Michael Vizard

Most IT organizations are not particularly good at managing data or, for that matter, IT in general. Not only is there a lot of redundant data strewn all across the enterprise; a lot of data that isn’t particularly important winds up clogging up expensive primary storage systems. Obviously, this creates an opportunity for solution providers […]

Joint ventures are tricky by definition. While they tend to start off with much promise over time they almost always wither and die. The reasons for this are varied. Usually, it comes down to conflicting internal agendas. But sometimes unforeseen external forces also wind up making the joint venture untenable. Such is the case with […]

On the plus side IBM is convinced that the combination of Big Data and analytics application software is laying the foundation for a major economic expansion. On the downside, prospective customers are a little short on analytics expertise and most IT organizations are still not familiar with Big Data technologies such as Hadoop. IBM is […]

Most solution providers by now have taken note of the fact that there are lots of changes taking place these days in the data center. Not only are whole data centers being consolidated, the job functions are evolving thanks to tighter integration across the server, storage and networking components that make up the data center. […]

Unified communications has always been a space that offered a lot of promise to the channel. But given all the complexities and components involved in actually creating a solution, customers have been moving to embrace unified communications at a modest pace. Hewlett-Packard wants to change the pace of adoption of unified communications with a new […]

Based on its recent acquisitions in the software and security space it’s pretty clear that Dell is gaining a much greater appreciation for the value of recurring revenue. While Dell’s acquisition of SonicWall adds firewall and security gateway platforms to the portfolio of products that Dell has assembled to gain more sway in the data […]

One of the bad things about virtual machine software from the perspective of the channel is that it allowed customers to reduce the number of x86 servers they needed. While the overall number of x86 servers being sold continued to rise, higher utilization rates constrained the number of servers being sold because customers are getting […]

Managing IT has become more complex than ever. In the interest of giving customers access to a more flexible IT environment, managed service providers of all sizes have embraced technologies such as virtualization. But the challenge this creates is that there is a direct correlation between providing increased flexibility and the cost of the complexity required to […]

There are a lot of specializations in the land of IT. Some of them are a little more artificial than others, but to one degree or another they help solution providers differentiate various services. But as IT becomes increasingly complex, it’s clear that additional tiers of computing are bringing new performance pressures to bear on just […]

The good news is that as the newly-appointed CEO of Hewlett-Packard Meg Whitman’s decision to combine the PC and printer divisions shows a willingness to take on some of the company’s more intractable challenges. The bad news is that while this decision makes an imminent amount of sense from the perspective of HP, it may […]

The hardest thing about selling IT these days is that the money that is actually available to fund anything new is usually somewhere between five to 30 percent of their IT budget. Obviously, the size of the IT budget varies from company to company, so five percent of a large IT budget, for example, can […]

The hardest thing about selling IT products and services these days is that the percentage of the customer’s actual budget that is available to fund anything new is usually somewhere between five to 30 percent. The size of the IT budget obviously varies from company to company. But the reality is that the preponderance of the […]