Mike Vizard

Network monitoring has gone from being a relatively sleepy corner of the enterprise IT world to suddenly becoming a category where mergers and acquisitions are beginning to regularly occur. JDSU this week announced it has completed its acquisition of Network Instruments for $200 million in cash. The finalization of the deal comes on the heels […]

Three Big Problems Big Data Will Create in 2014 Most business users are a whole lot more interested in the ends rather than the means, so when it comes to analytics, more often they’re really looking for the shortest path to actual business insight. With that goal in mind, Logi Analytics today launched Logi Vision, […]

Ten Predictions for Cloud Storage in 2014 There’s no question that in the age of the cloud, distributed databases are a challenge. In fact, it’s the management of distributed SQL databases that has pushed so many organizations creating cloud applications to embrace NoSQL databases that more easily scale. And yet, a lot of applications are […]

Ten Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud One of the primary objections that IT organizations have when it comes to the adoption of cloud storage is a lack of control over the service being provided. Thanks to snapshot software available using storage systems deployed within the data center, a lot of IT organizations […]

Ten Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud As a way to inexpensively improve the performance of cloud applications, many organizations routinely rely on open source caching software such as Memcached. As is often the case with open source software, however, they often wind up looking for a more robust implementation that comes with […]

Five Predictions for the Connected Enterprise in 2014 With more organizations starting to rely on cloud-based applications such as Google Apps instead of traditional productivity applications such as Microsoft Office running on local Windows PC, an opportunity to rethink how PCs are deployed is starting to emerge. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) today, Hewlett-Packard […]

Across the enterprise, building mobile computing applications is all the rage. But there’s a world of difference between building a mobile application that people check out from time to time and one that they find both engaging and useful enough to want to regularly use. Looking to help organizations develop mobile computing applications that users […]

Managed file transfer (MFT) may not spring to mind as a critical issue that IT organizations are going to need to address in the coming year. But with the acquisition of Aspera at the close of 2013, the folks at IBM are betting that it will be. While IBM has been providing an MFT capability […]

Four Ways to Solve Cloud Integration, for Better or Worse Given the fact that many of the applications that any organization needs to integrate exist outside the enterprise, it only makes sense that a lot of that integration should take place in neutral territory in the cloud. A lot of organizations just don’t want to […]

Right after the holidays, more than a few organizations begin a review of their customer service operations, and more often than not, they are found wanting. Targeting organizations that need to provide a higher level of customer service in the digital age, Pegasystems has upgraded its customer service offering that runs on top of version […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore If 2013 was the year that most organizations discovered what Big Data platforms such as Hadoop were all about, then the coming year will be the one in which they discover the applications that turn all that data into something of business value. Brett Sheppard, director of […]

Top Security Priorities for CIOs in 2014 Fresh off an equity investment made by the venture capital investment firm Insight Venture Partners, Unitrends, a provider of data protection software, at the close of 2013 turned around and acquired PHD Virtual, a provider of data protection software optimized for virtual machine environments that is also primarily […]