There has been a lot of hype about “the cloud” and what it can offer business. Like so many misunderstood concepts, “cloud” has become a buzz word used by people who really don’t have a clue. You know the people I’m referring to. They are very important as they synergistically align their business, creating flat organisational structures, delivering milestones, whilst leveraging and syndicating a paradigm shift!
The Cloud has created an awful lot of excitement for something which, in various forms, has been happening for years, with Gmail being one of the oldest and most recognised “cloud” services.
Being that IT Partners is all about business and creating value, we too have been doing “cloud”-like services for a number of years. Our clients want results, not buzz words, and most of all they want value which is why we are now partnering with Microsoft Online Services.
So in one quick sentence, what does Microsoft Online Services do? “We provide business email and collaboration tools, with storage, backup, and spam protection for a fixed fee per month per user.”
Microsoft Online Services does all the things I consider important. It delivers value and scale, allows greater flexibility, and has the ability to really help our clients with their growth ambitions.
Ok, I have been somewhat slack with updates and for good reason. IT Partners has been incredibly busy, a good sign that the Waikato economy is growing again. We are seeing higher levels of recruitment, adding to net staff numbers along with increased levels of investment especially in R & D and strategic projects. IT Partners continues to grow with two new hires joining us over the next 3 months, so we will soon be a team of 14.
At IT Partners we love it when we can better implement technology and achieve savings at the same time. A recent example has been the announcement by Citrix to deploy a number of their hardware based products as virtual instances. We have long been an advocate of Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) which is in my opinion the best SSL VPN product out there. The CAG is fast, efficient and able to be easily deployed and operated by non-technical people. The downside, and a limiter of our sales previously, was an entry level price of $5000 + GST. Now that it is available as a virtual appliance the cost has come down to about $1800 + GST.
For some clarification, from what we’ve seen, most remote access in NZ is either done in some insecure fashion (Windows Servers directly exposed to the net), or using manual connections setup using PPTP which is slower and more prone to interruptions in transmission. PPTP has been favoured as a VPN protocol as it is built in to Windows Server, and is thus “free”. However, no account is taken of the time to manually configure and troubleshoot these connections over the lifetime of use. What we know from our clients that have transitioned to SSL VPNs is that they have less support calls, faster connections and are able to self-provision.
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.