Mike Vizard

Five Social Media Tools to Enhance Customer Service Response The issue with social networking in the enterprise is that merely replicating a Facebook experience doesn’t do much for improving productivity. Without any association to a business process, social networking in the enterprise doesn’t tend to provide any useful context. To address that specific issue, SAP […]

As a cloud computing platform for managing IT service desks, ServiceNow gives IT organizations a lot of flexibility, especially in terms of letting end users self-service their requests for IT support. Now, ServiceNow wants to extend those capabilities. First is in the form of HTML5 support, which makes ServiceNow accessible from a variety of mobile […]

The Struggle to Manage the Complexity of Modern IT After acquiring XtremIO well over a year ago to satisfy increasing demand for all-Flash storage arrays, EMC today announced that it has begun shipping EMC XtremIO storage systems as part of an overall expansion of its Flash memory product line. The new storage system can provide […]

Six Mobile Management Implications of iOS7 Just about everyone agrees that mobile computing is becoming critically important across the enterprise. Where disagreement manifests itself is in how to manage it. Many folks insist the only way to manage a fast moving mobile environment is with a dedicated mobile device management (MDM) platform, while others contend […]

Seven Criteria for Choosing an IaaS Provider The way service providers and internal IT organizations think about the cloud is fundamentally different. For service provider, the notion of the cloud evolved around the twin concepts of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The former is all about outsourcing hardware using a shared model that is significantly […]

Eight Reasons Why Organizations Should Virtualize In an era where it’s become increasingly practical to make use of storage resources that are tightly coupled to virtual machines running on servers, Maxta wants to finally force the issue. This week, Maxta unveiled its namesake software that turns Flash and magnetic storage running on a server into […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore The rise of Big Data presents IT organizations with a broad swath of management challenges that all can be traced back to the need to create a next-generation data warehouse to store all that data in a way that allows it to bring value to the business. […]

The Battle for Sales: Five Reasons Showrooming Will Always Win One of the primary reasons that customer relationship management (CRM) software is not universally used across the business is that for the most part, these applications were designed for managers rather than the people that are actually tasked with using them. To specifically address that […]

Six Reasons Businesses Need to Pay Attention to Unstructured Data Whenever the conversation turns to Big Data and analytics, the topic is naturally assumed to be related to Hadoop. But it turns out that Cassandra, a NoSQL database that requires higher levels of performance than can be typically achieved using Hadoop, is gaining a fair […]

Six Secrets Most Backup Vendors Don’t Want You to Know Backing data up in the era of the cloud puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the network. The good news is that in the few years the routers that make up most of our extended networks have become a lot smarter. The challenge now […]

Tracing the Evolution of Business Intelligence Through the Rise of Embedded Analytics Most IT people are squarely focused on back office systems that are highly automated. Increasingly, however, it turns out that a lot more IT opportunity lies outside of the traditional office than inside. One of those areas is known as product lifecycle management […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore The popular perception is that anything involving petabytes of data requires a lot of IT people and at least one data scientist to analyze. In reality, however, analytics applications are scaling to the point where analysts can now analyze that data without much help from anyone. With […]