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Networking giant Cisco is attempting to quantify the enterprise market for tablets. So, the company spent the last several months of 2011 surveying 1,500 executives, middle management, salespeople and clerical staffs of medium to large business around the world. What they found was that, on average, enterprise IT shops handle one tablet request for every three smartphone requests across the world.

Cisco's history at building brands around consumer-grade devices and services has been not only less than stellar, but a bit below mediocre. It failed to make the most of the Linksys acquisition in 2003; it ended up killing its actually-popular Flip camera last April, then shut down its Eos social platform the following month; and its recent social CRM tool SocialMiner and social collaboration platform Quad have been dwarfed into obscurity this year by Salesforce.com.

So you might think the strategy of marketing enterprise services the way it's marketed its consumer brands in the past, might warrant at least a moment's reconsideration. Today, however, Cisco is going forward with a branding campaign for cloud management software and services for cloud service providers (CSPs) to resell to customers or redeploy within an enterprise under its own brand. The clear objective for CloudVerse is for Cisco to maintain its customers within a Cisco cloud corral the way VMware has done with virtualization.

Puppet Labs announced today that it is receiving $8.5 million in Series C financing from Google Ventures, Cisco and VMware. The new round of financing brings Puppet Labs up to $15.75 million, which begs the question – what does the IT automation company need with that kind of dosh?

Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, says that the money is going into development, marketing and sales. Kanies says that the company is looking to grow faster than "organic growth" would carry the company.

Two announcements in the past month show that the wireless routing marketplace is getting cloud-savvy, with the ability to use the cloud to manage widescale deployments. The advantage of this is clear for companies with several branch offices that want to maintain a single wireless and wired network across their entire enterprise.

The products are from the Branch on Demand BR100 from Aerohive and the ZyXEL NWA1100N-CE. While not directly comparable, both offer the ability to centrally manage a collection of wireless routers and both are offered on a subscription-pricing model. Aerohive units will be available in mid-December, and the ZyXEL units are available now.

The open source NoSQL graph database that has perhaps attracted the most attention in recent months has been Neo4j, a Java-based DBMS with a RESTful API that supports multiple languages. Earlier this month, Microsoft embraced Neo4j by enabling its use through the Windows Azure cloud platform, whose .NET languages aren't typically associated with Java.

Now, a new commercial distribution of Neo4j premiering this week from Spring Data adds a head-turning new feature for developers: a mapping mode that enables data to be accessible as ordinary Java objects. This means new Java developers won't have to learn the quirks of Neo4j's AspectJ library to access data much the same way they're already doing for Oracle and MySQL Connector/J.

In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back to competitiveness against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools. These let admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients, even to tablets like Apple's iPad, without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?

The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop, the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.

According to the Patent Examiner, a company called Innovatio IP Ventures is suing individual branches of hotel chains for use of Wi-Fi. Though I'm staunchly against software patents – and by extension software patent lawsuits – I think this is a good thing.

The company is launching a "systematic campaign" according to Matthew McAndrews, the lead litigator for Innovatio. The company is trying to shake down "several hundred" defendants for $2,300 to $5,000. Says McAndrews, "We want you to continue to use this technology, we just want our client to get his due share. This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown."

Lots of memories of my computing past flooding through me this morning, and no, this won't be another Jobs tribute. But a post yesterday talking about whether you were using the Internet back in 1995 brought me back to that era, and I thought it would be a good time to show how much progress we have made in the 16-some years and what businesses were doing with the Internet back then.

If you are looking for a new way to do enterprise video conferencing that marries the quality, standards support and management features missing from Skype and its ilk, take a look at today's announcement from Logitech with its ClearSea service.

The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.

The OpenStack Project has made impressive gains since its inception just a little more than a year ago. OpenStack has gone from a joint project between RackSpace and NASA to a massive effort spanning 110 companies and organizations.