Charles King

A singular challenge during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a tendency to focus on current problems while letting longer term issues take care of themselves. That point is entirely understandable; it’s clearly wise to focus on doing all you can today to stay healthy and alive, but doing so risks missing or slighting […]

In the normal course of tech industry happenings, spring is the season of Tier 1 vendor conferences for customers and partners. By this time last year, I had attended CES, IBM Think and PartnerWorld, and Dell Tech World, and was preparing to fly to Orlando, Fla., for Lenovo Accelerate. This year the COVID-19 pandemic has […]

Most of the time, the enterprise server market moves at glacial speed with changes occurring so incrementally that they are barely visible to the naked eye. But occasionally a technological advancement or a market rebalancing sparks a massive shift that causes people to rethink long-held assumptions. This dynamic is especially apparent in x86-based systems, where […]

The connections between IT vendors and their channel partners, including value-added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), systems integrators (SIs) and managed service providers (MSPs), aren’t always clear to outsiders. In one sense, these are purely business relationships determined and defined by contractual and service agreements. But closer examination reveals critical links where success depends […]

Earth Day 2020 arrives at a strangely terrible and terribly strange juncture of events. With COVID-19 shuttering businesses and stunning large swathes of global economies, the internet, service providers and cloud computing platforms are playing key roles in everything from streaming entertainment to social networking to educational programming to enabling thousands of companies’ work from […]

There has never been a time when the values of IBM’s Z mainframe solutions were clearer. As millions of organizations and billions of workers worldwide grapple with often unimaginable uncertainties, the remarkable resiliency, continuity, data privacy and security capabilities that define mainframe computing help ensure that companies can and will remain open for business. Those […]

It’s easy to define successful business leaders by one or two characteristics—resolution, imagination, compassion—and by the successes or failures for which they are best remembered. However, it’s futile to consider these points without keeping broader context in mind. After all, companies and their leaderships don’t operate in a vacuum. Like individuals and families, they are […]

It doesn’t take long for the world to be turned upside down. Three months ago, despite dire reports of a new coronavirus and growing epidemic in China’s city of Wuhan, work and leisure elsewhere were preceding pretty much as normal, especially in the tech industry. The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) attracted over 175,000 attendees […]

Edge of network computing has been a topic of growing interest, mainly due to the emergence of promising internet of things (IoT) solutions and next-gen 5G mobile technologies. But it would be a mistake to consider computing at the edge to be entirely new or only about IoT.  For decades, enterprises of all kinds have […]

While events of the past month have been surreal by nearly any measure, the appearance of the novel coronavirus and resulting COVID-19 pandemic are not unprecedented. By historical standards, the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic wasn’t all that long ago and resulted from the same H1N1 virus that sparked the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Not surprisingly, […]