We moved last week to all company phones being iPhones. Previously we were a mix of BlackBerry and iPhones, but the business case for going completely to the iPhone was very compelling.
First of all, before I enrage ardent BlackBerry fans, there are legitimate reasons for having a BlackBerry the most obvious is the benefit of a lower cost of operating when using data roaming overseas. I am not knocking BlackBerry, but for our circumstances, going to 100% iPhone made sense.
On the savings side, we dropped one server as we no longer needed a server dedicated to BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), and we dropped the monthly running costs as we have found that we all use less than 200MB each month on data, on average. When combined with the generous handset rebates from Vodafone, it made sense to have everyone moved over.
I know we gained on the productivity side as well as the positive user feedback! It also fits in nicely with our philosophy; “if you are going to do it right, do it right for everyone”, so matches up with us all having three screens, fast laptops (Solid State Drives now standard) replaced every 24 months, all of us having gone to Windows 7, the list goes on but I hope you see what I mean.
Clients, vendors, and the team all tell me that as a firm that we are reasonably progressive. This is something I don’t want to lose as we grow. One of the major investments we have made since day one of IT Partners is a commitment to Research & Development. A good example that happened today was the implementation of a Netflow monitoring tool. I sent an article to Greig from Cisco detailing some options – typical of Greig he had already installed a tool and was looking at improving it for client deployment!
In other news we have become a member of the NZICT Group. To find out more visit: http://www.ict.org.nz/
Happy New Year – hope everyone had a relaxing break and are looking forward to a great 2010!
IT Partners takes patching very seriously, we are proactive in both our monitoring and application of security patches. We want to avoid the unfortunate circumstances that the Waikato DHB has (per this article). I can imagine the explanations of why are similar to this hilarious commercial for Canal+. So next time your workstation says that it needs to take a few minutes to install updates whilst shutting down – please do so!
If you have an iPhone you might be interested in checking out this App: St John NZ CPR iPhone App – produced by Marker (our website people) in partnership with St John.
This year at IT Partners we gave the team hampers. Where possible, we included NZ made food products, but I also wanted to include a tech related gift. In previous years we have had items like iPods which went down really well! Two items came to mind, one was a Roomba (a robot vacuum cleaner) and the other was a PowerStick (a portable batter for emergency charging). The PowerStick won - great design, comes with all the adapters requested for iPod, Nokia, BlackBerry and a whole lot of other phone and device types. Contact us if you want the NZ distributor's details.
Thank you to one and all for your support of the IT Partners team in 2009. It has been another year of growth, with welcome additions to the team of Frazer Thompson and Christo Allers, along with some fantastic new clients. On Friday the 11th we had our bi-monthly board meeting followed by our Christmas Party. It was held at Smith & McKenzie chophouse – a great evening with all the team and partners. Photos can be found here - what a great tool Flickr is.
On a personal note, Sarah & I were delighted to announce that on Saturday the 5th at NZST 4:25pm Alexander Dean Morton-Johnson was born – all is going well and the household is returning to normality.
From all the team at IT Partners, have a great Christmas break and we look forward to seeing you all in 2010.