Dave Sobel

I get it. I’ve been struggling to understand where Microsoft BPOS fits in my cloud strategy, and I finally get it. Last time I wrote, I concentrated on the perils of the transition to the cloud. With multiple players and changes in our managed services strategies, I’ve given a lot of thought to how cloud […]

I’m thinking a lot about something I don’t have good answers to yet. I like to sit down and write something insightful, some meaningful thought that you can take forth. Today, I’m pondering questions that don’t have simple answers. As 2010 has gotten underway, the question of building business in a cloud world has taken […]

Paul Mah wrote a blog called “The State of Virtualization in SMBs," which is something of a response to some interviews I did recently. (What a cyclical world blogs have made this!) Paul also wrote a piece about Virtualization, “Not Worth it for Most SMBs.” I’m not entirely sure what the thesis of Paul’s piece […]

I’m on the road again.  This week I’m in the United Kingdom, and from here to Las Vegas. Being on the road reminds you about the fragile nature of connectivity. I hit the ground in London, and fired up my netbook and my USB dongle for connectivity in the UK, and caught up on my […]

I detest New Year’s resolutions. I love goals. I also love lists, as the numerous pads of paper I carry around are clear evidence of. But I don’t care for the idea of setting resolutions just because of the change of the year. I prefer goal setting and planning, and I break that down by […]

CES is unlike any of the other trade shows I attend during the year. Unlike the many channel and tech conferences I attend each year, this event is much more like “time warp shopping”; it’s a giant mall of things you might buy in the future. Vendors are here looking for distributors for their products, […]

I just spent the last three days snowed in. My firm, Evolve Technologies, is based just across the Potomac River from the National Mall in Washington DC, and for those who missed it we just endured what local bloggers called the “Snowpocalypse.” A weekend of continuous snow left the District and much of the Mid […]

I just completed another hardware spec. Like every hardware spec I’ve done in the past six years, I spent a while tweaking CPU, memory and disk. I could spend an entire day playing with the various RAID configurations for performance versus cost. If I add lots of spindles to a system, I increase performance, but […]

Virtual desktops and applications are increasingly interesting to me.     Today I decided to move my company, Evolve, from Quickbooks 2007 to Quickbooks 2010. I’ve never been a huge Quickbooks fan, but QB 2010 has some dashboard features that actually make a big difference in the way I use the program, and put the information I […]

It’s not often that Channel Insider’s Larry Walsh and I get to go at it face to face, and even rarer that we engage in lively debate within a structured meeting rather than the hallway, over dinner or at a reception.  But recently we did. We both were down at the HTG meetings, and he […]

Gartner released some great information about their predictions on server virtualization. Although server virtualization is not currently as widespread as many presume, the market is growing rapidly, according to Gartner, Inc. Only 16 percent of workloads are running in virtual machines today, but Gartner predicts that this will rise to around 50 percent of x86 […]

It’s been an interesting time for services. Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile lost some of their user’s data recently when an outage turned into a data loss. Users who hadn’t backed up their Sidekick data were out of luck. Many users assumed that because it was a cloud service, it didn’t need a backup. I think this event highlights […]