Michael Vizard

Looking to give solution providers a leg up in the mobile computing market that is expected to grow from $22 billion in 2012 to $36 billion by 2015, IBM today rolled out Mobile Foundation, a portfolio of IBM mobile computing technologies that are designed to simplify the management of mobile computing and applications in the […]

Over the years a huge percentage of the custom application development being done by corporations has been outsourced to the channel. Whether it’s modernizing COBOL applications using developers in India or creating mobile computing applications by relying on the expertise of independent application development houses, the channel in many ways dominates application development these days. […]

As part of an effort to accelerate adoption of a recently unveiled family of pre-integrated IBM PureSystems platforms that can be optimized to support different types of application workloads, IBM today announced it is making available a new tool that will allow solution providers and their customers to optimize the performance of custom application workloads […]

There’s a lot concern these days about the profitability of managed service providers (MSPs). Like any product once a service becomes a discrete item that customers can purchase it becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Most MSPs in the last few years have learned this lesson in the last few years the hard […]

Most solution providers are familiar with the role application delivery controllers (ADCs), also known as load balancers, play within the data center. As the ADC analyzes application traffic it flows that traffic to the appropriate server. As important a function as that is within the data center, the rise of cloud computing is starting to […]

The trouble with storage is that it’s difficult to manage, so very few organizations do it well. It’s kind of like the digital equivalent of cutting the hedges; many IT staffs don’t do it particularly well because they’re secretly hoping that somebody else will just show up and do it for them. Unfortunately, most small-to-medium […]

Most solution providers today still think in terms of classes of products. But it’s become increasingly clear that many of those products are starting to converge. Customers are obviously starting to think more holistically about IT. Instead of having isolated conversations about servers, storage and network, the arrival of next-generation systems such as the Cisco […]

There’s obviously a lot of interest in cloud storage these days, but actual usage of cloud storage has not been as popular as most solution providers in the channel might like. The reason for this is that most customers are not very disciplined about backup and recovery as a process, In addition, many customers can’t […]

There’s a tendency to think of the enterprise as one massive entity. In reality, an enterprise is much like the average city, which is usually made up a series of neighborhoods that share access to common services. Similarly, most enterprise IT organizations are an amalgamation of divisional systems that ideally should depend on a common […]

For many managed service providers (MSPs) the difference between winning and losing new business often comes down to whether they can convince customers that they can provide a higher level of service than the internal IT department. The challenge, of course, has been actually proving that on a regular basis. With the release of version […]

While just about every business executive is aware of the power of social networking these days most of them don’t realize how social networking principles are being used to transform not just the way people communicate with each other, but also the way every business process is conducted. Often referred to as "Social Business," the […]

One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations. That […]