Business Category Archives

I recently was shown some preview shots of the new GUI for the upcoming revamp of Calyptix’s AccessEnforcer, and I have to say I am looking forward to the new style. I think the new major navigation icons at the top are a wonderful addition and will make a very easy to use product even easier to n[...]

I was pointed to an article over on ChannelWeb about Symantec moving away from a partner channel and focusing more on direct sales to their customers. According to the article: … Symantec is making moves to take its largest 900 customers from partners and hand them over to its direct sales te[...]

This past year has been a rather busy year for hosted services having major issues due to massive failures at data center facilities. Places like The Planet have been affected, and most recently Autotask had an outage. This was of the most interest to me as I am an Autotask customer, and wanted to t[...]

I’ve long held a dream of running my own company, and that dream became a reality last year with the start of my consulting company. For the first year it has basically been a sole proprietorship, with me wearing every hat that the company needed to get the job done. The past couple months I’ve [...]

I have long been a proponent of removing tape as a primary backup medium, with the exception of long term offsite archival storage, and this week has clearly reminded me why I no longer recommend tape backups for my clients. The scenario that has reminded me why is as follows: 13 DLT-IV tapes [...]

I’m planning on rolling out our first ever rate increase to our legacy clients that will be going into effect the first of July. This is going to affect a lot of long term clients I’ve worked with for years, but weren’t the right fit for the managed services focus that I currently provide to m[...]

Not that long ago I upgraded my primary home workstation with some larger hard drives, effectively doubling the internal storage capacity of my machine. I ordered the drives through Dell (Yes, I know, probably my first mistake), mostly because they were on sale, I had a coupon for an additional amou[...]

When the very near term inclusion of an outsourced company assisting with our onsite services to our clients became a reality, I very seriously began to look at various collaboration resources. I did not travel the popular Basecamp route here; instead I’m using a product called Central Desktop. Ce[...]

Something I’ve come to grips with recently is that my quoting process for clients is horrible. I know my products, I know what I deliver, but the process is painful and tedious. Currently I’m using a combination of PDFs, Word Documents and Excel Sheets to create a cohesive quote for services to [...]

One of the goals I’ve had since day one with my consulting company is to run as lean and efficiently as possible. One of the most simple things that I adhere to in that philosophy is to attempt to prevent any expenses from being generated that are not directly covered by generation of some form of[...]