Mike Vizard

5 Tips to Successfully Plan for IT Modernization In theory at least, one of the best times to sell anyone anything is during a service call. The challenge comes in first training service personnel on what to sell, and then giving them the means to do it. With that issue in mind, Salesforce this week […]

One of the major issues that IT organizations have always struggled with is to what degree they should try to impose any given workflow on their end users. There are clearly patterns to how work gets processed. But each end user tends to approach each one of those processes in a slightly different way. Aiming […]

How Developers Balance Speed and Quality The biggest challenge with implementing DevOps is the assumption that somebody is available with programming skills to automate the management of IT infrastructure. If an IT organization has anybody who can program, they are usually devoted to writing application code rather than managing IT infrastructure. Developers, of course, could […]

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), there’s a lot of hubris involved on the part of IT vendors. Just about every one of them is assuming that AI is a service that organizations will employ in one way or another to better impact their customers. To that end, most of them, to a degree, […]

At the VMworld 2016 conference this week, it became more apparent just how comprehensively VMware has changed its approach to desktop computing. Rather than focusing solely on desktop virtualization, VMware is now pursuing a more holistic approach that spans everything from providing mechanisms for managing the authentication of endpoints to full-blown workspaces through which end […]

25 Cool Gadget Gift Ideas for Executives and Tech-Lovers Most of the tower PCs that sit under a desktop are made up of more air than components. With that realization in mind, HP Inc. set out to shrink the size of the traditional tower PC to something that actually fits on a desktop. The fruit […]

Building High-Growth IT: 5 Things to Know Now One of the best things about document databases is that they enable individual developers to build applications that require a database with little to no intervention from the internal IT department. That also turns out to be one of the worst things about document databases. As the […]

5 Ways Retailers Can Best Leverage Data Analytics Building an analytics application is one thing. Designing it in such a way that business people want to regularly use it is often another matter altogether. Salesforce today moved to address that issue by delivering implementations of the Salesforce Wave Analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for specific vertical […]

5 Ways Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Lowers CapEx and OpEx In another sign that a major shift toward microservices architecture based on containers is now under way, Cisco this week announced it is acquiring ContainerX. With this acquisition, Cisco gains access to a management framework designed from the ground up to support containers running on […]

How Developers Balance Speed and Quality As part of a concerted effort to couple its data warehouse more tightly with the SAP HANA in-memory database, SAP today unveiled an implementation of that data warehouse that only runs on HANA. In the past, SAP has supported its data warehouse running on top of multiple databases. But […]

5 Essential Elements in Building an Agile Data Center There’s clearly a tremendous amount of interest in unifying the management of IT infrastructure. Trying to adroitly respond to changing business and application requirements when compute, storage and networking are managed in isolation is all but impossible. Any number of converged and hyperconverged systems promise to […]

Flash Storage Architecture: What’s Available and Why It Matters Thanks to the advent of faster NVMe host controller interfaces, the way IT systems are fundamentally designed is likely to change in the months and years ahead. One of the first examples of this shift came this week at the VMworld 2016 conference in the form […]