Mike Vizard

5 Steps to Rationalize Your Application Portfolios The reality of enterprise IT is that most systems never really go away. Many IT organizations end up running applications on systems such as the IBM iSeries (formally known as the AS/400) for a decade or more. The challenge they face is that managing them within the context […]

Automating the Intelligence of Business Intelligence One of the primary reasons there is so much interest in the concept of a software-defined data center (SDDC) is that right now it takes months for the average IT organization to provision a cluster. To address the clustering issue, a number of vendors have created stacks of automated […]

With the rise of so-called citizen integrators in the enterprise, the popular conception is that most of these tools are never going to be handling complex business processes. The folks at Workato would beg to differ. The latest release of the company’s namesake cloud integration platform adds support for a range of new applications, including […]

4 Ways IT Can Better Align Itself to Fulfill Business Needs At the Cloud Foundry 2016 Summit conference this week, Mendix announced an alliance with IBM under which its application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) will become available on the IBM Bluemix cloud service. Mark Rogers, vice president of business development and ecosystems for Mendix, says Mendix saw […]

Salesforce this week extended the capabilities of its Service Cloud platform by making available a series of plug-in modules that organizations can use to add, among other things, a two-way video chat capability. The goal of the plug-in modules, dubbed Service Cloud Lightning Snap-Ins, is to provide connected, personalized service across any device, according to […]

5 Ways Retailers Can Best Leverage Data Analytics Machine learning algorithms may be all the rage these days in IT circles but for most business executives it remains an esoteric concept. To help make it real for those executives, Alpine Data this week released an update to its Chorus analytics software that adds collaboration and […]

Rethinking Application Performance in the Digital Business Era One of the inconvenient truths about the TCP/IP protocols on which most IT environments rely is that they’re not very secure. As a result, IT organizations spend a small fortune each year on products and services to compensate for that deficiency. However, there are industrial applications that […]

Increasing Enterprise Application Performance with Route Optimization For all the buzz surrounding the need for greater agility, networks remain stubbornly difficult to manage. While we’ve clearly seen advances in software-defined networking (SDNs), the vast majority of network administrators don’t have the programming skills needed to manage an SDN environment, even if they could figure out […]

5 Tips for Effectively Implementing a Desktop Virtualization Solution Many IT organizations have historically struggled with providing access to both commercial and custom applications under a single pane of glass. Achieving that goal typically required making investments in a broad range of backend services and client software that continues to be expensive to deploy and […]

Digital Integration: Overcoming Enterprise Data Challenges While interest in all forms of computing that promises to make IT infrastructure faster and more efficient has been running high, very little attention has been paid to the way instruction sets actually lay bits down on top of IT infrastructure. With the launch today of Symbolic IO that […]

Eliminate Technical Debt to Enable a Nimble IT Organization One of the major challenges associated with any Internet of Things (IoT) project is connectivity. There is no shortage of ways to connect an endpoint to the Internet. But various forms of connectivity are a lot more expensive than others. To make it simpler and less […]

2016 Cloud Security Trends: Confidence on the Rise When it comes to public clouds, IT security is always mentioned as a concern. That doesn’t mean that organizations won’t avail themselves of public clouds; it just means that their comfort level with IT security in the cloud is relatively low. To help increase comfort levels with […]