Mike Vizard

While there is a lot of excitement these days over open source frameworks for managing the cloud, there are doubts concerning how long it will be until these frameworks are mature enough to use. There are those who would suggest that what vendors agree to cooperate on may not have much value in the grand […]

The dawn of a new era of cloud computing is upon us, and one that will be defined by more granular application workloads that are seamlessly integrated across an open and secure ecosystem. According to Dave Elliott, Symantec senior product marketing manager for global cloud marketing, the first step toward turning this vision of applications […]

One of the first places many organizations look to take advantage of the cloud is in building mobile computing applications. Most of them don’t have a lot of expertise when it comes to building mobile computing applications, or even access to the right set of tools. The cloud affords them a place to not only […]

Application Bloat Afflicts the Enterprise Given the state of the economy, most businesses are obsessed with cutting costs, especially when it comes to IT. At the same, however, many of those same businesses are supporting a lot more applications than they need, which only serves to drive up IT costs. A recent survey of 150 […]

With all the major storage vendors starting to load up on Flash memory, things have never been better for IT from a performance perspective. Officially joining the Flash memory fray this week was Hitachi Data Systems, which unveiled the Hitachi Accelerated Flash Storage, a flash memory array that customers can plug into the Hitachi Virtual […]

Customers Weigh In on Oracle Itanium Controversy It’s pretty clear that many IT organizations are dubious of Oracle’s motives. Intel and Hewlett-Packard collectively thumbed their noses at Oracle today with the introduction of new high-end HP servers based on a new family of Intel Itanium 9500 series processors. The 2.53 GHz Intel Itanium 9500 series […]

When people think of workflow, their thoughts naturally tend to shift toward the movement of various documents across the organization. Unfortunately, that approach tends to result in a fairly stilted set of business processes that can make it difficult for the business to dynamically change those processes as new business conditions emerge. The folks at […]

Like it or not the re-election victory of President Barack Obama means there will be more business regulations to comply with in the years ahead. The truth of the matter is that most regulations wind up forcing businesses to be better managed. But it’s also true that those regulations increase the cost of doing business. […]

While being able to manage application workloads across public and private instances of cloud computing is important, the ultimate end goal should be the ability to play one cloud service provider off against another. For a few years now GreenButton has been providing a service through which IT organizations could manage multiple cloud service providers. […]

The rise of in-memory computing coupled with the availability of inexpensive Flash memory is turning the way data is processed upside down. As more processing of live data moves into memory, the role of the disk array in the enterprise changes. In fact, it becomes just as important to make sure there is enough Flash […]

While everyone wants IT to be more efficient these days, the fact remains that a lot of IT resources are being spent on supporting applications that are long past their prime. A survey of 150 IT managers at organizations with over $500 million in revenue, and conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of the Quest […]

For the most part, much of the activity surrounding databases in the cloud have been confined to NoSQL databases. But the folks at the Heroku cloud unit of Salesforce.com are starting to make an aggressive case for running traditional SQL relational databases in the cloud. Heroku recently made available an instance of the open source […]