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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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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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 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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