Michael Cocanower
President, itSynergy |
Welcome
What a month it has been. I now know more
about collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)
and credit default swaps (CDS) then I ever
cared to. Additionally, you and I as US
Taxpayers either already or will very soon
hold equity stakes in some of our largest
financial institutions. It has certainly
been a roller coaster ride, and with the
media’s never ending appetite to deliver us
doom and gloom about the economy both in the
US and abroad, one could easily start to
think the sky is falling.
I for one, however, choose to take an
alternate viewpoint. In my opinion, now is
the time to be aggressive and invest in your
business. |
It is my opinion that those companies which make
key strategic investments now will be leaps and
bounds ahead of competitors as we emerge from the
downturn. To be clear, there are certainly some
specific industries which have been very hard hit –
we have a number of customers involved in one way or
another with real estate in Arizona, and times have
been tough for those organizations. That being said,
economic conditions like we have today should be a
catalyst to cut inefficiencies and investments in
areas that (with the benefit of hindsight) we
probably shouldn’t have explored to begin with.
There are still plenty of opportunities to invest
strategically for the future, not to mention
reallocate some of our previous spending in
different areas in order to be more efficient with
technology expenditures.
We were recently engaged by the local arm of a
large national homebuilding company to assist with
streamlining some of their internal processes, and
help get their various systems talking to each
other. Additionally, another local homebuilder
recently engaged us as a replacement for an in-house
IT administrator that was leaving for another field.
Needless to say, both companies are in a market that
has been badly battered in the current economic
environment. I chose these two companies as examples
because I believe each illustrates an important
trend:
| 1. The first (the national homebuilding company)
demonstrates the commitment of an extremely
visionary leader who refuses to sit on the sidelines
and sulk during tough times. Instead, he sees this
as an opportunity to become better integrated
between systems and departments, and position his
organization to emerge at the front of the pack. He
knows that slow times are the best times to
implement new systems and change because team
members can really focus on process improvement.
During the busy times, everyone has other priorities
and these types of projects are much more difficult
to complete. 2. The second organization demonstrates an
effective strategy for retasking existing IT dollars
to more systematized and automated processes that
can cut the costs of ongoing maintenance or the
’care and feeding’ that every technology system
requires. This is a popular activity for us these
days because of the speed and efficiency we have
been able to drive into rote IT management tasks
such as backup, antivirus, spam filtering, patch
management, hard drive cleanup, etc. Whereas
companies used to hire a full time employee to
handle these tasks, we can now take care of all of
those items using the efficiencies of scale we have
built and do it all for a fixed, predictable monthly
fee. We have done so much of that recently, in fact,
that we published a new case study that talks about
the impact we had with a local manufacturing
company. You can read more here.
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The bottom line as I see it is that each of us
has to make a choice. We can sit on the sidelines
biting our nails and worrying about what’s next and
how bad it will get. Alternately, we can be
aggressive, replace inefficient processes and
unpredictable costs with efficiency and a fixed
budget, and seize the opportunity to drive
organizational change while employees are able to
give that change the attention it deserves.
For those that choose to invest now in order to
reap significant rewards in the future, a great
place to start would be attending our upcoming lunch
and learn webcast on Windows Sharepoint Services.
The webcast will be held on November 6, 2008 from 12
to 1pm. We will be sending out an ’official’
invitation in the next few days, but if you want to
make sure one of the limited number of seats has
your name on it, you can pre-register
here.
Hope to ’see’ you there.
Have a great month! |
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Riding the Economic Rollercoaster
reprinted with permission from HP
 Stephen
Minton, vice president, Worldwide IT Markets and Strategies, IDC, offers
insight on how outsourcing can help you ride out the economic
downturn—and maybe even gain a leg up on the competition along the way.
Rising gasoline prices.
Falling consumer confidence. Subprime mortgages. Inflation. Budget cuts.
Currency fluctuations. Floods, droughts and crop shortages. Each day’s
news seems to add to the torrent of challenges heading our way. No
business is immune—but outsourcing can offer a way to leverage
technology to help stem the negative tide.
Here, IDC’s Stephen Minton
shares his expert views and experience on the subject—and puts some
useful perspective around when it does and does not make sense to
consider outsourcing in today’s volatile economic climate.
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The Elephant Named Sharepoint
  any
of us have heard the fable about the blind men and the elephant. When the men
were asked to describe what an elephant looked like the descriptions ranged from
a snake to a tree to a fan depending on whether the blind man had touched the
trunk, the leg or the ear. What does an ancient fable like this have to do with
technology? It’s the same problem we have when we try to explain to you how
useful a tool Microsoft SharePoint can be to your business. SharePoint is so
flexible and has so many uses; we often have trouble describing it in a way you
can get the whole picture.
So, here goes our description of
SharePoint. It’s:
• A shared company calendar that everyone can access
• An electronic bulletin board where you post notices for the whole company
• Your own company library for forms and policies
• A photo album for your digital images
• An electronic water cooler for company discussions
• A lock box for sensitive company information
• A shared web page of your company’s most used links
• A piece of useful technology for the distinctly untechnical
• And much, much more
 The
good news is that many of you have SharePoint available for use today if you are
using Microsoft Server 2003 or Small Business Server. All that you may need is
our help in getting started. We’re ready with a special startup package with
special pricing. Contact us today to find out how you can tame an elephant ---
one piece at a time. |
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System Engineering Corner
Notes
from the Network Engineering Department:
Note to readers: As our network engineers
work with all of you across our entire customer
base, they observe trends and issues that many
people have in common, or that many customers will
find helpful to know about.
This section is designed
to give them a mechanism to communicate those issues
to you, with the hope that YOU might benefit from.
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Stretch Marks and Liver Spots
By Mark D. MacLachlan, Infrastructure Team Manager
This month’s topic might remind you of your next milestone birthday, but our
focus is going to be on server hard drives. SBS 2003 is now five years old and
that means there are a lot of 5+ year old servers out there still in service.
FAT DRIVES (no we don’t mean File Allocation Table)
Over the past year we have battled hard drives that are pushed to their
maximum. Files from service packs and hot fixes, antivirus updates, spam
filtering, you name it are filling up hard drives faster than we can delete what
is no longer needed. Drives are getting so full we expect to see stretch marks
on them. As disk space becomes less available, servers start to misbehave. Older
drives tend to be smaller capacity drives. These drives fill up quickly and when
they reach capacity servers often crash. We recommend periodic cleanups of
drives, for drives already near capacity more frequent attention may be needed.
OLD AGE
Your server’s hard disk is no different from you or me. It works all day
every day and as time goes on it gets more and more tired. Robert Vasquez,
Systems Engineer at itSynergy has a saying he likes to use. "There are only two
kinds of hard drives, those that have failed and those that will eventually
fail." This is exactly the case. The majority of servers out in production
environments have a type of hard disk referred to as “SCSI”. These drives are
robust drives that take a lot of punishment from constant reading and writing of
data. The type of drive typically used in desktop computers for the past several
years (referred to as “IDE”) would long have failed under the same usage. SCSI
drives start to fail after about 5 years of service. SCSI drives and IDE drives
are seeing less popularity these days as new drive types referred to as “SAS”
and “SATA” are taking their place. These newer technologies are available in
much larger capacity drives for a fraction of the cost of the older technology
drives. As these drives are much newer to the market, there isn’t a lot of data
to suggest lifetime expectancy for drives. Considering that a 500GB drive can
cost as little as $70, I recommend planned replacement after 2 years. The cost
of replacement is a very small investment compared to the cost of down time
should your drives fail.
FULL, FAT AND SLEEPY
Small Business Server (SBS) owners at this point are probably thinking about
just how old their server is and are recognizing that their server really seems
more sluggish than normal. You may notice that there is far too little disk
space to accomplish business goals like moving to a paperless office. Maybe you
are even feeling the crunch of expansion in headcount and are close to going
beyond the 75 user limit of SBS.
You may not be aware that both Windows Small Business Server 2008 and its
medium IT counterpart Microsoft Windows Essential Business Server 2008 are just
around the corner with a planned release date of November 12, 2008. Now is the
time to upgrade to a new server running the latest Microsoft operating system.
Best of all, server hardware is priced to sell with amazing deals to be had. |
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September 2008
In this issue
□ Welcome
□ Economic Rollercoaster
□ Elephant Named Sharepoint
□ Engineering Corner
□ Referral
Program
□ Avoid a Data Disaster
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itSynergy Referral Program
 Can we
buy you dinner and send you to the movies? How about
make a donation to your favorite charity in your name?
Earn rewards for referring new customers to itSynergy.
For more details, please
visit here.
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Avoid a Data Disaster on the Road: 5
Tips
by Christopher Elliott
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center
Reliable
information can make or break your next trip, whether it’s the ability
to cultivate a business contact, ensure accurate company records or keep
you safe.
In other words, your PC
data is priceless. You just can’t afford to be without it. Consider:
Travelers are relying on
accurate information to ensure their security, according to a survey by
American Express. In an age when terrorism is a persistent threat to air
travel, who can blame them?
Most companies have strict
policies regarding the use of a corporate travel agent and company
charge card, according to a Runzheimer International poll. In other
words, meticulous record-keeping is now more essential than ever.
Some 25% of all business
travelers miss having access to their internal company systems, British
market research firm Continental Research recently concluded. It’s not
hard to guess why: having the latest information keeps them productive.
Put another way,
information is more than power. It’s the thing that powers your business
trip. That is why I have outlined the steps below to help you avoid
losing one of your most precious assets while on the road.
Take it from someone who
has left his office without synching his laptop and PC, who has wiped
out days worth of work because he neglected to install a backup system
and who even has lost clients because he ignored the importance of good,
reliable, actionable information.
Don’t make the same mistakes I
have.
Here’s what a career on the road has taught me about computer
data:
1. Start every trip with
a
synch.
2. Don’t trust your
computer.
3. Stay in touch with
the
office.
4. Collect information —
and back it up.
5. When in doubt, switch
to
paper.
Read the details
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Quote of the
month
October.
This is one of the peculiarly
dangerous months to speculate
in stocks. The others are
July, January, September, April,
November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
--Mark
Twain
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7310 North 16th Street,
Suite 130
Phoenix, AZ 85020-8203
Telephone: 602.297.2400
Fax: 602.297.8703
Email: info@itsynergy.com
www.itsynergy.com |
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