Michael Vizard

In a world where most of the bread and butter IT products that the majority of solution providers in the channel sell have become a commodity, it’s clear that in order to compete against mass market retailers and online e-commerce sites there needs to be a reason to engage a solution provider that goes beyond […]

Just about every merger winds up having some unexpected consequences and the acquisition of McAfee by Intel is no exception. In this case the unintended consequence is a decision by McAfee to exit the USB security device market. The business is now being transferred back to Imation, which developed the technology that McAfee licensed. According […]

When it comes to emerging technologies it usually the path of least resistance that winds up gaining favor with most IT customers. Right now there’s a massive amount of interest in anything to do with cloud storage. But beyond using the cloud for anything more complex than backing up files and archiving data, the promise […]

Anything having to do with the Domain Name System (DNS) these days is getting a whole lot more attention. Not only are DNS servers a fundamental piece of core Internet infrastructure that connects users to Web applications, they have also become one of the favorite targets of cybercriminals. Whether it’s in the form of a […]

Storage is one of the hottest contested areas in the cloud so it should come as little or no surprise that the vendors competing in this space are looking to increase their size of their arsenals. Case in point is Nirvanix, which this week announced it has picked up an additional $25 million in funding. […]

One the one hand it may be assumed that when it comes to selling backup storage systems to an Oracle database shop solution providers should go in search of the storage specialist that manages that environment. But because of the nuances of the way Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) software works it turns out that the […]

As organizations move to align the sales process with the management of whole customer experience strategy the way vendors need to manage sales teams both inside and outside the company is rapidly evolving. Instead of making gut decisions based on spreadsheet data that may be prone to errors, there is a class of new sales […]

Whether it involves IBM, Cisco or Hewlett-Packard a common theme has emerged in recent months as it relates to IT spending. Customers will invest more in IT if only IT wasn’t so difficult to manage. Studies show that customers on average spend 70 percent of their budget on maintaining the systems they have. Logic dictates […]

Most companies at this point find themselves managing a mix of Windows systems given the fact that the migration to Windows 7 from Windows XP is taking place gradually. Many of those same companies are now also evaluating the forthcoming release of Windows 8, which means at some point in the next year or so […]

Success for solution provider is all about driving change. Unless customers have some motivation to develop a new business capability or enhance an existing one, they really have no reason to invest in new IT systems. Unfortunately, while most solution providers have a wealth of technology skills, they usually don’t have much insight into a […]

IT history can arguably be defined by the movements of bottlenecks. Every time there is an advance in one area it tends to create a bottleneck somewhere else that needs to be addressed by new technologies. There’s no better example of that today than virtualization. As IT organization get more comfortable with virtualization they are […]

On one level solution providers that sell end point security software are going to be upset. Check Point Software Technologies has announced an upgrade to its it free ZoneAlarm security software that not only now includes a firewall, but also performs as well as most commercial software offerings. In tests performed by performed by AVtest.org, […]