Mike Vizard

Five Common Excuses for Avoiding Windows Migrations While lack of support from Microsoft for Windows XP can be annoying, a similar lack of support for an instance of Windows Server can be fatal. A year from now, Microsoft plans to end support for Windows Server 2003, which still has an installed base that can be […]

Debunking the Top Data Center Myths Ever since the advent of the Watson supercomputer running on IBM Power processors, IBM has been on a campaign to increase the appeal of its Power processors. While IBM has made a lot of progress in that regard, one of the lesser appreciated nuances of the IBM Power8 strategy […]

Top 10 IT Performance Management Predictions for 2014 While the concept of business activity monitoring (BAM) has been around for years, very few organizations have really been able to apply BAM at a granular enough level to make investing in it worthwhile. With its recent acquisition of Systar, Axway is now gearing up to accomplish […]

Five Ways to Scale Agile for the Enterprise As an in-memory cluster extension to Hadoop, the Apache Spark project has been gaining a fair amount of momentum as a vehicle for running a variety of real-time applications. This week, an effort to standardize how Apache Spark is implemented was announced at the Spark Summit 2014 […]

Eight Steps to Reach New Heights with Unified Communications IBM today moved to take social networking in the enterprise to a higher level with the release of IBM Connections 5, an instance of its social networking software that can run on premise or in the cloud. Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for IBM, […]

Top Predictions for Big Data in 2014 With more than 70 percent of all the data in the enterprise still residing in mainframes, it’s obvious that the mainframe is a target-rich environment for applying analytics. The challenge is that that the mainframe is also a potentially expensive place to apply those analytics. Looking to give […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Looking to combine the best real-time attributes of NoSQL databases, DataStax this week unveiled a DataStax Enterprise 4.5 database platform that combines Cassandra with the Apache Spark in-memory computing engine. Announced at the Spark Summit 2014 conference, DataStax Enterprise 5.4 is the latest iteration of a commercially supported […]

Most log data winds up as an underutilized resource simply because it’s too hard to navigate. Worse yet, even when someone does take the time to navigate all that data, all too often it turns out that someone else in the organization ends up looking through all that same data too, looking for an answer […]

The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users With Hadoop becoming a major source of data in the enterprise, it’s only natural for users to want analytics applications to be deployed where the data resides. With that goal in mind, Alteryx plans to soon allow users of the Alteryx Analytics application to read and […]

In-Memory: Speeding Up Value by Using Operational Intelligence In-memory databases are clearly the next big thing in enterprise IT. The challenge is going to be figuring out where and when to use what type of in-memory database. Looking to become one of the major players in this space, EXASOL AG has released version 5 of […]

Five Burning Security Issues in Cloud Computing One of the biggest challenges with compliance is making it simple. Too many approaches to enforcing compliance require users to engage in unnatural acts that they simply are not going to do in the performance of their everyday duties. The end result is that they find a way […]

Top 10 Storage and Networking Trends for 2014 Within the data center, a debate rages over where and when to apply Flash memory. Many IT organizations are clearly embracing Flash memory first in the form of a card that plugs into their server. But at the same time, Flash memory is finding its way into […]