Mike Vizard

In the not-too-distant future, instead of looking for information, social analytics tools are going to bring all the information right to you. That’s not only a powerful idea that will transform the way information is discovered, correlated and consumed, but it ultimately punches holes in the various walled gardens that currently dot the social networking […]

Much has been made over the years about the importance of managing IT as a service. In reality, however, what really matters is the experience the internal or external customer has with IT. You can manage IT as a service all you want, but if all those services still wind up providing the customer with […]

With the release of Windows 8 getting closer to being imminent, interest in building applications for the next big Windows platform — especially mobile ones — is starting to build. Microsoft this week formally released the Visual Studio 2012 development environment, which Telerik today followed up with by making available the release candidate for Telerik […]

There’s a school of thought out there that suggests that with the advent of Big Data, existing storage systems are getting the math wrong. This doesn’t refer just to the cost of that storage, but also the actual algorithms used to store all that data. The basic theory says that standard RAID lacks the scalability […]

Now that most IT organizations appear to have virtualized more than half their server environments, the question that naturally starts to arise is how best go about managing an IT environment that contains a mix of virtual and physical servers. More than a few companies, including VMware, have made the case for specialized management tools […]

In the wake of a set of horrific attacks that took place 11 years ago today, the twin subjects of business continuity and disaster recovery became forever embedded into the IT consciousness. Arguably, it was those attacks that made research and development in these areas such an imperative. That research in turn helped lead to […]

One of the reasons that the divide between developers and IT operations team — otherwise known as the “DevOps crisis” — has been allowed to spin so far out of control is that nobody is really in charge of anything called DevOps. In fact, you can hardly find anybody with any kind of title that […]

It’s been a few decades since the introduction of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the enterprise and salespeople are still complaining about it. There’s always tension between salespeople and upper management over whom actually owns the relationship with the customer, so organizations naturally have a difficult time getting salespeople to enter relevant data about […]

As a subset of business intelligence, applications that specifically address enterprise performance management (EPM) tend to suffer from the same adoption issues. For many business users, the familiarity of spreadsheets continues to trump all other applications, regardless of how much more visibility into any given process those applications may provide. But with the rise of […]

It’s no secret that Hewlett-Packard has a close technology partnership with Microsoft, which the two companies this week extended for another three years. What is changing is the focus of that partnership. The two companies plan to work closely together to make deploying private clouds based on Windows Server 2012 a lot easier. According to […]

There has never been much love between chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their CIO counterparts. CMOs often tend to think IT organizations are generally too slow to meet their needs, while CIOs tend to resent when CMOs go around them, as well as when they violate any number of data governance and compliance policies. This […]

As the I/O performance gap between processors on the server and storage systems continues to widen, providers of storage systems have been embracing cache memory as the efficient way to narrow the divide. The problem is that most of those offerings are not as tightly integrated with the overall storage environment as should be. To […]