Michael Vizard

IBM has been making a lot of marketing noise lately about making the planet smarter, ranging from complex undertakings such as making the electric grid more efficient to just trying to synchronize traffic lights so cars burn less gas. As noble as all those goals are, however, IBM has been pursuing this ambitious set of […]

There’s nothing quite like a recession to change behaviors. Not too long ago most of the sales people working for vendors had little or no time for their counterparts at solution providers. Flash forward to today, and sales people that work for vendors are tripping over themselves to get next to sales people that work […]

When you’re a solution provider, you can either spend your time trying to persuade people to do something or you can spend your time making money by helping do things they already want to do. With that in mind, solution providers might want to take note of a Ziff Davis Enterprise survey of senior IT […]

Justified or not, there are more than a few people in this industry that think the channel engages in shady business practices on a regular basis. Adding some real fire to a concern that has usually been made up of more smoke is an allegation of misdeeds involving government contracts that has ensnared Accenture, EMC and NetApp. […]

When it comes to managed services, it’s the worst of times and the best of times. The worst of times has to do with the state of the economy, but the best of times has everything to do with a fundamental shift in how customers want to pay for IT. Up until recent, customers had […]

When it comes to software as a service, there’s a lot of understandable fear and loathing in the channel. After all, all too often it appears that the only way to make money reselling a SAAS offering is to act as an agent on behalf of the vendor that builds and maintains the application. Unfortunately, […]

One of the problems with setting up any kind of security practice these days is that it’s hard to really differentiate yourself. After all, just about anybody can claim to be a security expert these days, even if they don’t have anybody on staff that is actually certified by any recognized industry body. And even […]

There seems to be an increasing amount of nuance being applied to term "green IT" these days that appears to have more to do with the amount of green in the IT budget rather than how green IT is in terms of the environment. When you think about it, we have now gone through three […]

When you look at how things are shaping up in enterprise IT, the No. 1 priority is to improve business processes followed closely by reducing the cost of the IT budget. The issue that most IT organizations have, however, is that they are overly wedded to antiquated technologies and not close enough to the business […]

There’s been a lot of chatter about the potential impact that the new Obama administration might have on government-funded IT projects. There’s no doubt that as the government moves forward on an impressive array of economic stimulus projects, large numbers of IT projects are sure to follow. For solution providers looking to the government to […]

Every time there is a downturn one of the areas that suffers most is enterprise network equipment. This is because customers typically feel they can stretch the lifecycle of their network infrastructure pretty far, with some customers going as much as five years between upgrade cycles. But not all downturns are the same and, as […]

A recent survey conducted by the AFCOM, which is billed as the largest independent association for the data center industry, found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents said they expected their budgets for 2009 to stay the same or increase, while the remaining one-third of those surveyed said they expect to see their budgets cut […]