Michael Vizard

By now solution providers have noticed that adoption of Google Apps in business environments has become quite substantial. While that might not thrill many folks in the channel given the margins involved in selling Google Apps compared to Microsoft Office, the fact remains that applications of all types are moving into the cloud. But accessing […]

Historically providing IT services has always been a business where the cost of labor was fairly high. But as IT continues to evolve it’s apparent that as the devices become more instrumented the easier it’s becoming to automate the IT services process. The latest case in point is Nexsan, a provider of storage systems that […]

There’s a lot of money to be made in providing IT services provided your organization has the wherewithal to invest in hiring the people that have the skills required to deliver them. For that reason many solution providers have opted to simply resell services provided by vendors, even though that tends to detract from the […]

Big Data is one of those mega IT trends that winds up being a gift to the channel that keeps on giving. Beyond the obvious impact of the Big Data on demand for additional storage capacity and the rise of new technologies to implement such as the Hadoop data management platform, one of the more […]

With the rise of virtualization it’s becoming clear that more companies than ever are struggling with backup and recovery and by extension disaster recovery. There are several key issues that IT organizations are struggling to manage, including fundamentals such as the fact that ther amount of processor capacity available to the backup and recovery application […]

Solution providers today often find themselves caught between two diametrically opposed forces. It’s clear to them that many employees at the organization they service would like access to the latest and greatest PC technologies. But the internal IT department is constrained by both budget and ability to actually manage the environment. Almost invariably, end users […]

Just about everybody in the channel would agree that unified communications have been a frustrating experience. While the technology holds great promise, the effort required to get customers to first test and then actually deploy it can be nothing short of herculean. But all that may be about to finally change for the better now […]

The new CEO of Hewlett-Packard says the future of Hewlett-Packard will be shaped by a consumerization of IT phenomenon that simultaneously plays to the company’s strengths both the enterprise and consumer technology markets. Speaking at a Global Influencers Summit 2012 conference in Shanghai today, HP CEO Meg Whitman says the company is doubling down on […]

Software-defined networking (SDN) may be one of the hottest new buzz words floating around the channel in the wake of the Interop 2012 conference this week. But while most of the SDN conversation is focused on reducing the cost of managing enterprise networks by managing them at a much higher level of abstraction, the implications […]

One assumption that is often made about desktop virtualization is that whatever is on the back end of the solution is going to be from the same vendor on the front end. But it turns out that right now the most popular desktop virtualization combination is Citrix on the client and VMware on the server. […]

Given that large swaths of the channel are dependent on PC sales the current state of the PC industry is of more than passing concern for most solution providers. With the rising popularity of the systems from Apple such as the Apple iPad and the MacBook Air more than a few solution providers are concerned […]

Historically solution providers in the channel tended to align themselves with one major computing platform or another. Given the complexities of setting up any particular server platform, that approach made a lot of technical and economic sense even if it did tie the interests of a solution provider to a particular vendor. But in the […]