Mike Vizard

One of the most strategic initiatives that Salesforce.com started in 2012 — with any eye towards achieving and maintaining control over the cloud in 2013 and beyond — is Salesforce Identity. Looking to build a viable ecosystem in the cloud that will attract the support of both application software providers and IT organizations, Salesforce.com needed […]

As larger amounts of Big Data become more accessible with each passing day, finding ways to analyze that information is becoming a higher priority for organizations of all sizes. But as is often the case with large amounts of information, a picture is often worth a thousand words. Mani Gill, vice president and general manager […]

While some folks have some serious doubts that an IT skills shortage actually exists, a new “2012 IBM Tech Trends” report finds that only one in 10 organizations say they have the technical skills they need to succeed. The report, based on a global survey of 1,200 business and IT leaders, finds that most acute […]

There are really two fundamental challenges with trying to manage a private cloud. The first is that a homogeneous private cloud is going to be the exception rather than the rule, and the second is that trying to figure out what infrastructure elements support what application workloads is going to be complicated. Unless you’re planning […]

Cyber Crime Hits Users at Home and On the Go Much of the battle between security vendors and cyber criminals takes place in a netherworld that is beyond the visibility of the average IT organization. But once in a while a report surfaces that shines a light on just how much work goes into trying […]

Health Care Breaches Are in Critical Condition Medical records are becoming a big business for all the wrong reasons. While the Obama administration has encouraged health care organizations to invest billions of dollars in electronic health care records, some of the biggest beneficiaries of that program are likely to be cybercriminals. A new survey of […]

In theory, cloud computing should lead to the development of the “boundary-less data center” in the sense that any resource in the cloud should be able to be invoked by any application. The trouble is that making that actually happen on the fly is still a little bit beyond the current state of the technology. […]

As organizations become increasingly comfortable using cloud services, practical issues related to how much they are actually spending start to become a lot more important. Not only do organizations want to know how much they are spending, they also want to be able to play one cloud service provider off another. To help IT organizations […]

As marketing and the call center increasingly become tightly intertwined, organizations are looking for ways to unify their interactions with customers. Right now, within most organizations, there is little to no coordination between the customer support activities that take place in the call center and their social media activities. Looking to bridge that divide, Moxie […]

As the business value of APIs becomes more apparent, the need to foster the creation of a vibrant community around those APIs becomes critical. Unfortunately, all too often organizations hang an API off an application and then pretty much forget about it. What’s required is a mechanism through which developers who want to make use […]

A new global survey of 460 business and IT leaders, conducted by the business and IT consulting firm Capgemini, finds that business leaders are now just as likely to be making the decision about what cloud services to use as IT. Reducing costs remains the primary motivation for moving to the cloud, but interestingly enough, […]

While a lot of people are quick to criticize Microsoft, people tend to overlook it when the company actually executes well. Such is the case with Microsoft Systems Center 2012, the management platform that Microsoft developed to run on top of Windows Server 2012. By just about all accounts Microsoft Systems Center 2012 can stand […]