Mike Vizard

Interest in IT automation is on the rise, driven by the need to manage IT at scale in the age of the cloud. The challenge many IT organizations face when trying to implement IT automation, however, is that they don’t have the programming skills needed to succeed. Seven Enterprise Applications Trends for High Growth Companies […]

In order to consolidate branch office applications into a centralized data center, organizations need to be able to treat the network as a seamless extension of their storage systems. Otherwise, latency issues will result in a rebellion among rank and file employees, who these days can just as easily contract any number of shadow IT […]

At a time when large numbers of organizations are contemplating their next Windows move following the termination of Windows XP support in early 2014, interest in desktop virtualization is on the rise. Not only has the performance of desktop virtualization technologies considerably improved as of late, IT organizations are finding that many end users are […]

Five Best Practices for Disk Drive Storage Decisions The battle for control over analytics platforms in the enterprise intensified this week with Oracle rolling out an upgraded version of the Oracle Exalytics platform that provides access to twice as much memory in addition to 2.4TB of solid-state drives (SSDs) and 5.4TB of hard disk storage. […]

Middleware in the cloud is getting more complex each day. Not only are there service-oriented architectures (SOA) that drive traditional enterprise applications to deal with, but there is also a new generation of applications that leverage RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs). The end result is a level of application integration across the cloud that is […]

Five Pitfalls That Can Derail Your Big Data Project Beauty may only be skin deep, but when it comes to getting users to actually adopt an analytics application, it may be everything. Historically, end users have resisted giving up their spreadsheets in favor of more robust analytics applications because of the comfort they have with […]

Five Tips to Improve Your Data Analysis One of the more frustrating aspects of managing data in general and governing it in particular is trying to figure out which application owners go with which particular set of data. Without the ability to easily determine which application owner is responsible for generating a particular data set, […]

Dispelling the Myths and Fears of Converged Infrastructure Mainframes are expensive to acquire and costly to manage. They also require a fair number of people with some very specific skill sets to run them. As part of an ongoing effort to reduce some of these costs, this week CA Technologies extended its CA Chorus tools […]

When it comes to analytics, the biggest challenge is not creating the algorithms that drive the application; it’s getting the information the application generates into the hands of end users in a way they can easily consume it. With that issue in mind, Predixion Software has developed an analytics application that functions essentially as an […]

Organizations of all sizes are clearly interested in the potential productivity benefits of video conferencing; it’s just that deploying it and managing it often make it more trouble than it’s worth. Pexip, a startup company founded by engineers that formerly worked at Tandberg and Cisco, are looking to solve that problem with the recent launch […]

Integrating hybrid clouds that consist of multiple applications is one thing. But keeping two or more cloud instances running the same application synchronized with each other in a hybrid cloud environment represents a whole other level of complexity. Back to Basics: Objectives for Successful Cloud Adoption This week, Skytap is rising to the challenge by […]

In theory, backup and recovery should be a fairly simply process. In practice, though, it’s often one of the most fractured and poorly managed processes in all of IT. As part of an effort to unify broken backup processes, EMC today defined what it describes as a new data protection architecture based around a refresh […]