Mike Vizard

One of the more difficult challenges that many organizations still face when deploying customer relationship management (CRM) software is actually getting salespeople to use it. Salespeople are still naturally suspicious of anything that can be used to reduce the value of the relationships they build, and the fact that CRM software has gotten only more […]

While identity management in the cloud is still in its relative infancy, that doesn’t stop the service providers such as Okta from dreaming big. Okta CEO Todd McKinnon says he sees a day coming when identity management services essentially eliminate the need for on-premise deployments of Active Directory. Outside of large enterprise organizations it doesn’t […]

Much like nervous thoroughbred before the start of a race, server vendors are getting anxious following the announcement of the general availability today of Microsoft Windows Server 2012. After all, most IT organizations, when upgrading to a new operating system of that scale and magnitude, are going to opt to deploy it on a new […]

Too many IT organizations seem to think that cloud computing is simply about shifting the place where their applications are delivered versus reimagining how those applications are actually built and managed. As such, much of the discussion surrounding cloud computing tends to focus on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. In reality, however, IaaS doesn’t do all that […]

There is an emerging cadre of vendors in the storage space that are making the case that, as the number of virtual machines running on each physical server steadily increases, existing approaches to storage are not going to cut it from a performance perspective. One of those vendors is Astute Networks, which just launched a […]

In the wake of the VMworld 2012 conference this week, it may feel like the whole IT world is going virtual. But in reality, virtual and physical IT resources live side by side inside almost every data center. The real problem is that two distinct management frameworks for managing virtual and physical resources have evolved […]

Given the fact that EMC has the most at stake in the shift to Flash memory, the company’s future plans in this regard are of great interest to many people across the IT spectrum. At the VMworld 2012 conference this week, EMC announced EMC VFCache, caching software that sits on a server that EMC claims […]

One of the more compelling aspects of the VMware vision of the future of enterprise computing is this whole notion of there being a virtual data center. This week at the VMworld 2012 conference VMware extended that vision by not only releasing version 5.1 of a VMware vCloud Suite, which makes it easier to manage […]

As the next major battleground in the cloud, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings are generating more interest than actual current usage. But as IT organizations start to realize that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings simply transfer the location where IT needs to be managed to a third-party data center, many of them are starting to realize they need a […]

To say that most of the processes surrounding business intelligence are a little dysfunctional would be putting it mildly in most organizations. Not only are there multiple data sources that are often in conflict with each other, it’s not often clear who has responsibility for managing the BI process. Fact is, there’s usually an analyst […]

The fastest machines in the data center just got a whole lot faster. IBM today announced the zEC12, a mainframe based on 5.5 GHz processors built using the latest 22-nanometer technology. According to Doug Balog, general manager of System z, the zEC12 now has 101 configurable cores that are about 25 percent faster than processors […]

As Tropical Storm — soon to be hurricane — Isaac takes aim at the Gulf Coast, some IT professionals are starting to make the case that traditional backup and recovery are essentially obsolete. Case in point is Axcient, a provider of a data protection service that allows an IT organization to recover all the data […]