous for some great quotes around the workplace. I took one of these and turned it into a blog post on ostatic that you can read here.

I wrote a blog post this week on the possibility of Cisco moving into the enterprise data center by offering blade servers for their new Nexus 7000 switch. I think this move is inevitable given that Cisco, IBM, HP, Microsoft, VMware and others are fighting for account control in the enterprise data center. You can read my post here.

This topic has never failed to raise my blood pressure and get me worked up.... Why again should ISPs be responsible for people breaking the law using their infrastructure? Read my latest post on this topic here and get ready for some dripping sarcasm.

It looks like open source is going where few people have gone before - to space, the final frontier. Coverage of NASA's use of Fedora and RHEL starts here on the ostatic blog. I can already picture the Vyatta system routing packets between planets, something that has been on the minds of networking geeks for over 8 years.

According to Sun, FOSS will be helped by the US recession. I guess there is always a silver lining! Read about the good part of the US recession here.

The EU has announced that it will consider buying more open-source software. While this is clearly another gnarl at Microsoft, it also bodes well for EU business practices and economics. You can read some thoughts on this announcements over at Ostatic as well. Ah, how I look forward to Paris in the spring time - browsing the web with Firefox running on Fedora and connected to the Internet with Vyatta routers.

Om asked me to help christen his latest addition to the GigaOm network, the Ostatic blog with a post on open source telecom. That seemed right up my alley.... You can read my post here. In case you are wondering - I know I was - Ostatic is destined to be slang for "ecstatic with open source." That works for me!

Insanity around policing the Internet continues. The UK is considering legislation that will force ISPs to disconnect users if they are suspected of downloading pirated music or video. I thought theft was handled by police? Read my post on this topic here.

Here's a great post by Bruce Perens about the first decade of open source. As entrenched open source is throughout IT infrastructure, it's easy to forget this movement is only ten years old.

I read an article today that really bothered me about the US government performing searches on digital media when entering the country. I wrote a short blog about this for Om that you can read here. I guess when you bring a Vyatta system into the US you may have to boot it up and execute a "show config" command?!?

Here's a post that I wrote on how we're getting closer and closer to IPv6 being deployed globally. Another chink in the chain fell into place this week with the root-level domain name servers returning IPv4 and IPv6 addresses instead of only IPv4 addresses. Read more of my post here.

Open source in the enterprise is on the rise and up 26% - it's only a matter of time people, only a matter of time....

Here's a post I wrote for Om where I have publicly slammed my favorite rock band of all time (well, their manager). Bono please forgive me, but something had to be said on this issue.

Virgin Galactic revealed plans for SpaceShipTwo with an open architecture today. From the press that I read, it looks like Virgin Galactic will be more of a user of open source than an open source company. Still, the words "open source" next to the word "spaceship" is pretty cool Yes, I think the open source model has evolved. If it is good enough for rocket science, it is surely good enough for data networks!

So, it is 2008 and the Denver Broncos finished last season in miserable form. I honestly don't know their final win-loss record off the top of my head and it's been decades since that was true in January. I did manage to hold true to my oath not to watch the Broncos in 2007 and I'm really not worse for the wear. 2007 was a good year but I suspect I'll ruin 2008 following my favorite team to another disappointing season. Baseball anyone? :)

Here's a post I did for Om on my current quest for new collaboration tools for our advisors at Panorama Capital. As always, please let me know your comments and suggestions.

I'm been fascinated by the constant drum of media around privacy issues on the Internet and how people are surprised when their privacy has been compromised. I absolutely believe that everything you send on-line is being tracked and monitored (and I'm not too paranoid :) and wrote about some things you can do to help you try to keep some of your privacy and leave less of a digital footprint for Om.

I've been thinking a lot about video on the Internet these days given our recent investment in GridNetworks. That got me thinking about set-top boxes and I wrote this post for Om. Comments and suggestions always welcome!

Lots of folks carry a lot of data on USB disk drives these days.  And that can be a big security concern for CIOs - I wrote about about this for Om here.

Here's a post I wrote for Om on the movement on the Internet toward IPV6.

Please let me know your thoughts!

I came across a great article by Network World today on why it makes sense to break away from Cisco as your single networking vendor for your organization. To be fair, this article was a counterpoint to an argument on why having a single vendor and a single throat to choke is a good thing. The point of the article that I found very interesting was that while Cisco is a single company, their product line is complex and filled with many reliability impacting software features that most people never touch. This impacts MTTR and means that the claim that a single vendor provides better reliability is not relevant and fairly hollow. You can read the full article here.

As some of the comments on the article point out, quality support from your networking vendor is of paramount importance. We here at Vyatta agree and think our customers say it best.

I just found out that the Broncos are on Monday Night Football tonight. I'm really going to try to not torture myself like last time. Repeat after me three times: "I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night. I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night. I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night." Wish me luck on avoiding inevitable pain and sorrow....

UPDATE: I just read this morning that the Broncos actually won. Repeat after me: "A single win does not equal a winning streak. A single win does not equal a winning streak. A single win does not equal a winning streak."

Here's a post I wrote for Om on the upcoming transition that may finally be upon us - it's time to learn IPv6. Really, we mean it this time. :) You can read the post here.

I was having some challenges this past weekend on my home desktop PC running Windows XP. I was getting the dreaded hang at the Windows Splash screen (the where the flag logo shows up and the green bars scroll along the bottom of the screen) that I could not solve. Nothing had changed on my machine and I had tried all sorts of options to get my system back running based on some research I did on the Net: ran chkdsk multiple times, tried multiple different restore points, booted into safe mode, checked msconfig options and so forth. Let's just say that I spent a number of hours working on the issue to no avail and I was more than a bit frustrated.

In a last ditch effort, I was doing one last chkdsk and booting off my Windows Recovery Disk into safe mode. While the chkdsk was running (about a 3 hour process) I finally decided to take the advice of my friend Om to "get a mac." For those that know me, I used to be violently anti-Mac based on a horrific experience in the early 90s with a AppleBook that I was forced to use that continually gave me a bomb message with "Sorry a system error occurred." But, I've grown older and maybe wiser to look beyond the past. So, while my PC was running chkdsk for the third time I decided to boot my laptop and surf www.apple.com to check out the options on the iMac and MacBook Pro. I must admit they look very cool!

And just as I was checking prices, I swear, my PC completed the chkdsk and rebooted perfectly. It was up and running, no issues to be found. For fun, I rebooted it twice and it came back up perfectly (I still have no idea what the issue was or how I solved it).

So, I may be paranoid, but if AT&T was watching my web browsing and sent that information over to Microsoft, did an automated process kick in and fix my PC to avoid me becoming an Apple convert? Of course, if that was really the case, I would like to think that Microsoft would have solved the problem on my PC before I reached the frustration point of pricing a Mac. But, I wonder....

If you read this blog you know I have sworn off the Denver Broncos in 2007. I was doing good with my fasting - I had not watched a single minute of any of their games nor did I even know where they stood in the standings. But, when they played last night on Monday Night Football, it was hard to resist settling in to watch them play. I mean come on - a re-match of Elway's SuperBowl victory over Favre and the Packers?!? What football fan could resist?

But, I did resist. I did not listen to the game on the way home from work on ESPN. I did not come home early to watch the game and I declined a few invitations to go to a local bar and watch the game with friends. I was feeling good about my abstinence.

I came home, did some errands, ate some dinner and did some work. I was doing just fine.... And then, I decided to sit down and relax in front of the tube. The tube came on to ESPN and I saw the score: Denver 13, Green Bay 13, start of overtime. I actually said aloud, "Well, this may be worth watching!" I felt a little guilty for breaking my promise, but seriously, what could it hurt?

And then came the shock therapy. Denver kicks off and on the first play from scrimmage Favre throws an 82-yard touchdown pass (I think it was some sort of Monday Night Football record) to end the game. In literally 16 seconds of my time spent watching the game it was over. At least I did not waste 4 hours watching the Denver Donkeys - I got the same treatment in an efficient 16 seconds.

Here's another cross-post on a piece I wrote for Om on using network traffic statistics to produce more relevant search results. This post was inspired by an excellent paper by Joe Weinman of AT&T that you can find here. I really thought this post would spark some major concerns over privacy, but since it did not I guess everyone knows that whatever you do on the Internet (email, IM, VoIP, web browsing, etc.) is public knowledge.

If you have not seen this video from the RIPE 55 Meeting last week in Amsterdam at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky (great place - been there a few times) then you're missing out. Classic networking geek video - try to see how many of the technical references you can catch.

My favorite verse: "And now we've all lost our purpose.. my cisco shares completely worthless..." Enjoy!

Today NewTeeVee (part of the GigaOm network) posted a blog I wrote about how the Internet would change if bandwidth was infinite. It's good that I have a fairly thick skin as some of the comments on the post were less than constructive - and it got even worse on digg.

If you're up for joining the fray, I'd welcome your comments and thoughts on the topic!

I authored a post on the possibility of infinite bandwidth for the Internet that went live today on NewTeeVee here. I think that the potential for infinite bandwidth is very real and the resulting applications would be absolutely fascinating.  Please let me know your thoughts!

The startup pitch showdown known as Launch Pad  is one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0  conference. Hundreds of companies pitching to be the next new thing!   Just two years after Launch Pad 2005, alumnus Zimbra   be purchased by Yahoo  last month for $350M  ! This year, front man John Battelle approached a couple of us to take a more active role with the event. Here’s an insider’s view of the process, and the market trends that are emerging through it:

Behind the scenes

This year, Battelle asked investors if we would do two things: First, reach into our pockets to sponsor the Launch Pad so that cash-strapped startups would not have to. Second, instead of just selecting companies as in past years come on to the main stage and have a conversation with the six finalists, as part of an American Idol style judging format. (I am not sure who is going to be Paula, Simon, or Randy, but I am sure the companies will be outstanding!) The audience will vote in real-time to determine the winner.

We have an exceptional group of companies to look at again this year. We are giving the review process our best shot, but it is by definition a difficult and less than perfect exercise. Entrepreneurs pour their heart and soul into these companies, and we only have a few minutes to spend on sizing each one up. (OK, maybe I am Paula.) As of Friday, the six judges have managed to narrow the pool of almost 200 companies down to 18 semi-finalists.

Trends

Although the judges are curiously split down the middle on “what is interesting,” several trends are apparent from our selection of the 18 semi-finalists.

1. Extending commerce into community: referrals networks, advertising to vertically focused communities, and behavioral targeting.
2. Monetizing video: publishing, distribution, advertising, and life cycle management
3. Focused semantic web: enhancing search around specific verticals
4. Replacing Microsoft with web apps: along the Zimbra theme, but the next step
5. Communities and collective intelligence: using the social graph to get smarter faster on just about everything
6. Bridging on & off-line worlds: how to bring more of the off-line world into an integrated experience online; resources, transactions, voice, etc.

What did the less interesting submissions have in common?

1. We’ve already seen companies attack the problem with that type of solution (and even worse, we saw it at the 2005 or 2006 Launch Pad.)
2. Narrow markets and/or difficult channels to the end customer
3. Too complex, or too poorly articulated for the panel to grok in the limited time available to review submissions.

Next step: selecting the top six companies

The main criterion in narrowing the pool of 18 semi-finalists down to six finalists is simple: is the company fundable, or is it just a cool idea? Semi-finalists have been asked for additional information so we can make the final selection on Tuesday night. Lobbying has been creative – a life-sized raccoon cutout was delivered to my office last week – and persistent.

Although the names of the 18 companies are under wraps, we’ll be able to share more takeaways once the final 6 are selected. Names of the final 6 will be publicly announced at Web 2.0 on October 18th at 5 PM .   

Is there a Zimbra in the bunch?  Not sure, but the next round of conversations should be interesting.    It’s time for your close up Launch Pad semi-finalists!

I found a great article in the Guardian today by Victor Keegan about how ignoring open source software (mainly Linux and Firefox) is costing the UK significant amount of revenues. What I found most interesting is that the author found a prevailing attitude toward open source as "anything that is free can't be any good." If the UK is getting ready to save some money with Linux and Firefox, wait until they realize that they can reduce their networking costs too using Vyatta! You can read the full article here.

I wrote a post on the need for network devices in the data center to go green.  It's live on the Earth2Tech site (part of the GigaOm network) here.

Another post on the GigaOm site, this time focused on the interesting revolution in data centers.....  Read on here.

I've been thinking a lot about the future of data centers and the relevant systems and network architectures. Not following the Broncos has given me some free time on Sundays :)

Om posted my piece on the current revolution for data center architectures last week - it sure does look like we're headed back to the future. It's clear to me that virtualization is going to play a key role in the data center of the future and that looks vaguely familiar to network architectures of the past. You can read the post here.

I have also been very interested in making data centers more eco-friendly and wrote about this over at Earth2Tech (a GigaOm site) here. If you're a fan of Vyatta, then you know our software runs on servers that are Energy Star certified already!

P.S. Yes, I do know the Broncos are 2-0. I have not watched a minute of them in 2007 yet :)

Being heavily involved in telecommunications and networking has me thinking about this market from multiple angles.  Here is a post I wrote for GigaOm on Cisco and Microsoft.

I posted over at GigaOm on why Google should buy Adobe - and it's all about video.  You can read this post here.

I've just posted a new piece I've written on GigaOm on CSCO vs MSFT that is found here. As you can tell, those of us involved with Vyatta are watching Cisco from multiple angles! :)

Please let me know your thoughts!

I've been thinking a lot about how service providers can become SaaS and Web2.0 companies using their sheer size and scale.  A post on this topic went live today on the GigaOm site here.

GigaOm posted a blog I wrote on how Google should buy Adobe that you can read here.  Please let me know your comments!

I will not be a fan of the Denver Broncos in 2007. There, I've said it....

Many of you know that I grew up in the Denver area and have been a rabid Denver Broncos fan for over 20 years. I was there for Morton to Moses, Norris Weese, Randy Gradishar, the strike year, the bad and then great Elway years, the championship games against the Browns, the Mile High Salute and Jake the Snake. When I moved out to the SF Bay Area I was still a Broncos fan, against the rabid and ridiculous tide of the 49ers (or 40-whiners) fans. I was still there after the 55-10 SuperBowl debacle - and I survived in the heart of the 40-whiners territory.

Although, I must admit over the past few years I have not committed myself as much as I had in the past to the team as both work and home kept me busy on the weekends. And, of course, I can't watch every game here as I used to back in Colorado. That being said, every week I would scan the game listings and see if by some luck of the draw the Broncos would be a nationally televised game or even on Sunday or Monday night and then attempt to plan my weekend accordingly. Even if I could not watch the game, I checked the score via the web nearly hourly.

For the Broncos, 2005 was a great vintage. They went 13-3 and had a good shot at the SuperBowl but lost to the Steelers in the AFC Championship game. And then came 2006.... I was set for another great season and hoped the team would go further than in 2006. Things started off great, but faded into the second half. Even that seemed fine to me, I've been through tough seasons as a fan before and I could endure this one too.

Until the last game of the season. The Broncos simply had to beat the hapless 40-whiners at home in Denver and they would stumble into the playoffs. The game was televised on a Sunday afternoon and I was ready. I cleared the deck of all plans and got into game mode. Needless to say, things went badly. The Broncos (as my friend Mark always says) "played down to the level of their opponent" and lost in overtime (Rick Wallace, if you are out there, I owe you $5).

As the shock of losing the game set in, I realized that I had just spent more than four hours of my life rooting for my team and they had disappointed me again. I know fans should be fans forever and never waver, but it was at this moment that I decided that I would not be a Broncos fan in 2007. No Sunday afternoons watching games, no checking of scores, nothing. I'm going cold turkey.

Well, sort of. If the Broncos are playing in January 2008, you can count on me being there. And, somehow, My Yahoo! page still shows Broncos scores. In fact, I did happen to notice that in their first pre-season game this week they beat the 40-whiners. Not like I noticed or that I am a fan or anything.... :)

Somehow, I missed the declaration by ARIN that it is finally time to move to IPv6. Good thing I have not held my breath since RFC 1883 came out on IPv6 in 1995 waiting for this moment.... The topic came up as Robert and I were out for drinks with a few friends last night at a bar in San Francisco. Yes, it is true, when networking geeks go out and party we talk about the wildest and raciest stuff ;)

Ars Technica has a good discussion of the technical issues around migrating the world from IPv4 to IPv6 along with some good insights on how to deal with the 8th layer of the OSI model (politics) during the migration.

I guess that this means two things for Vyatta: 1) it's a good thing that we have IPv6 support in the product and 2) in another few years even fewer people will understand how IP addressing works and network engineers will be valuable assets (I wrote on this awhile back over on GigaOm here). So, if you're a network engineer go brush up on your IPv6 addressing and protocols, implement your network migration using Vyatta and be prepared to be a scarce commodity for years to come.

During the early days of cisco when people took a business trip they came back and wrote up a quick trip report to send to the entire company. The trip reports were a way for us all to keep in touch with the many moving parts of our growing company. The reports were usually a few paragraphs long and described the business trip activities with some inevitable humorous travel-related anecdotes. The trip report always included one other item - a fairly detailed description of every meal and foreign food encounter. Restaurant reviews, menus, detailed descriptions of plates and food and prices were required material. As you might expect, some folks were better writers and had more fun with this activity than others (I do recall one exceptionally long trip report that detailed a meal in Paris that I still want to duplicate). Regardless of the skill of the writer, I really enjoyed reading about the trips and the food.

I'm not really sure who did the first trip report - they were already part of the cisco lore when I joined the company in 1990 - but I quickly realized that there was an implicit rule that if I went on a business trip I had to write a report and it had to include the lurid details of my meals. This was not in an employee handbook or written down anywhere, it was just common knowledge - and I relished in the opportunity to contribute to my company and my team. As I think back to those days, I know I wrote a few trip reports but I'm really not sure if they were humorous or memorable, but I know I tried.... I do recall leaving the my cube one day headed out for the airport and hearing someone yell after me, "Don't forget to take notes on the food!"

Then one day, I'm not sure when exactly, I stopped receiving trip reports from my fellow team members. Cisco was booming, growing up culturally, and we were all running as fast as we could to keep up. Trip reports didn't fit in to the culture of Cisco with a capital 'C' as much as they did in the old days when the company was just cisco. Of course, Cisco as a company is a monumental business success story. The lack of trip reports clearly did not hurt the company financially.

At subsequent small companies where I have worked I've tried to start up the culture of trip reports again, usually centered on business and food. To me, it was both fun and nostalgic. Yet, somehow, they never took on the life of their own as we had at cisco.

So, imagine my surprise when I opened up my Vyatta email the other day and saw a trip report from one of our team members (I'll withhold her name now to protect the innocent from embarrassment :-). This trip report was a bit different because she went on vacation to London and met up with a few Vyatta customers on her own time! The trip report included some great feedback from her customer meetings and also some fun anecdotes on what shows to see in London (apparently Spamalot is great) and what are the best tube routes for traversing the city. Even though there was no mention of food, the style of the trip report really brought me back to the early days of Cisco.

I sent her an email thanking her for bringing back great memories and for writing up her trip report (and for taking time on her vacation to meet with customers!). Surprisingly, she was not from cisco (or Cisco :) and did not know about the lore of the old trip reports. She just wanted to share her experiences with her team. As it turns out, she's also empowered to help us build the Vyatta culture. As it should be at a fast growing small company!

So, trip reports for all who choose to write them and thanks again Kirsten for the memories!

For those of you who were not around for the glory days of networking, back when IBM ruled the roost, the term FEP is more than likely a new one. A FEP is a Front End Processor, a device that was built to sit in front of a mainframe to handle peripherals and network connections because the CPU cycles of the mainframe were too valuable to be spent on moving bits. These were also the days when the mainframe has less CPU cycles than your average modern PC, so it made sense to offload networking and other functions. IBM made a killing on sellng FEPs with model numbers such as 3705, 3745 and 3746.

Today, no-one gives a thought to a PC using the Intel x86 architecture being used for both computational and networking functions. As we've shown at Vyatta, this architecture can handle both functions and achieve a very nice price/performance ratio. In fact, in many networking environments, the CPU has many spare computational cycles to burn - and this has led to many people using Vyatta in combination with a virtual machine environment such as VMWare or XenSource.

And, that got me thinking a bit.... Let's imagine that you build a PC with a 3Ghz CPU (or faster), add a couple of 10Gigabit/sec Ethernet cards, load it with a few gigabytes of memory and then run a virtual machine with Vyatta and other networking/telephony software (Asterisk comes to mind as an example). Given the right software, this PC could do a lot of networking functions in a single box (routing, firewall, vpn, call routing, voicemail, SSL termination, load balancing, anti-spam, and so forth) and reduce the processing load on application servers in a given environment.

So - is a PC running many different networking applications on a very fast LAN connection in front of application servers really any different architecturally than a FEP? Probably not - it should be interesting to see if networks do evolve back to the future.

Here at Vyatta we use various web analytics tools to understand where our products have been distributed throughout the Internet. One of the interesting reports that these tools give us is the distribution of the Vyatta system globally by geography. As you may suspect, a large distribution of the Vyatta system (46.7%) is here in the US, followed by India (6.3%) and Germany (6.1%).

What surprised me was that the next country in the list was Vietnam!?! The value proposition of open source networking is clearly playing well in multiple global markets. But, why Vietnam? Sure, we're in places that are focused on both quality features and great price/performance as compared to other closed source vendors. But, there may be something else here - it may be that there are geographies and markets that have an intuitive understanding that being open and flexible are key advantages in networking. Or maybe, it's that the networking infrastructures in some geographies don't have the legacy issues of migrating off closed source vendors. In case you were wondering, here are the top 10 countries (and their percentage of active Vyatta systems that we know about):

1. United States: 46.7% 2. India: 6.3% 3. Germany: 6.1% 4. Vietnam: 3.8% 5. China: 3.4% 6. Poland: 3.0% 7. Canada: 2.8% 8. Malaysia: 2.7% 9. United Kingdom: 2.5% 10. Indonesia: 2.1%

A few of the more exotic (at least to me) places that the Vyatta system has reached are Botswana, Algeria, Malta, Kenya and Macedonia.

What are your thoughts on the geographies where the Vyatta system will have the most traction outside of the US?

Yesterday we announced a partnership with Digium, the Asterisk company. As those of you who read this blog know, we've been thinking about this partnership for some time and think this partnership makes all the sense in the world. While we don't have the same number of deployments as Asterisk (yet!), we're seeing great traction into the same end customer markets with the same value propositions: open, flexible, extendable, runs on x86 hardware and very cost-effective. All of those hold true for Vyatta and Asterisk, so we're sure this partnership will be beneficial to both parties!

When we started Vyatta, we made a conscious decision to make the company based on open source software and principles. We assumed, that since we were open source software, that there would be software coding done by or community that would help us along in our product development. We have leveraged and contributed to a number of open source projects (XORP, iptables, FreeSWAN, etc.), but in reality we have not seen a wealth of intricate router/firewall/VPN code patches, bug fixes and features from our developer community. Don't get me wrong, we've seen some great code from the developer community and we strongly encourage this to continue, but thinking back on things it makes sense that Vyatta users should spend their time extending our system for their specific environments. Networks are complex systems and the Vyatta system clearly appeals to users who need the flexability of an open source solution.

With this said, I have been very impressed with the way our user community has supported each other. We now have a good number of very knowledgeable users that we have never met (Arturo, Jacobo, Jon, Nick and others I am talking about you :) that provide excellent answers to our community. We see new people on the vyatta-users mailing list everyday and I am sure that this community support will continue to grow quickly. This involvement helps us out each and every day - thank you to everyone!

We're also impressed with the way people have been helping us test out the Vyatta system. Nick has done some extensive testing and www.openmaniak.com has built a Vyatta tutorial. These are some of the most visible examples of community involvement and if you know of others, please let me know.

We're watching the community grow, let's keep having people help people!

A few weeks back we had our quarterly Panorama Technology Advisory Board (TAB) meeting at our offices in Menlo Park.  Our guest speakers for this event were Doug Brent (COO) and David Conrad (General Manger of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - IANA) from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). We chatted about a number of different topics, but one that caught my interest was the topic of International Domain Names.  I circled back with David a week later and then wrote a blog post on GigaOm on this topic.

I'm embarrassed to say that's it has been a month since I last posted here. I'll definitely try to pick up the pace - things have been busy on multiple fronts. As a partial excuse, some of you have noted that I've been fairly busy posting on GigaOm on various topics.

Back on track, today Zimbra, the open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, announced a partnership with Comcast - the same folks that led our recent Series B investment.

This latest news makes complete sense to me, as Comcast is interested in using their large fiber and cable infrastructure to deliver integrated voice, video and data products to both the consumer and enterprise markets. While they have a good market position, they need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the telcos, specifically AT&T and Verizon here in the US. Leveraging open source for that innovation, whether for network infrastructure (Vyatta) or the hosted email (Zimbra) gives them better economics and avoids a vendor lock with either Cisco or Microsoft. Better operational costs leads to better customer pricing for their target markets and larger overall market share.

I think Comcast's use of open source to build products and services is a great strategy - it should help keep pressure on the telcos for now.

We've been meeting with a few Fixed-to-Mobile Convergence (FMC) companies of late and I wrote a post on GigaOm on this subject here.

I did a post last week that generated some good interaction with the GigaOm community about a meeting that I had with a web2.0 company.  You can read about Web2.0 and the Death of the Network Engineer here.

I wrote a post for GigaOm that garnered some good comments on the need in the mobile media market for a CDN solution.  You can read that post here.

I've read a few stories about a Dutch company making an open source car. Seems like the open source philosophy can permeate into multiple technology arenas. I'll definitely be tracking the progress here, but not after drinking too much open source beer.