Mike Vizard

As Apple gains more market share, more end users are experiencing the level of IT support provided by the Genius Bar that Apple has set up in its retail stores. Unfortunately, for many IT organizations that experience is starting to set some IT support expectations that most of them can’t currently match. The folks at […]

It’s not that the emerging OpenFlow standard as a foundation for software-defined networking (SDN) isn’t technically viable; it’s just that it’s beside the point. According to Prashant Gandhi, senior director of product management for the Cisco Server Access Group, that’s essentially the position that Cisco is adopting now that OpenStack, an emerging standard that provides […]

Now that everyone is starting to get a better handle on exactly what the emerging OpenStack framework for managing clouds actually does, the focus is quickly turning towards what can actually be done with it. At the OpenStack Summit 2012 conference this week, Midokura became one of the first vendors to deliver an OpenStack-compatible application […]

IBM significantly extended its cloud computing reach today with the general availability of SmartCloud Application Services, which is the company’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. As the distinction between different types of services in the cloud continues to blur, IBM is making the case that PaaS will not only become a dominant form of cloud computing, but […]

Ever since the first Hadoop system found its way into the enterprise, IT organizations have been looking for ways to couple SQL to Big Data. While there are already a number of options available to do just that, Teradata is taking that need for integration to a whole other level. The company today unveiled the […]

With over 6.8 million users of the WebEx platform to its credit, the second largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform on the market after Salesforce.com actually belongs to Cisco. At the Cisco Collaboration Summit today Cisco is looking to not only gain recognition for its cloud computing efforts, it’s extending the reach of its collaboration offerings into […]

As more organizations focus on the critical importance of the data center, the costs of providing that security are coming under more scrutiny. The simple truth is that most data centers today are protected by a hodgepodge of products and technologies that don’t readily share information about attacks with each other and often require a […]

With the economy stuck in a slow grind, the latest survey from The Society of Information Management (SIM) is focused mostly on business productivity and cost reduction. That’s not necessarily coming at the expense of other goals, such as the alignment of business and IT, but it does indicate that tactical issues are getting a […]

IT Organizations Shift Focus Toward the Fundamentals Back in the heyday of enterprise IT, the focus was pretty much always on increasing the productivity of the people working in the company. When the great recession hit, however, the focus pretty much switched to cost cutting both inside and outside the IT organization. Now that the […]

The good news is that because of the emergence of centralized hubs such as Github, it’s never been easier to discover and download open source software. The bad news is there is not much in the way of actually governing that process, which creates all kinds of potential compliance headaches for the IT organization. To […]

One of the better things about the shift to cloud computing is that it creates an opportunity to address the sins of the past. One of those major transgressions has been the divide between proponents of mainframe and distributed computing models, which in their zeal to be right all too often came close to tearing […]

While Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is still primarily known for selling storage systems, the company recently expanded its product portfolio to include servers. Now HDS wants to combine those offerings with VMware vSphere to create a new converged infrastructure platform. The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) announced this week at the VMworld Europe 2012 conference […]