http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZCbJcEbKr0
This whitepaper shows how corporate IT can manage its environment as if it is “deployed to the cloud.” So, if and when different parts of the environment are deployed to the cloud, day-to-day management of the environment remains unchanged—regardless of where it is running: on premises or at a service provider.
By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud
It’s no secret that the Winter Olympics in Sochi has had its fair share of problems. From infrastructure issues, to handling incidents, to security, to amenities for athletes, it seems like anything that could go wrong has gone wrong. So, what can IT learn from what has unfolded at Sochi?
Have your infrastructure in place beforehand
There are plenty of examples from Sochi about the proper infrastructure not being in place before the games started. There was unfinished construction around the city that consisted of exposed wires, uncovered manholes and buildings that weren’t finished. Many of the hotels were also unfinished. Some didn’t have working elevators, completed lobbies, or even running water (not to mention toilets that don’t flush). There’s a great picture circulating the web of an employee spray painting the grass green outside of an Olympic venue. Even the rings at the opening ceremonies malfunctioned. There were also safety concerns regarding the infrastructure of some of the ski / snowboard courses. The women’s downhill ski training runs were delayed after only three racers on the opening day because it was deemed too dangerous because one of the jumps was too big and athletes were “getting too much air.” In addition, Shawn White pulled out of the slopestyle event over safety concerns.
The first takeaway for IT from Sochi is to have your infrastructure in place and running properly before trying to start new projects. For example, if your organization is going to rollout a virtual desktop initiative you better take the proper steps beforehand to ensure a smooth rollout or you’re going to have a lot of angry people to deal with. For example, you need the correct WAN bandwidth between offices as well as the correct storage requirements in place for suitable performance. You also need to ensure that you have the correct network infrastructure in place beforehand to handle additional traffic. Finally, you need the proper server infrastructure set up for the redundancy and horse power necessary to deliver virtual desktops.
Make sure you have a way of handling incidents as they arise
There are always going to be unexpected circumstances that arise during the course of an event or project that have the potential of throwing you off. For example, there was a pillow shortage for Olympic athletes in Sochi. The following message went out to surrounding communities
“ATTENTION, DEAR COLLEAGUES! Due to an extreme shortage of pillows for athletes who unexpectedly arrived at Olympic Village in the mountains, there will be a transfer of pillows from all apartments to the storehouse on 2 February 2014. Please be understanding. We have to help the athletes out of this bind.”
I’m not going to pretend like I know what the plan was ahead of time to deal with supply shortages, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t to borrow used pillows from strangers.
IT needs to make sure they have detailed plans in place BEFORE starting a project so there is a protocol to deal with unexpected issues as they arise. For example, a few months back GreenPages moved its datacenter. Our team put together an extremely detailed plan that broke out every phase of the move down to 15 minute increments. They devised teams for specific phases that had a communication plan for each team and also devised a backup emergency plan in the event they hit any issues the night of the move. This detailed planning of how to deal with various issues in different scenarios was a big reason why the move ended up being a success.
Have proper security measures in place
Another picture that is circulating the web was taken by a journalist who returned to her hotel room to find keys in her door and the door wide open…even though she left the room with the door shut and locked. There were also reports that visitors in Sochi faced widespread hacking on their mobile devices. IT departments need to make sure that the proper security measures are in place for its end users to protect corporate data. This includes implementing authentication and encryption, using intrusion detection technologies, and edge scanning for viruses.
When dealing with top talent, make sure they have the tools to get their jobs done & stay happy
Olympic athletes certainly qualify as top talent, as they represent the best of the best at their crafts in the entire world. When dealing with top talent, you need to make sure they have the tools to get their jobs done and to stay happy. The yellow colored tap water in Sochi is probably not all that appealing to world class athletes who may be looking to quench their thirst after a long day on the mountain. I can’t imagine that the small bathroom with multiple toilets, but no stalls or dividers, goes over very well either.
In the business world, it’s important to retain top talent. IT can help keep employees happy and enable them to do their jobs in a variety of ways. One example is to make sure you’re offering the applications that people actually use and want. Another example is empowering employees to use the devices of their choice by implementing a BYOD policy.
Conclusion
Take these lessons from this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi and apply them to your IT strategy and maybe one day you too can win your very own shiny gold medal.
If you would like to learn more about how GreenPages can help you with your IT operations fill out this form!
Photo credit http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1952496-the-20-biggest-sochiproblems
By Rob O’Shaughnessy,Software Licensing Specialist, Pre-Sales Technical Support
There are only a few months left before Microsoft ends its Extended Support for Windows XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. On April 8, 2014 Extended Support will cease to exist. At this point you should be making arrangements to upgrade to the latest editions of Microsoft products so you can continue to receive the necessary support that Microsoft provides. If you’re looking to upgrade, here are some paths for you to take.
Windows XP Professional: Microsoft offers an upgrade price through volume licensing that allows Window XP Professional to upgrade to Windows 7/8 Professional. It’s worth noting that if you are running an older PC, you may want to test to see if it is compatible with the newer versions of Windows.
Exchange 2003: Microsoft doesn’t offer an upgrade price for Exchange; however, they do offer two options to get the latest edition of Exchange in your environment. The first is on-premise licensing of Exchange 2013. This would be loaded and managed locally and MSRP for Exchange Server is $708. In addition, each Device or User accessing Exchange would also require a Client Access License that starts at $68 for the Device Cal and $78 for the User Cal.
The other option to purchase Exchange is through Microsoft’s Cloud known as Office 365. Known as Exchange Online, this off-premise subscription license provides the same Exchange experience as on-prem but without having to have a lot of the local infrastructure in place. There are two options: Exchange Online Plan 1, which is $4 per User per Month and Exchange Online Plan 2, which adds enterprise features and is $8 per User per Month.
Office 2003: Similar to Exchange, Office doesn’t offer an upgrade price and also like Exchange, Office can be purchased as a volume license or through Office 365. The MSRP for Office Standard through volume licensing is $380 a license and for Professional Plus it’s $508. If you prefer the subscription-based model, Office Professional Plus can be purchased through Office 365 for $15 per User per Month. Office 365 requires a minimum of a year for the subscription. If you need to upgrade both Exchange and Office, Microsoft provides an Office 365 Plan that includes Office Professional Plus, Exchange Plan-2, SharePoint Plan-2 and Lync Plan-2 for $20 per User per Month. There are several volume licensing agreements and Office 365 Plans to choose from.
Last, although still a ways away, Windows Server 2003 R2 extended support will be ending on July 14, 2014.
If you are looking for assistance, here is how GreenPages can help:
Licensing: Our top notch licensing desk can assist you in understanding all the nuances of Microsoft volume licensing as well as Office 365. We can work with you to find what program fits best for your organization, help mitigate costs, and ensure your compliancy. We can run license history reports to make sure you’re appropriately licensed and review all the various licensing changes in products such as Windows, System Center and SQL.
Migrations & Professional Services: As a dual gold-competency Microsoft Service provider, GreenPages can assist you with the migration to a new client platform. This can include services to perform the following:
• Upgrading client computers from Windows XP to Windows 7/8
• Upgrading Office from 2003 to 2013
• Installing and configuring System Center technologies to incorporate upgrades to the latest technologies and implementing automated patching, remote control, software deployment, and Operating System Deployment (OSD)
Upgrading client operating systems and office packages can be the tip of the IT Iceberg. Let GreenPages help implement a lasting lifecycle management infrastructure for your environment.
When it comes to messaging, there are a number of scenarios to evaluate including
• Upgrade Exchange 2003/2007/2010 to Exchange 2013
• Migrate from Exchange to Office 365
Whether an on-premises upgrade is in your forecast, or you are ready to seize the opportunity to move toward a hybrid cloud environment and migrate to Office 365, GreenPages can help with these and other Microsoft projects.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZnNtDaGBdA
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The time is here for bloggers across the internet to make their tech predictions for 2014 and beyond (we have made some ourselves around storage and cloud). In this post, a couple of our authors have weighed in to grade predictions made by others across the web.
Prioritizing Management Tool Consolidation vs. New Acquisitions
Enterprise customers will want to invest in new tools only when necessary. They should look for solutions that can address several of their needs so that they do not have to acquire multiple tools and integrate them. The ability to cover multiple areas of management (performance, configuration and availability) to support multiple technologies (e.g., application tiers) and to operate across multiple platforms (Unix, Windows, virtual) will be important criteria for enterprises to assess what management tools will work for them. (eweek)
Agree – I have been saying this for a while. If you want a new tool, get rid of 5 and consolidate and use what you have now or get one that really works. (Randy Becker)
Bigger big data spending
IDC predicts spending of more than $14 billion on big data technologies and services or 30% growth year-over-year, “as demand for big data analytics skills continues to outstrip supply.” The cloud will play a bigger role with IDC predicting a race to develop cloud-based platforms capable of streaming data in real time. There will be increased use by enterprises of externally-sourced data and applications and “data brokers will proliferate.” IDC predicts explosive growth in big data analytics services, with the number of providers to triple in three years. 2014 spending on these services will exceed $4.5 billion, growing by 21%. (Forbes)
Absolutely agree with this. Companies of all sizes are constantly looking to garner more intelligence from the data they have. Even here at GreenPages we have our own big data issues and will continue to invest in these solutions to solve our own internal business needs. (Chris Ward)
Enterprises Will Shift From Silo to Collaborative Management
In 2014, IT organizations will continue to feel increased pressure from their lines of business. Collaborative management will be a key theme, and organizations will be looking to provide a greater degree of performance visibility across their individual silo tiers to the help desk, so it is easier and faster to troubleshoot problems and identify the tier that is responsible for a problem. (eweek)
Agree – cross domain technology experts are key! (Randy Becker)
New IT Will Create New Opportunities
Mobility, bring-your-own device (BYOD) and virtual desktops will all continue to gain a foothold in the enterprise. The success of these new technologies will be closely tied to the performance that users can experience when using these technologies. Performance management will grow in importance in these areas, providing scope for innovation and new solutions in the areas of mobility management, VDI management and so on. (eweek)
Disagree – This is backwards. The business is driving change and accountability. It is not IT that creates new opportunities – it is the business demanding apps that work and perform for the people using them. (Randy Becker)
Here comes the Internet of Things
By 2020, the Internet of Things will generate 30 billion autonomously connected end points and $8.9 trillion in revenues. IDC predicts that in 2014 we will see new partnerships among IT vendors, service providers, and semiconductor vendors that will address this market. Again, China will be a key player: The average Chinese home in 2030 will have 40–50 intelligent devices/sensors, generating 200TB of data annually. (Forbes)
Totally agree with this one. Everything and everybody is eventually going to be connected. I wish I were building a new home right now because there are so many cool things you can do by having numerous household items connected. I also love it because I know that in 10 years when my daughter turns 16 that I’ll no doubt know in real-time where she is and what she is doing. However, I doubt she’ll appreciate the ‘coolness’ of that. Although very cool, this concept does introduce some very real challenges around management of all of these devices. Think about 30 billion devices connected to the net…. We might actually have to start learning about IPv6 soon… (Chris Ward)
Cloud service providers will increasingly drive the IT market
As cloud-dedicated datacenters grow in number and importance, the market for server, storage, and networking components “will increasingly be driven by cloud service providers, who have traditionally favored highly componentized and commoditized designs.” The incumbent IT hardware vendors will be forced to adopt a “cloud-first” strategy, IDC predicts. 25–30% of server shipments will go to datacenters managed by service providers, growing to 43% by 2017. (Forbes)
Not sure I agree with this one for 2014 but I do agree with it in the longer term. As more and more applications/systems get migrated to public cloud providers, that means less and less hardware/software purchased directly from end user customers and thus more consolidation at the cloud providers. This could be a catch 22 for a lot of the traditional IT vendors like HP and Dell. When’s the last time you walked into an Amazon or Google datacenter and saw racks and racks of HP or Dell gear? Probably not too recently as these providers tend to ‘roll their own’ from a hardware perspective. One thing is for sure…this will get very interesting over the next 24 to 36 months… (Chris Ward)
End-User Experience Will Determine Success
Businesses will expect IT to find problems before their users do, pinpoint the root cause of the problem and solve the problem as early as possible. IT organizations will seek solutions that will allow them to provide great user experience and productivity. (eweek)
Agree – 100% on this one. Need a good POC and Pilot that is well managed with clear goals and objectives. (Randy Becker)
Amazon (and possibly Google) to take on traditional IT suppliers
Amazon Web Services’ “avalanche of platform-as-a-service offerings for developers and higher value services for businesses” will force traditional IT suppliers to “urgently reconfigure themselves.” Google, IDC predicts, will join in the fight, as it realizes “it is at risk of being boxed out of a market where it should be vying for leadership.” (Forbes)
I agree with this one to an extent. Amazon has certainly captured a good share of the market in two categories, developers and large scale-out applications and I see them continuing to have dominance in these 2 spaces. However, anyone who thinks that customers are forklift moving traditional production business applications from the datacenter to the public cloud/Amazon should really get out in the field and talk to CIOs and IT admins as this simply isn’t happening. I’ve had numerous conversations with our own customers around this topic, and when you do the math it just doesn’t make sense in most cases – assuming the customer has an existing investment in hardware/software and some form of datacenter to house it. That said, where I have seen an uptake of Amazon and other public cloud providers is from startups or companies that are being spun out of a larger parent. Bottom line, Amazon and others will absolutely compete with traditional IT suppliers, just not in a ubiquitous manner. (Chris Ward)
The digitization of all industries
By 2018, 1/3 of share leaders in virtually all industries will be “Amazoned” by new and incumbent players. “A key to competing in these disrupted and reinvented industries,” IDC says, “will be to create industry-focused innovation platforms (like GE’s Predix) that attract and enable large communities of innovators – dozens to hundreds will emerge in the next several years.” Concomitant with this digitization of everything trend, “the IT buyer profile continues to shift to business executives. In 2014, and through 2017, IT spending by groups outside of IT departments will grow at more than 6% per year.” (Forbes)
I would have to agree with this one as well. The underlying message here is that IT spending decisions continue to shift away from IT and into the hands of the business. I have seen this happening more and more over the past couple of years and can’t help but believe it will continue in that direction at a rapid pace. (Chris Ward)
What do you think about these predictions? What about Chris and Randy’s take on them?
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By Erin Marandola, Contract Administrator, PMP
Simply stated, a successful IT project is one that is completed on time and within budget. But, how do we get there, and why are there so many project failures? From a service provider’s perspective, a successful project avoids scope creep (the project getting out of control), which adds cost, time and risk. The successful project should also avoid gold plating (the addition of unintended added features to the final product of the project). These pitfalls can be easily avoided. In this blog, I’ll review how properly defining requirements can contribute to a thorough, well-thought out Statement of Work, and lead to a successful project.
If there is a mutually agreed upon Statement of Work outlining the project scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and assumptions, each party should have a clear, equal understanding of the project, right? Not exactly. A key factor in project failure is neglecting to exhaustively define and document project requirements within the Statement of Work. When we withhold information, assumptions are made. Since we don’t all think the same way, this can lead to the service provider believing certain terms and conditions are true, while the customer believes otherwise.
Looking back at my career, a few project failures come to mind. In one case, there was a different perception of what was considered in and out of scope between various parties. For example, the Statement of Work said “Eight (8) hours of post-implementation support.” The customer assumed the provider would provide support to end users, but the provider assumed the support would be at the system level and provided only to system administrators. In another case, assumptions were made while scoping the project and writing the Statement of Work, but they were never documented and validated by all parties. This resulted in an engineer arriving onsite for an Exchange upgrade, only to realize the project could not be completed based on conflicts in the client’s environment. It was assumed the customer had a Disaster Recovery solution in place that would support the upgrade, but that was not the case. Had the requirements been documented, this would not have happened.
Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more about project management best practices
To create a comprehensive Statement of Work, we need to methodically define requirements. The most crucial ingredient in defining requirements is the stakeholder, defined as anyone with a vested interest in the project, or anyone that will be impacted by the project. Stakeholders should be included in meetings where scope and requirements are being defined. They can open our eyes to the impacts the future project will have on the organization, environment and processes. They can also help define what the business and functional requirements are, and what constraints might hinder project objectives. Additionally, stakeholders help define what assumptions the project team is working under and how project success will be measured. The benefit of stakeholder involvement in defining requirements is the collaboration – the stakeholder meetings facilitate consensus amongst participants, ownership, and buy-in in the project. The collaborative approach allows stakeholders to assess multiple options to reach the project goals and mutually agree upon the best fit.
Once the requirements from the stakeholder meeting are defined, progressively elaborated and documented, a Statement of Work can be created incorporating the feedback. Prior to mutual execution of the Statement of Work, it is crucial that the service provider and customer review the document together to ensure both parties understand the business need, desired solution, assumptions, and scope of work. The Statement of Work should be updated as appropriate based on feedback from the review session(s).
In summary, defining requirements early on is essential in keeping a future project on track, in scope and in budget. Stakeholders are an invaluable resource in defining requirements. Defining, documenting and incorporating requirements into the Statement of Work results in a document that is clear, through and easy to manage to, helping to avoid some of the pitfalls we earlier alluded to. Best of all, defining requirements leads to a project that meets the true needs of the organization. If you’re looking for more information around IT project management, our VP of Project Management and our Director of Project Management are holding a webinar on January 23rd to discuss the benefits of creating a Project Management Office.
By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne
As 2013 comes to a close and we begin to look forward to what 2014 will bring, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect back on the past year. We’ve been talking a lot about that evil word ‘cloud’ for the past 3 to 4 years, but this year put a couple of other terms up in lights including Software Defined X (Datacenter, Networking, Storage, etc.) and Big Data. Like ‘cloud,’ these two newer terms can easily mean different things to different people, but put in simple terms, in my opinion, there are some generic definitions which apply in almost all cases. Software Defined X is essentially the concept of taking any ties to specific vendor hardware out of the equation and providing a central point for configuration, again vendor agnostic, except of course for the vendor providing the Software Defined solution 
. I define Big Data simply as the ability to find a very specific and small needle of data in an incredibly large haystack within a reasonably short amount of time. I see both of these technologies becoming more widely adopted in short order with Big Data technologies already well on the way.
As for our friend ‘the cloud,’ 2013 did see a good amount of growth in consumption of cloud services, specifically in the areas of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IT has adopted a ‘virtualization first’ strategy over the past 3 to 4 years when it comes to bringing any new workloads into the datacenter. I anticipate we’ll begin to see a ‘SaaS first’ approach being adopted in short order if it is not out there already. However, I can’t necessarily say the same on the IaaS side so far as ‘IaaS first’ goes. While IaaS is a great solution for elastic computing, I still see most usage confined to the application development or super large scale out application (Netflix) type use cases. The mass adoption of IaaS for simply forklifting existing workloads out of the private datacenter and into the public cloud simply hasn’t happened. Why?? My opinion is for traditional applications neither the cost nor operational model make sense, yet.
In relation to ‘cloud,’ I did see a lot of adoption of advanced automation, orchestration, and management tools and thus an uptick in ‘private clouds.’ There are some fantastic tools now available both commercially and open source, and I absolutely expect to see this adoption trend to continue, especially in the Enterprise space. Datacenters, which have a vast amount of change occurring whether in production or test/dev, can greatly benefit from these solutions. However, this comes with a word of caution – just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I say this because I have seen several instances where customers have wanted to automate literally everything in their environments. While that may sound good on the surface, I don’t believe it’s always the right thing to do. There are times still where a human touch remains the best way to go.
As always, there were some big time announcements from major players in the industry. Here are some posts we did with news and updates summaries from VMworld, VMware Partner Exchange, EMC World, Cisco Live and Citrix Synergy. Here’s an additional video from September where Lou Rossi, our VP, Technical Services, explains some new Cisco product announcements. We also hosted a webinar (which you can download here) about VMware’s Horizon Suite as well as a webinar on our own Cloud Management as a Service Offering
The past few years have seen various predictions relating to the unsustainability of Moore’s Law which states that processors will double in computing power every 18-24 months and 2013 was no exception. The latest prediction is that by 2020 we’ll reach the 7nm mark and Moore’s Law will no longer be a logarithmic function. The interesting part is that this prediction is not based on technical limitations but rather economic ones in that getting below that 7nm mark will be extremely expensive from a manufacturing perspective and, hey, 64k of RAM is all anyone will ever need right?
Probably the biggest news of 2013 was the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had undertaken a massive program and seemed to be capturing every packet of data coming in or out of the US across the Internet. I won’t get into any political discussion here, but suffice it to say this is probably the largest example of ‘big data’ that exists currently. This also has large potential ramifications for public cloud adoption as security and data integrity have been 2 of the major roadblocks to adoption so it certainly doesn’t help that customers may now be concerned about the NSA eavesdropping on everything going on within the public datacenters. It is estimated that public cloud providers may lose as much as $22-35B over the next 3 years as a result of customers slowing adoption due to this. The only good news in this, at least for now, is it’s very doubtful that the NSA or anyone else on the planet has the means to actual mine anywhere close to 100% of the data they are capturing. However, like anything else, it’s probably only a matter of time.
What do you think the biggest news/advancements of 2013 were? I would be interested in your thoughts as well.
Register for our upcoming webinar on December 19th to learn how you can free up your IT team to be working on more strategic projects (while cutting costs!).
By Matt Mock, IT Director
It was a very busy year at GreenPages for our internal IT department. With 2013 coming to a close, I wanted to highlight some of the major projects we worked on over the course of the year. The four biggest projects we tackled were using a cloud management solution, improving our business continuity plan, moving our datacenter, and creating and implementing a BYOD policy.
Cloud Management as a Service
GreenPages now offers a Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) solution to our clients. We implemented the solution internally late last year, but really started utilizing it as a customer would this year by increasing what was being monitored and managed. We decided to put Exchange under the “Fully Managed” package of CMaaS. Exchange requires a lot of attention and effort. Instead of hiring a full time Exchange admin, we were able to offload that piece with CMaaS as our Managed Services team does all the health checks to make sure any new configuration changes are correct. This resulted in considerable cost savings. Having access to the team 24/7 is a colossal luxury. Before using CMaaS, if an issue popped up at 3 in the morning we would find out about it the next morning. This would require us to try and fix the problem during business hours. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone the hassle of trying to fix an issue with frustrated coworkers who are unable to do their jobs. If an issue arises now in the middle of the night, the problem has already been fixed before anyone shows up to start working. The Managed Services team does research and remediates bugs that come up. This happened to us when we ran into some issues with Apple iOS calendaring. The Managed Services team did the research to determine the cause and went in and fixed the problem. If my team tried to do this it would have taken us 2-3 days of wasted time. Instead, we could be focusing on some of our other strategic projects. In fact, we are holding a webinar on December 19th that will cover strategies and benefits to being the ‘first-to-know,’ and we will also provide a demo of the CMaaS Enterprise Command Center. We also went live with fully automated patching, which requires zero intervention from my team. Furthermore, we leveraged CMaaS to allow us to spin up a fully managed Linux environment. It’s safe to say that if we didn’t implement CMaaS we would not have been able to accomplish all of our strategic goals for this year.
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Business Plan
We also determined that we needed to update our disaster recovery plan to a true robust business continuity plan. A main driver of this was because of our more diverse office model. Not only were more people working remotely as our workforce expanded, but we now have office locations up and down the east coast in Kittery, Boston, Attleboro, New York City, Atlanta, and Tampa. We needed to ensure that we could continue to provide top quality service to our customers if an event were to occur. My team took a careful look at our then current infrastructure set up. After examining our policies and plans, we generated new ones around the optimal outcome we wanted and then adjusted the infrastructure to match. A large part of this included changing providers for our data and voice, which included moving our datacenter.
Datacenter Move
In 2013 we wanted to have more robust datacenter facilities. Ultimately, we were able to get into an extremely redundant and secure datacenter at the Markley Group in Boston that provided us with cost savings. Furthermore, Markley is also a large carrier hotel which gives us additional savings on circuit costs. With this move we’re able to further our capabilities of delivering to our customers 24/7. Another benefit our new datacenter offered was excess office space. That way, if there ever was an event at one of our GreenPages locations we could have a place to send people to work. I recently wrote a post which describes the datacenter move in more details.
BYOD Policy
As 2013 ends, we are finishing our first full year with our BYOD policy. We are taking this time to look back and see where there were any issues with the policies or procedures and adjusting for the next year. Our plan is to ensure that year two is even more streamlined. I answered questions in a recent Q & A explaining our BYOD initiative in more detail.
I’m pretty happy looking back at the work we accomplished in 2013. As with any year, there were bumps along the way and things we didn’t get to that we wanted to. All in all though, we accomplished some very strategic projects that have set us up for success in the future. I think that we will start out 2014 with increased employee satisfaction, increased productivity of our IT department, and of course noticeable cost savings. Here’s to a successful 2014!
Is your IT team the first-to-know when an IT outage happens? Or, do you find out about it from your end users? Is your expert IT staff stretched thin doing first-level incident support? Could they be working on strategic IT projects that generate revenue? Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more!
By Chris Reily, Director of Solutions Architecture
Well, with the holidays upon us, I find myself in the position of having to figure out what to buy for the solutions architects this year to thank them for another great year in 2013. If you think buying gifts for Aunt Emily, Cousin Jimmy or dear old Dad is hard – try picking out gifts for one of the most exacting, technical, opinionated and outstanding group of guys you’ll ever get to know. I missed black Friday and Cyber Monday so here goes nothing…
Nick P – Practice Manager, Networking
A 48oz. bottle of Bluebeard’s Beard Wash AND some SDN (software defined networking) with Cisco Open Network Environment Platform Kit (onePK) so he can finally have comprehensive Cisco network intelligence.
Randy B – Enterprise Architect
A relaxing massage chair AND a smart phone that is truly smart, does email, contacts and a calendaring that works as well as a vintage BlackBerry. It need to hold a decent charge to last a full work day AND reminds Randy of important appointments not to be missed. Or maybe he just needs a copy of VMware View!
Harris H – Solutions Architect, Data Center
An industrial size vacuum sealer for packing homemade jerky AND a quality Cloud as a Service offering to distribute to all those in need of new technology. And it would be just wrong not to provide a great way to manage it all with CMaaS!
Randy W – Practice Manager, Data Management
A case (okay, maybe just a bottle) of 1989 Chateau Petrus Bordeaux AND some super-fast hybrid flash storage like Nimble’s C250G (oh how Randy loves 10 gig networking).
Mark H – Solutions Architect, Data Management
A St. Croix Legend Bass fishing rod AND an EMC VNX5400 array. Plenty of fast disc to store and access plenty of hi-resolution photos of all the fish he can catch.
Francis C – End User Computing, Practice Manager
A Max Brooks signed copy of The Zombie Survival Guide AND a high quality technical manual for Citrix Xen Desktop 7!
John D – XaaS Consulting Architect
Cross country saddle bags for a BMW R-1200GS motor bike AND a ticket to London to meet Sharon Taylor,ITIL Chief Examiner, for lunch.
Chris C – Solutions Architect, Data Center
A Gillette Mach-3 Razor AND a converged data center (virtual computing platform) courtesy of Nutanix. Chris is keeping it simple in 2014 by combining storage, compute and networking in a single platform.
Joel G – Solutions Architect, Microsoft Solutions
An Air Force Academy sweatshirt AND an Azure environment managed by System Center 2012 R2. Who doesn’t want infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service in the New Year?
Ralph K – Practice Manager, Unified Communications
A Harley Davidson leather jacket AND a Cisco Jabber Client. So when Ralph is ready to hit the open road, he can unchain himself from the office but stay in touch by video and voice.
Chris W – Our CTO
Front row tickets to see Metallica in Germany next summer AND a guest appearance on TLC’s NY Ink, on which a talented artist Megan Massacre will create and complete an original tattoo design incorporating the logos of VMware, Cisco and EMC on Chris chest. He’s one dedicated dude.
As an IT professional, what’s on your holiday wish list this year? My gift to you? Here’s a free ebook on how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services.