Michael Vizard

The history of computing can be defined by the movement of bottleneck around the data center. Every time a bottleneck appears a massive opportunity emerges for the channel. The next great bottleneck is going to be the networking layer in the cloud. A recent survey of 1,300 IT professionals conducted by Cisco finds that the […]

Any time a company such as Hewlett-Packard announces that it intends to lay off 27,000 employees, or 7.7 percent of its workforce, it’s going to be cause some consternation. There is a natural tendency to assume the sky is falling, and while it’s not an ideal situation by any means to put that in some […]

There are a lot of IT events that are seemingly unrelated that upon further examination wind up having a direct causal relationship. Such is the case between mobile computing and thin clients.One of the knocks against thin client all these years was the end users needed a device that was mobile, which led them to […]

There’s a lot of contention these days not so much over whether customers should embrace cloud computing as much as what’s the right path to get there. This debate has some significant implications of solution providers that are being asked to represent various cloud computing service providers, especially in the enterprise. One knock that cloud […]

Marketing has been the bane of the channel as long as anyone can remember. If a solution provider has any money available to invest in their business they generally opt to do one of two things: recruit another sales person or hired an additional engineer. Unfortunately, the one thing they don’t tend to invest in […]

VMware has set out to expand the definition of desktop virtualization with the acquisition of Wanova, a provider of what has been dubbed as intelligent desktop virtualization software. Wanova makes a desktop virtualization offering, called Mirage, that splits Windows into multiple virtual layers. Mirage allows IT organizations to continue to run applications and user data […]

While the hype surrounding IBM’s Watson project far exceeds any current reality, the implications of the next-generation analytics platform on the channel could be as far reaching as they are profound. IBM has already started a number of pilot projects in vertical sectors such as healthcare that will ultimately transform how those businesses are managed. […]

Now that EMC has announced that it’s going to rely even more on the channel to push products and services for the cloud, a lot of solution providers are going to have to ask themselves what exactly is the best business model when it comes to storage in the cloud. At the EMC World 2012 […]

One of the issues that solution providers have with investing in the cloud is all the money needed upfront to create a cloud computing service. The amount of capital required effectively puts building cloud computing platforms out of reach for many solution providers, which results in them reselling services built by somebody else. The trouble […]

Most customers are not particularly enthralled with the software they rely on every day to drive their business. For the most part, they have been making the best of a bad situation. The application they rely on was designed to serve the needs of a broad swath of potential customers, which is to say it […]

It used to be that the small-to-medium (SMB) market was a place the channel sold products and technologies that had matured to a point where they could be safely deployed by organizations that didn’t have much IT expertise. But in recent years it’s becoming clear that there are different classes of SMB organizations and that […]

It seems like everywhere anyone turns these days IT is getting more complex to manage. The question that begs then is whether there will soon be some sort of backlash against IT products that are overly complex. And if so, is this a trend that solution providers could capitalize on. Certainly part of the interest […]