Michel Labelle

Here’s some notes from today’s Cisco, VMware and NetApps joint presentation on virtualization and cloud computing. Killing the silos It is critical that as IT managers that we understanding that silos in our organization can be both good or bad. When looking at the typical IT environment, we can easily recognize that many of our [...]

At a decidedly lackluster hockey game last night, I had the pleasure of talking to my favorite telecommunications engineers.  I won’t mention his name or his organization since it wasn’t an official interview, but I want to pass on some of his ideas that struck home with me on how the wireless industry will change in [...]

Andrew McAfee over at Harvard Business Review discusses an interesting point on how the IT industry is unlike any previous industry.  The core point being that the IT industry is the only industry where prices have continuously declined over time.   The graphs he presents are pretty revealing. There is a subtle point about halfway [...]

Another of those great resources that I need to dig into every once in a while. The Federal government has a fantastic Public Safety website with a lot of resources that come in handy when you are trying to build a business case for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. The first thing I recommend is [...]

As important as blogging has become over time, in most cases it is little more than quickly informed opinions or content rehash. One of the technology enablers however that is slowly changing this is situational blogging. In some ways, Twitter is the epitome of this. Twitter was originally designed around the concept of SMS messaging. [...]

Every once in a while a staff member will ask me one of those questions where at one point in my life I might have remembered the answer, but for some reason today I just can’t. Sure I could do a few Google queries and give them an answer, but sometimes being a good coach [...]

Brian Madden posed an interesting question on his blog. Five years from now, will a 200-person company need any servers on site?

This is an interesting debate, but I would like to look one step further. In a world where we can literally have everything in the cloud, do we really need to keep investing in our basic IT infrastructure? Is IT still a competitive differentiator?

One of the hardest things to take on for most IT departments is the continued consumerization of the core infrastructure technology we consume.  Gone are the days when devices were primarily built for the corporate entity.  Manufactures realized early that gaming PCs were replaced sooner than CAD PCs and ultimately there was  a bigger market. [...]

In a surprise announcement this morning on their Red board, Rogers has officially allowed cell phone tethering on their Blackberry and IPhone data plans.

While there are a number restrictions on which data plans this will be allowed on, the fundamental message is Rogers is slowly loosening its hold on what users can and can’t do.