Dell Inc. names SHI Partner of the Year

If you happened to stop by the Hilton in Austin, Texas, yesterday, you'd have found over 350 of our employees from 26 offices throughout the U.S. and Canada all gathered in one place for this year's SHI Corp. Kickoff Sales Conference.

Our special guest was Michael Dell, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Dell Inc. (but you knew that). Michael presented us with the Dell Partner of the Year award, which recognizes us for securing over $100 million in revenue for Dell products and services over the past year.

In the same ceremony, we presented Michael with one of our Platinum Partner of the Year awards, which recognizes Dell Inc. as an SHI top-five partner, and second-largest hardware vendor.

Thai and Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., pose with their awards

All the details are in the press release we issued today.

So where does SHI rank in the who's who of New Jersey industry?

Not everything shows up in your email. Last week, we found something really big stuffed in our mail box: the hefty NJ Biz Book of Lists. If you need some exercise, you can put one in each hand and do some lifts. These things have some heft, because they're so comprehensive in terms of providing an abstract of New Jersey industry.

In case you haven't gotten your copy yet, here's how SHI measures up.

When it comes to the cloud, protection is the best prevention

This is obvious, but I'll say it anyway: When you're moving to the cloud, your first order of business should be to make sure it's secure, and also to make sure it will comply with your industry's compliance requirements.

That's one reason SHI chose Solutionary as one of our third-party partners. Solutionary's technology is one of the key components that helps us define our industrial-strength cloud with its virtual active guard appliance log gathering, firewall monitoring, intrusion detection, and vulnerability scaling.

OK, that's a lot of industry buzz-words to take in, so let's put it in plain English. We talked to Don Gray, Chief Security Strategist for Solutionary, who gave us the inside scoop on their prevention methods and compliance appliance.



How did you choose your security provider? Tell us in a comment.

E-Commerce Times features my comments in "10 Things to Remember When Reaching for the Cloud"

We love to hear that people are switching to the cloud, but we love it even more when we hear that they have put the proper preparation in place before doing so.

To get the most out of your cloud services provider, you need to look carefully at your company's legal, security, and business affairs prior to the move in order to confirm the perfect match.

I shared this important point with E-Commerce Times, and it asked to me elaborate with an easy-to-use checklist for its readers. I made it to help purchasers understand the issues that should be on their radar as they move to the cloud. Jump over to the article to see what I came up with.

What does ironclad cloud security mean?

SHI Cloud CLOUDVILLE Cartoon by Dave Blazek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blog.shicloud.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://blog.shicloud.com.

CRN takes a pass at my 2012 prediction: Prepare for PaaS

The cloud holds a lot for 2012. But when we say that, what do we really mean? What exactly is it that cloud providers and customers will be capitalizing on over the next year?

CRN asked me and nine other IT professionals to add our input to its "10 Cloud Predictions for 2012" slideshow. My prediction -- that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be the new cloud battleground in 2012 -- is in good company. The slideshow features predictions from companies such as Bluewolf, Kroll, Egnyte, Salesforce, Rackspace, and more.

Make sure to click through the full slideshow to see what else you should be looking for in 2012. Are you making any changes to your cloud services in 2012? Tell us in a comment.

Why 2012 will be the year that the cloud gets budgeted in IT

I attended a summit where I presented to 42 CIOs in the beginning of December. During the breakout session, I asked how many of them had budgeted for the cloud in 2011. Three CIOs raised their hand. Later in the session, I asked the same question, but about their budget for 2012. Twenty-five CIOs raised their hand.

The cloud has changed the way CIOs do their job, but 2012 promises to bring even more change. So, I've put together a list of eight things that every CIO should do as a part of his New Year's resolution to stay current in the IT industry in 2012.

1. Migrate to the cloud. As I mentioned above, more CIOs are realizing that the cloud is the next stop on the technology curve, and they're planning accordingly. CIOs should do their best to be on the front end of the technology adoption curve as innovators and visionaries, and I believe that in 2012 CIOs will want to ramp up that cloud-adoption curve to get it rolling towards mass adoption.