CES, the showcase of all tech that is likely to make a splash over the next year, is upon us. While reserved primarily for, as the name implies, consumer technology, there are fundamental tools and technologies that will impact businesses as well.
News coming out of Las Vegas today is around chipmaker Intel's use of existing Wi-Fi radios for personal area network (PAN) connectivity. The release of the updated Wi-Fi driver software will allow the existing wireless 802.11 radios inside devices with the Centrino 2 chipset to use the radio as a means to connect to an IP-based network as well as local, Wi-Fi-enabled devices. The devices, ranging from cameras to network attached storage (NAS) will allow users to rely on the Wi-Fi radio in their Centrino-powered device to provide IP connectivity as well as file sharing and peripheral connectivity. Currently, the standard for most PAN applications and peripheral devices is Bluetooth, however Ozmo Devices, a firm partially funded by Intel, is out to change that.
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Friday, Iron Mountain and Microsoft announced a new partnership. Customers of Microsoft's backup offering, Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 service pack 1, can electronically vault redundant copies of their data to Iron Mountain's CloudRecovery service. This is welcomed news for DPM customers. Customers will continue to backup locally to disk for instant restore but rather than vault data to tape and physically transport tape to an offsite storage service provider, customers will vault data over the Internet to Iron Mountain. For disaster recovery purposes and long-term retention services, you need this redundant copy of your data offsite. By eliminating the physical tape transport you eliminate the risk of lost or stolen tapes or the need to deploy some kind of tape encryption solution. Microsoft DPM hasn't taken the backup world by storm since its introduction in 2005, but each subsequent release has added critical features and application support. Additionally, because it is often bundled in with Microsoft System Center, I expect adoption will increase among small and medium businesses (SMBs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Tuesday, January 20th, Riverbed Technology 
The Wall Street Journal 
Nortel’s future does not look bright. It admitted to huge financial reporting misstatements in 2002 and 2003, and the Canadian federal police are pursuing the former CEO, CFO, and comptroller for fraud. Nortel has lost more than $7 billion since CEO Mike Zafirovski took over in 2005. Competitors like Cisco and Juniper have been gaining share and new ones like Huawei have emerged. Since 2005, Cisco’s revenues have grown by almost 60%, Huawei’s have more than doubled, and we estimate that Juniper’s revenue has grown by well over 40% over the same three year period. In contrast, Nortel’s revenues have declined. During this time, Nortel’s share price has dropped by 90%. Nortel is losing share in the IPT market and the overall economic climate will clearly affect telecom hardware purchasing. All of this makes Nortel’s recovery even more difficult ¬— despite having $2.4 billion in cash on hand.