Mike Vizard

The Role of IT in the Cloud Era As field service organizations become an increasingly critical element of the customer experience, many organizations are looking to tightly integrate their field service applications with their customer relationship management (CRM) applications. To make that easier to accomplish, Salesforce today unfurled Field Service Lightning, a suite of field […]

While hybrid cloud computing across heterogeneous environments is largely still a dream for most IT organizations, the arrival of namesake software from Velostrata is promising to make it much simpler to move application workloads from VMware environments into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Velostrata CEO Issy Ben-Shaul says Velostrata enables the creation of a […]

7 Characteristics of a Data-Driven Organization One of the more frustrating aspects of analytics is the amount of time it takes to put data in a format that makes it useful. By some estimates, manually making data accessible to an analytics application can consume as much as 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Given the […]

Rethinking Application Performance in the Digital Business Era When it comes to IT, to some degree every silo adds latency to applications as well as additional costs. Within the context of hyperconverged platforms, Nutanix has made available Acropolis File Services (AFS), which eliminates the need for a separate system to manage files. Prabu Rambadran, director […]

Flash Storage Architecture: What’s Available and Why It Matters In a move that blurs the line between storage and server vendors, Pure Storage at a Pure Accelerate 2016 conference today unveiled FlashBlade, a hyperconverged platform that makes use of RAM and Flash memory to provide both compute horsepower and all the associated storage and network […]

Software-Defined Networking and the Enterprise One of the major challenges that IT organizations routinely face is figuring out which applications and services are dependent upon one another at any given time. Not having clear visibility into those dependencies affects everything from the way applications are tested to the way regulatory compliance gets enforced. To make […]

2016 Data Analytics Forecast: Top 5 Trends to Watch Tableau Software, a company most often associated with providing visualization of data stored in a database optimized for analytics, this week acquired HyPer, a provider of an in-memory database platform.  Patrice Pelland, senior director of engineering for Tableau Software, says the acquisition of HyPer comes at […]

2016 Software Trends: The Evolution of Enterprise Software When it comes to data centers, many of the providers of hosting services often have proprietary hooks that, for all intents and purposes, wind up locking IT organizations into a specific facility. To address that issue, Vapor IO has created a Vapor Open Data Center Runtime Environment […]

2016 Data Storage Trends: DevOps, Flash and Hybrid Cloud Now that the shift toward Flash memory of primary storage is well under way, the question at this juncture is not so much when to make the switch but rather how much Flash storage can an organization afford to reasonably deploy. Making it possible to stretch […]

5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud The rise of cloud computing has transformed not only the way IT is managed, but also the class of services that can be delivered around almost any given product. By way of example of that phenomenon, Xerox today announced that its multifunction printers (MFPs) can tap into […]

2016 Trends: Preparing the Network for Web-Scale Demands While it’s still early days, IT organizations are slowly adjusting to the fact that they can mix and match network operating systems and switches at will. The latest instance of that open networking capability came this week at the Open Compute Project 2016 Summit in the form […]

9 Tips for Creating Successful In-Store Mobile Experiences As part of an effort to bring video conferencing capabilities to any place where there is an automated teller machine (ATM), Vidyo this week announced that it will be working with NCR to embed video conferencing software within ATMs manufactured by NCR. Sam Waicberg, senior vice president […]