Networking > Interviews

Charles Giancarlo spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and was widely considered a likely heir to Chairman and CEO John Chambers before he left last year for investment company Silver Lake Partners. Then Silver Lake orchestrated a private-equity buyout of Cisco rival Avaya, and Giancarlo stepped in as interim president and CEO. In January, former JDS Uniphase chief Kevin Kennedy will take over day-to-day operations as president and CEO, and Giancarlo will become chairman. Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service spoke with Giancarlo on Tuesday after he delivered the opening keynote at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

Interim Avaya CEO Charles Giancarlo is winding down his tenure at the helm as the company narrows down a permanent replacement for former CEO Lou D'Ambrosio, who stepped down earlier this year for health reasons.

Amid the current economic doldrums, Juniper just posted third quarter revenue (up 29 percent to US$947 million) and earnings (US$148.5 million, up 75 percent). Barely seven weeks into the job, new CEO Kevin Johnson, a 16-year Microsoft veteran, spoke with Jim Duffy about what's driving the company's momentum.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

John McCool took over for Jayshree Ullal when the longtime and very visible Cisco data center chief resigned in May. McCool is no stranger though -- he came to Cisco in the Granite Networks acquisition during the industry's Gigabit Ethernet boom in the 1990s. Weeks into his new job as senior vice president of data center, switching and security, McCool shared some of Cisco's plans and visions with Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

Wendell Odom, Cisco press author, instructor and blogger was recently a repeat guest for Network World chat. Attendees asked him the best ways to build a home lab, which certifications still have power in the market, and strategies for most easily passing the hardest exams.

Lots of people like to describe their jobs as "being on the front lines," but there are IT professionals whose jobs really do put them on the front lines of a combat zone. You think your work life's stressful? Try getting a network restored after it's been brought down by a mortar attack - in 110-degree heat.

Educators used to follow the auto industry because that's where all the lessons came from, says Bala Iyer. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Google. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Iyer, an associate professor of technology operations and information management at Babson College, looked deep into Google's DNA to discern what makes it an innovation machine. Iyer talked with Kathleen Melymuka about what he and co-author Thomas H. Davenport discovered.