Google wants to take on what may become one of the biggest cloud-computing needs of the next few years with a service that will manage IoT devices and help developers bring the data they generate into applications that use Google's analytics platforms.

Its Google Cloud IoT Core, announced in a blog post on Tuesday, may be a good use of Google's reach, number-crunching power and device OS expertise. But the problem it aims to solve is daunting, and competitors are already focused on it.

The good news for enterprises is that there are several solutions to IoT sprawl already available or taking shape. Just last week, VMware introduced Pulse IoT Center, the latest broad-based platform for setting up, managing and scaling IoT infrastructure. Cloud rival Microsoft has Azure IoT Hub, with a similar mission. Cisco Systems, General Electric and Nokia are also in the game.

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The internet of things seems tailor-made for management headaches. Having thousands of tiny devices distributed across a city or a company is hard enough. Then there's the whole infrastructure supporting them, including network connections and edge gateways.

Some big players, including General Electric, Nokia, and Cisco's Jasper division, have products and services for running all this. Now VMware is taking on the challenge with VMware Pulse IoT Center, a solution that draws on two platforms the company already sells.

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Branch sites are ideal places to make networking simpler and less expensive. There's often little or no IT expertise there, and it's harder to justify costs because only a fraction of a company's business happens at a given branch.

Yet the rise of software-defined WANs and branch offices, designed to scale back the expense and complexity of far-flung networks, has left some parts of the problem unsolved, according to SD-WAN startup Versa Networks.

For one thing, replacing branch appliances for each function with applications running on one system may raise software compatibility issues that are even more complicated than wiring up several boxes. Also, swapping out private WAN links for lower-priced internet service can open branches up to some new security threats.

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When Sun Microsystems said, "The network is the computer," it might have been talking about the Internet of Things, which was little more than an idea at the time. Today, more machines than ever are talking to other machines, and computing is being distributed across far-flung networks.

Onetime Sun CEO Scott McNealy sees some of the legendary company's vision coming to fruition in an IoT "data bus" from a small Silicon Valley outfit called Real-Time Innovations. On Tuesday, McNealy became the first member of RTI's Advisory Board.

RTI's data bus is middleware for delivering the right information at the right time to all the people and systems that need it. The software runs on meshed computing nodes that can be a small as a microcontroller, and it uses several kinds of network connections to make sure the data gets through.

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Dell's drive into open networking accelerated on Monday with the announcement of the first switches to ship with OS10, the company's network operating system that's based on open source.

At Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, the company introduced two data-center switches running OS10 Enterprise Edition, an enhanced version of the open-source OS that Dell announced early last year.

The software is based on technologies from the Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project and is already available through an extended beta to customers who already have hardware. The Enterprise Edition is a complete software platform, including Dell's networking stack, but its open-source foundation means it can be extended with third-party software, said Jeff Baher, Dell EMC's executive director, networking.

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Dell EMC is making one of its broadest rollouts of updated storage gear in years at Dell EMC World on Monday, packing more capacity and performance into several product lines.

Coming several months after the completion of the Dell-EMC merger, the update includes the second generation of EMC's XtremIO all-flash array, a new architecture for its Isilon network-attached storage platform, and an improved flash module for the VMax line.

Some of the gains made in these products flow from improvements that come like clockwork from other players in the industry. SSDs keep getting bigger, with up to 15.4TB units now available in some of this gear, and Intel CPUs advance with new and faster chipsets, including Haswell (in Isilon) and Broadwell (in VMax).

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Saving money may be a good enough reason to try a brand-new cloud storage service -- if it can deliver on its promises.

That's the equation some enterprises may use when they look at Wasabi Technologies, an object storage startup that says it offers six times the performance of Amazon's S3 service at one-fifth the price. The service is available globally on Wednesday.

The company, started by the co-founders of online backup provider Carbonite, says its single pool of capacity can deliver primary, secondary or archive data at a sustained-read speed of 1.3GB per second, versus 191MB per second at Amazon. Its durability is the same, Wasabi says.

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Less than one-fifth of enterprise IT assets are in the cloud, but it looks like more are on the way.

One-third of data-center professionals and IT practitioners plan to deploy workloads in the cloud in the next year, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, an advisory group focused on improving critical infrastructure.

Companies still rely mostly on their own infrastructure and multi-tenant data centers, including collocation facilities, the survey found. Sixty-five percent of IT assets are in-house, and only 13 percent in the cloud.

But the move to the cloud continues. The survey found 67 percent of respondents had seen at least some workloads that would have run internally in the past move to the cloud.

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If you're a network engineer, don't rush out and learn a programming language. To compete in the new world of software-defined networking, it might be more important to start thinking like a programmer.

That was one of the ideas that emerged this week from an Open Networking User Group debate that generated healthy feedback from users in the audience.

The days of managing individual switches and routers and configuring them with proprietary CLIs (command-line interfaces) are numbered, four panelists at the ONUG spring conference in San Francisco said on Tuesday. Though SDN hasn't worked its way into every enterprise, new approaches to enterprise IT and the availability of public clouds just a few clicks away are driving companies toward more agile and automated networks, they said.

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A group of networking engineers and vendors is making progress toward an API that would help enterprises merge SD-WANs from different vendors.

The Open SD-WAN Exchange (OSE) initiative was launched last year by the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) to solve a shortcoming of software-defined wide-area networks: They often can't talk to each other. On Tuesday at the ONUG Spring 2017 conference in San Francisco, OSE will make public the work it's done so far.

SD-WANs control links to branch offices and remote sites with software, which ultimately should eliminate proprietary hardware and dedicated routing schemes. They also allow companies to use regular broadband connections instead of more expensive MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) services.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the hybrid cloud: Building the infrastructure was a pain in the neck.

That's what enterprise IT people in the Open Networking User Group have discovered Last year, public cloud providers persuaded C-level executives to move significant corporate workloads to the cloud, but the tools weren't there to make it work, said Nick Lippis, co-founder and co-chairman of ONUG.

"There is a ton of custom work that has to be done," Lippis said.

So the user group, which includes IT executives from hundreds of enterprises, chose building hybrid cloud infrastructure as its focus for this year. It will be the main topic at ONUG Spring 2017, taking place next week in San Francisco.

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Industrial IoT's big future is starting to become a reality, but many companies still don't think they're ready for it.

Those are some of the findings in surveys released on Tuesday by the Business Performance Innovation Network and the Eclipse IoT Working Group. They reflect the views of hundreds of executives and developers from a range of industries.

More than half of the executives think their industries are already adopting IoT through either pilots or large-scale deployments, and 57 percent are at least in the planning stages themselves, BPI Network said. About 350 executives from around the world responded to the survey by BPI Network, an organization of business leaders.

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Cloud computing is all well and good for enterprises with big-data applications and consumers with virtual assistants, but it runs into some limits in an isolated cornfield.

On farms and other places far from powerful computers and network connections, there's a trend away from centralized computing even while most of the IT world is embracing it. In remote places, the internet of things requires local processing as well as data-center analysis. So-called edge computing is coming to industries including manufacturing, utilities, shipping, and oil and gas. Agriculture is getting it, too.

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A coast-to-coast network trial by AT&T last month, using open-source "white box" switches, pointed toward an imagined future of more reliable services that may come quicker than some people think.

The carrier ran a trial on its core network earlier this year using switches based on chips from Intel, Broadcom and startup Barefoot Networks. The latter only started shipping in sample quantities in December, making the trial deployment a remarkably quick turnaround.

Like other carriers and cloud providers, AT&T is aggressively shifting its network toward SDN (software-defined networking). As these changes are carried out across more infrastructure, they should give both service providers and subscribers more flexibility and higher performance.

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More than 40 years after founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak has a lot to say about the early days of the world's richest company -- and about technology, learning, and being a born engineer.

On stage at the IEEE TechIgnite conference in Burlingame, California, on Wednesday, he gave a glimpse into how a tech legend thinks.

On open source

In the early Seventies, Wozniak read about phone phreaking, in which "phreakers" made free phone calls by using electronics to mimic the tones used for dialing each number. To learn how to do it, he went to the only place he knew that had books and magazines about computers: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He went on a Sunday and walked right in. "The smartest people in the world don't lock doors," Wozniak said.

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