Mike Vizard

Fights between proponents of mainframes and distributed computing platforms over which platform is better suited to run any given application workload continue unabated, but it is becoming easier to unify the management of those application workloads. In the interest of getting the most out of their investments in diverse computing platforms, IT organizations have been […]

For a lot of IT organizations, the rise of mobile computing has meant suddenly doubling or even tripling the number of devices that need to be supported, which obviously puts some strain on their IT management systems. In fact, many of them are now looking at upgrading those systems to accommodate not only a diverse […]

There’s a lot of discussion in IT circles about how to best go about managing identity that usually results in a lot of frustration. There’s not much in the way of actual standards when it comes to identity management, so it’s not uncommon to see IT organizations that embark on trying to solve this problem […]

There’s obviously a lot of debate these days concerning the merits of the acquisition of Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard. Much of that debate is focused on whether HP was duped into overpaying for Autonomy. But to hear Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele tell it, that may not be the only surprise in store for HP. According to […]

As IT organizations come to realize that they can’t successfully defend against all threats, many of them are starting to rely on a whitelisting approach to IT security that specifically identifies who gets access to what specific applications in the enterprise. Once dismissed for being too unwieldy to practically implement, Paul Henry, security and forensic […]

As organizations get more comfortable with cloud computing in general, one of the next, big killer applications in the cloud is expected to be supply chain management. After all, the business value of a supply chain is directly proportional to the number of companies connected to it. GT Nexus, an early pioneer in this space, […]

Heralding what SAP refers to as a new in-memory computing era for running SAP ERP applications, SAP executives today announced that the company’s flagship Business Suite of ERP applications is now available on the SAP High Performance Analytics Appliance (HANA) database platform. According to SAP Co-founder and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board Hasso Plattner, […]

IT Plays Catch-up with Cloud Application Security One of the more troubling aspects of cloud security is that as business users exert more control over cloud application selection, the less attention there seems being paid to fundamental IT security issues. The end result, finds a survey of 200 IT organizations in the U.S. and another […]

One of the most significant challenges that any IT organization faces when it comes to managing cloud applications is provisioning access. By and large, Microsoft Active Directory is the dominant method IT organizations rely on to provision access to applications within the enterprise. The problem is that Active Directory can’t be easily extended out to […]

For a lot of people, the phrase Big Data has become synonymous with Apache Hadoop, the open source framework originally developed by Yahoo to manage massive amounts of data. But as more organizations become familiar with the nuances of Big Data, it’s starting to look like there will be a much greater appreciation for different […]

As more organizations come to depend on customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage their business, a larger percentage of them are starting to spend most of their time managing their business from within that application. Zoho wants to help make it easier to do that by tightening the integration between its CRM application and […]

Conventional wisdom has it that cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft will soon dominate the entire cloud computing category. But smaller providers of cloud computing services that are specifically designed to meet the needs of enterprise IT organizations that want more control over their cloud computing environments report they are starting to […]