I remember the day like it was yesterday... Our exchange server was turned on, Charles programmed our T-Mobile Dash smart phones and all of sudden I had instant sync's - through the air - of all of our emails, calendar events and contacts. It was July 2007 and we had just made a very significant investment in hardware - 3TB of hard drive space, an Intel Duo Core processor, triple redundant power supplies, all running Microsoft Server 2003, Exchange and a host of other software programs - I wasn't too happy about those spent dollars, but I loved the new resources I was experiencing on my Dash. I couldn't open attachments to my email and HTML wasn't supported, but damn I loved my new features.
Now almost 3 years later, and we've done something that I never thought we would do... we actually have killed our Exchange Server. We sell servers... though not our core business, we do sell them. So us killing our Exchange is almost a bit like biting the hand that feeds us, though maybe only feeds us a snack.
There was nothing wrong with our server... it's worked and has performed well, but there were weaknesses; some were glaring and dangerous, like not having any emails if we lost power or internet - this was, for us, the main reason for killing exchange. Another was just possible failure of hardware.
(Check out this video from Google Apps that shows how Motorola Mobile made the switch from Exchange to Google Mail and Google Apps Premium addition.)
However, the biggest reason was Microsoft itself. We were operating on Exchange 2003 and making the investment to move to 2007 - when everything worked fine as it was - wasn't making me happy.
Then along comes Google...
I kept hearing stories of Google Apps and how Motorola Mobile (watch the video above), with with 14,000 mail box seats, Intuit and other big corporations, had made the move the Google. If they could do it... then why couldn't Convergex? So I started doing research and I quickly made the discovery that I could do everything with the Google email Apps - including syncing with Outlook, calender & contacts - that I was currently doing with Exchange and all for $50.00 per seat, per year including support!
All of a sudden it meant no worries about loss of power, internet or hardware failures; I no longer need to VPN in to sync my Outlook on my Laptop to the exchange server... I simply open Outlook on my laptop and within a few second all my emails are updated... right from the cloud.
We've lost internet at the office several times since 2007... once for a somewhat significant time after Hurricane Ike and we lost a good bit of emails, we had battery back-up and I even had places to get reliable internet access, but with the server down... we couldn't get our emails. Now with Google and the cloud... I don't worry about any of that.
We singed up for a service from Google called Google Apps Premium Edition. We pay $50 a year per seat and Google Premium Edition provides us with Google Email, Calender, Docs (a nice feature that lets you create forms and other custom documents), Video (a video chat and collaboration suite all recorded and hosted on Google servers), Google Sites (a simple point and click website creator), and includes 800 help desk support. Actually, all these features just mentioned can be done at no cost... the $50 per seat is actually for the support feature.
All of this is accomplished in the cloud and is powered by Google's massive server farm. I figured, why not let Google make the investment hardware? We don't have to invest any longer in new server hardware, Microsoft Server programs or costs to maintain that piece of our business... it a huge savings... combined with better security, access and processing power.
It's Win, Win, Win all over!
Yes killing Exchange was weird! It seems like we had just made the advancement to Exchange - and less than 3 years later we didn't need it anymore. Also, in a real sense it really brings home where technology is heading and it's a piece of our business that I can see will be slowly going away. Less or no hardware. Less or no hassle (we haven't made one tech support call - everything just WORKS) and everything is moving up... Up to the cloud we go!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Apple iPad - Why iWant One
Has Steve Jobs hit another home run with his new iPad? Well if we're talking from a pure sales standpoint - according to this Business Week article - the iPad will be a huge hit! The article estimates that Apple will ship almost 2.7 million units by the end of this year. Those are big numbers and in comparison with the Kindles estimated 3 million units sold since its release in 2007, according to this Las Vegas Review Journal article, the iPad would effectively over take the Kindle in just a few months.
I have owned a Kindle since 2008, have bought many books for it and I've enjoyed the e-ink reading experience. Also, since Amazon added PDF support to the Kindle, I have been able to take my massive and ever expanding ebook PDF library and read it on the go. Truthfully, I have never really enjoyed reading PDF documents on a screen. Reading my PDF ebook library on the Kindle has been, for me, a much better experience.
Though focusing on the the iPad as an ebook reader, and it's effect on the Kindle's future, is like sitting and focusing on the iPhone and how it's going to destroy Motorola's RZAR's market share. My iPhone is an incredible work tool. My Apps bring joy to my daughter... when she plays tic tac toe with me; 3G and Google allow me to find information quickly and easily. Yes the iPhone did destroy the RZAR's market, but that product, like the Kindle was a uni-tasker! The Kindle does a great job at what it does... downloading books on the fly, anywhere for $9.99 in a small, easy to carry, compact body.
The iPad will do that as well... and so much more. Just like my iPhone brought home my mobile phone, iTunes, email exchange and other Microsft features into one amazing package (and did it better than my previous Microsoft based mobile phone), the iPad will do the same and allow me to do away with my Kindle and maybe even my laptop as well.
What the iPad will do for us and how it we'll use it, is still left to be seen, but one thing for sure... the possibilities seem amazing and some of what I'm hearing is exciting. I've just read this article from Techcrunch.com on a new iPad APP from Nextflix that allows me to take my Netflix account, that I already use and watch on my Playstation, and watch my Netflix instant watch list on my iPad... that is huge. I can also go from watching my streaming Netflix movie on my flat screen at home, pause it and, supposedly, pick up it up on my iPad where I left off. Very exciting stuff!
Another amazing development is what's being called Cloud 2. Where Cloud 1 was type/click, Cloud 2 is touch; where Cloud 1 is Yahoo and Amazon and everything that they inspired, Cloud 2 is Facebook where all us are connected - always. Where Cloud 1 is location unknown, Cloud 2 is known and the iPad and other mobile connected, touch technologies will play a major roll in that human interface to Cloud 2.
In his excellent article Hello iPad. Hello Could 2, Mark Benioff, CEO and Chairman of Saleforce.com, describes all this Cloud 2 business in amazing detail and his vision for the future is all about the iPad and devices like it.
My business partner and CEO of Convergex Communications, Charles Boan, is starting to develop apps for use with our customers in medicine. More and more of our medical customers are moving to electronic and online medical records. However, many still use charts and hand write notes in them... many tell us that there portable touch screen laptops are sloppy at capturing their notes. Convergex sees the iPad and special medical apps designed to capture and easily move information to the cloud as an important business use of the iPad and devices like it.
With all that said and my obvious interest of owning an iPad, the question I get is... am I going to buy one right now? Well I have decided to wait and make my personal purchase for sometime in the future. In the meantime, Convergex will have one and we'll work on the development of apps on it from the get go; however, for me personally I'll wait for iPad version 2.0 to debut.
iPad, iWant one, but I will exercise patience at this moment.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Bits & Bites & Everything Nice
Our memories are now becoming virtual! Our lives are now becoming so digitized that I often wonder how historians will look at us. They'll know exactly how many of us lived from day to day, not just from frozen moments in photographs... like we have from the 19th and early 20th century... or from the mostly silent home movies from the mid 20th century... but how we talk and what we looked like in our youths.
Our grand children will share with their great children how we looked and talked and how we moved and expressed ourselves... most of us will have those memories, saved in some form or fashion, from our youth!
How I wish I could see my grand parents or their parents - young and hear their voices. I'd like to see how they sounded and see their personalities! I have stories... like a thousand generations before me... of how everyone was and how my great grand parents lived, told by my grandparents and my mom and dad and aunts and uncles and that's cool - my mind fills in the blanks of the details quite nicely - but our legacy will digital... maybe for a thousand generation forward... our descendants will know more about us than any generation before.
Now all of that is important and I suspect will play a much bigger part of history than anything else, but today - in the hear and the now - data is about business! Those bits and bites are valuable and the business of backing up your data is big!
Even small businesses that as recently as the mid-2000's weren't worried about data loss - a small SD card or thumb drive stored most of their important data - have started to implement data back solutions and protocols that run those solutions. A business used to have very little data that really needed to be backed up - Quick books and maybe a few key Microsoft office docs were all most businesses concerned themselves with.
Now; however, data creation is growing faster than ever... we're saving lots and lots of images. We're scanning more and more documents - like, multi-page contracts, faxes and medical records, we're archiving movies, music, and pictures. Our email in-box and our archiving of those emails and those attachments that ride along with them is growing exponentially, and because we are saving so much... we're creating such a huge treasure trove of information... that just by the simple passage of time, naturally, means more and more data is being created and stored.
Also the importance of all that stored information - and it's value - is just starting to be realized by the small to medium size business owner.
There is also the new realization... keeping all that data safe and accessible is becoming ever more critical to the success and health of the small to medium size businesses; along with laws such as HIPPA, that require medical providers to keep their data safe, accessible and secure... now can carry legal ramifications for not doing so.
Add to that what the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C. had to say recently about a very scary statistic that happens to businesses that experience a catastrophic data loss:
That's scary!
As the importance of data and its security grows, the limitations of what we've traditional used as data back up devices are starting to show their weaknesses. Some of these traditional back up solutions are:
Sometime it's not just the hardware that fails, though tape drives are very labor intensive, not only to back up to, but also to maintain in good working condition. No, it seems the major point of failure in all data back-up systems is human error!
Many times, since all of these back-up processes require someone to perform the task of actually doing the back up, even just one missed or forgotten day of doing the work of backing up - for a decent size business - will cause serious gaps in the back up archives!
Human error, combined with fundamental flaws of most current back-up technologies, make backing up data a less than reliable process. The weaknesses of current data back up systems is that they are:
Each one of these mentioned weaknesses can cause real issues to your ability to recover your data fully and completely, but many times multiple infractions happen - at the same time - that take a bad situation and make it infinitely worse! For example, the person in charge of backing up the data has forgotten or missed placed one or two days of back ups, combined that with a downed or damaged server (a main reason to try to recover your data) and a complete recovery can be almost impossible.
Another weakness of current back up solutions is that they cannot provide access to Incremental changes (that is different version of a document throughout the day). Incremental versions of documents and the archiving of those changes to the documents are what more businesses are looking for when protecting their information. Changes to documents throughout the day can be accessed and recovered. Even if a document is saved in it's final mode on your hard drive... a back up solution that implements incremental back ups can give a business access to data at different times through out the day.
So we need a solution that can eliminate most - if not all human interaction - can work automatically, can store incremental changes to documents through a work day and can also send data off to a remote location. Sending data off to remote locations is always a good these days... hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and floods can and will destroy your hardware along with all of your data and can also affect a specific region (as many of us here in Houston found after hurricane Ike).
A solution that Convergex is offering is just such a solution; however our data back up solution brings two more important and very powerful components to your data back protocol: One is not only the ability to back up all your data and their incrementals throughout the day, but also to have a complete "snapshot" of ALL of your programs as well. In other words, not only will our solution back up your data, but also all of your Microsoft operating system programs and Quickbooks and SQL and so on. All of your information is captured!
The second powerful feature that our solution brings to a company is that the technology that we install will also act as a back up server. If your SQL server crashes or your Exchange Server fails, we can - from anywhere in the world - program our back up solution to act as your back server as well; and all that can be done in about an hour from your catastrophic event. so in the event of a hardware failure our server will have you accessing all your email or your data in less than one hour... now that's true business continuity! Believe it or not all of this and more can be installed in a business today for less than $2500.00.
Protecting our data is such a crucial part of our lives that it almost seems silly to leave it up to a thumb drive or a flimsy SD card to safeguard it. For businesses, data is our life blood today!
For our future; however, it's so much more, as our great grand children and their great grand children a 150 years from now will take their optical (sugar cube size) drives holding 100's of zettabytes of pictures, video, and ancient data, and place that optical data storage device on a platform while some type of laser scans it and then it's projected in perfect full size 3D reality for them to watch in awe and wonder and make fun of their ancient and oh so silly ancestors, but will be infinitely grateful that they then can share that with their great children.
Click to learn more on our Data Back Up & Disaster Recovery solution and how it can help your business. Click on this link to learn more about Convergex Communications and all our products and offerings.
Our grand children will share with their great children how we looked and talked and how we moved and expressed ourselves... most of us will have those memories, saved in some form or fashion, from our youth!
How I wish I could see my grand parents or their parents - young and hear their voices. I'd like to see how they sounded and see their personalities! I have stories... like a thousand generations before me... of how everyone was and how my great grand parents lived, told by my grandparents and my mom and dad and aunts and uncles and that's cool - my mind fills in the blanks of the details quite nicely - but our legacy will digital... maybe for a thousand generation forward... our descendants will know more about us than any generation before.
Now all of that is important and I suspect will play a much bigger part of history than anything else, but today - in the hear and the now - data is about business! Those bits and bites are valuable and the business of backing up your data is big!
Even small businesses that as recently as the mid-2000's weren't worried about data loss - a small SD card or thumb drive stored most of their important data - have started to implement data back solutions and protocols that run those solutions. A business used to have very little data that really needed to be backed up - Quick books and maybe a few key Microsoft office docs were all most businesses concerned themselves with.
Now; however, data creation is growing faster than ever... we're saving lots and lots of images. We're scanning more and more documents - like, multi-page contracts, faxes and medical records, we're archiving movies, music, and pictures. Our email in-box and our archiving of those emails and those attachments that ride along with them is growing exponentially, and because we are saving so much... we're creating such a huge treasure trove of information... that just by the simple passage of time, naturally, means more and more data is being created and stored.
Also the importance of all that stored information - and it's value - is just starting to be realized by the small to medium size business owner.
There is also the new realization... keeping all that data safe and accessible is becoming ever more critical to the success and health of the small to medium size businesses; along with laws such as HIPPA, that require medical providers to keep their data safe, accessible and secure... now can carry legal ramifications for not doing so.
Add to that what the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C. had to say recently about a very scary statistic that happens to businesses that experience a catastrophic data loss:
93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to some type of disaster,
failure to properly back up their data or data loss by other means, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the catastrophic data loss event, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately!
failure to properly back up their data or data loss by other means, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the catastrophic data loss event, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately!
That's scary!
As the importance of data and its security grows, the limitations of what we've traditional used as data back up devices are starting to show their weaknesses. Some of these traditional back up solutions are:
- Tape Back-Up Systems
- SD Cards & thumb Drives
- CD's & DVD's
Sometime it's not just the hardware that fails, though tape drives are very labor intensive, not only to back up to, but also to maintain in good working condition. No, it seems the major point of failure in all data back-up systems is human error!
Many times, since all of these back-up processes require someone to perform the task of actually doing the back up, even just one missed or forgotten day of doing the work of backing up - for a decent size business - will cause serious gaps in the back up archives!
Human error, combined with fundamental flaws of most current back-up technologies, make backing up data a less than reliable process. The weaknesses of current data back up systems is that they are:
- People Dependent - People forget or just plain don't do it
- A Manual Process - Requiring swapping of tape, CD, DVD, SD or USB thumb drives
- Media That is Fragile or Easily Lost
- Lacking Proper Follow Through to Make Sure That Data is Really Being Backed Up
- Not Tested
Each one of these mentioned weaknesses can cause real issues to your ability to recover your data fully and completely, but many times multiple infractions happen - at the same time - that take a bad situation and make it infinitely worse! For example, the person in charge of backing up the data has forgotten or missed placed one or two days of back ups, combined that with a downed or damaged server (a main reason to try to recover your data) and a complete recovery can be almost impossible.
Another weakness of current back up solutions is that they cannot provide access to Incremental changes (that is different version of a document throughout the day). Incremental versions of documents and the archiving of those changes to the documents are what more businesses are looking for when protecting their information. Changes to documents throughout the day can be accessed and recovered. Even if a document is saved in it's final mode on your hard drive... a back up solution that implements incremental back ups can give a business access to data at different times through out the day.
So we need a solution that can eliminate most - if not all human interaction - can work automatically, can store incremental changes to documents through a work day and can also send data off to a remote location. Sending data off to remote locations is always a good these days... hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and floods can and will destroy your hardware along with all of your data and can also affect a specific region (as many of us here in Houston found after hurricane Ike).
A solution that Convergex is offering is just such a solution; however our data back up solution brings two more important and very powerful components to your data back protocol: One is not only the ability to back up all your data and their incrementals throughout the day, but also to have a complete "snapshot" of ALL of your programs as well. In other words, not only will our solution back up your data, but also all of your Microsoft operating system programs and Quickbooks and SQL and so on. All of your information is captured!
The second powerful feature that our solution brings to a company is that the technology that we install will also act as a back up server. If your SQL server crashes or your Exchange Server fails, we can - from anywhere in the world - program our back up solution to act as your back server as well; and all that can be done in about an hour from your catastrophic event. so in the event of a hardware failure our server will have you accessing all your email or your data in less than one hour... now that's true business continuity! Believe it or not all of this and more can be installed in a business today for less than $2500.00.
Protecting our data is such a crucial part of our lives that it almost seems silly to leave it up to a thumb drive or a flimsy SD card to safeguard it. For businesses, data is our life blood today!
For our future; however, it's so much more, as our great grand children and their great grand children a 150 years from now will take their optical (sugar cube size) drives holding 100's of zettabytes of pictures, video, and ancient data, and place that optical data storage device on a platform while some type of laser scans it and then it's projected in perfect full size 3D reality for them to watch in awe and wonder and make fun of their ancient and oh so silly ancestors, but will be infinitely grateful that they then can share that with their great children.
Click to learn more on our Data Back Up & Disaster Recovery solution and how it can help your business. Click on this link to learn more about Convergex Communications and all our products and offerings.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
So We Shot a Video Commercial
It was early June and things were already starting to get a little hot for this transplanted Chicagoan. I know I've been here for 23 years and I already should be used to it... but I am not.
Anyway....
We were late getting back to my offices in the Galleria and the catering guys from Escalantes were right on time... "damn!" We got in and the catering pros got right to work with our food set up and in 15 minutes we had a beautiful spread of food ready to be eaten. Though I was ready to dig in to those hot fajitas and fresh made guacamole right then and there! However, I exercised some patience and waiting a whole 20 minutes to eat. Luckily the camera crew was running a little late and everything seemed to coordinate just fine.
Hold on...
Lets back up... you see about a month earlier we had sent out invitations to show off our new fresh and modern office and, hopefully, capture some great testimonials about our company.
Wait...
Let me back up a little more. You see, Citysearch.. the online, local directory is now offering a service where they will come out to your office and film and 2 minute commercial and post it to your Citysearch profile - FOR FREE!!!! You just make a commitment to spend a certain dollar amount per month with them... all performance based... so if they don't drive traffic to you - you pay nothing.
It was a deal I couldn't refuse!
So I thought - instead of trying to figure out what to say in the commercial why don't we have a luncheon, invite our clients and have them talk about us. That's exactly what we did.
So to wrap this post up... we sent out invites, people came, ate and said some great things about us. In fact, I was really impressed with all the kind remarks we received.
A nice thing about a commercial is that in just a couple of minutes we talked about our trixbox IP PBX VoIP phone systems, our distributed audio system called Sonos and our AT&T voice and data services.
So here is our little commercial. Check it out and let me know what you think.
To Learn More About Convergex Products and Services please visit - www.goconvergex.com
Anyway....
We were late getting back to my offices in the Galleria and the catering guys from Escalantes were right on time... "damn!" We got in and the catering pros got right to work with our food set up and in 15 minutes we had a beautiful spread of food ready to be eaten. Though I was ready to dig in to those hot fajitas and fresh made guacamole right then and there! However, I exercised some patience and waiting a whole 20 minutes to eat. Luckily the camera crew was running a little late and everything seemed to coordinate just fine.
Hold on...
Lets back up... you see about a month earlier we had sent out invitations to show off our new fresh and modern office and, hopefully, capture some great testimonials about our company.
Wait...
Let me back up a little more. You see, Citysearch.. the online, local directory is now offering a service where they will come out to your office and film and 2 minute commercial and post it to your Citysearch profile - FOR FREE!!!! You just make a commitment to spend a certain dollar amount per month with them... all performance based... so if they don't drive traffic to you - you pay nothing.
It was a deal I couldn't refuse!
So I thought - instead of trying to figure out what to say in the commercial why don't we have a luncheon, invite our clients and have them talk about us. That's exactly what we did.
So to wrap this post up... we sent out invites, people came, ate and said some great things about us. In fact, I was really impressed with all the kind remarks we received.
A nice thing about a commercial is that in just a couple of minutes we talked about our trixbox IP PBX VoIP phone systems, our distributed audio system called Sonos and our AT&T voice and data services.
So here is our little commercial. Check it out and let me know what you think.
To Learn More About Convergex Products and Services please visit - www.goconvergex.com
Our New Blog
Welcome to the Convergex Communications blog. I know, it's 2009 and we should have this thing up like in 2006, but here it is and now we're ready to go with this.
The idea is that we'll be placing updates on what we're doing... and ultimately we'll show how this benefits you.
For now... a quick recap on the services we offer:
Nortel Sales and Services - Norstar, Option 11, Option 61 and Nortel parts.
trixbox Pro IP PBX
Disaster Recovery and Data Back-Up
Accessories and parts - Headsets, Battery Back-Ups Music on Hold Services.
AT&T Voice & Data Services
Cbeyond Voice Services
So that's a quick recap of our services and what we do.
Stay tuned and I'll get you update about our products and services.
RG
The idea is that we'll be placing updates on what we're doing... and ultimately we'll show how this benefits you.
For now... a quick recap on the services we offer:
Nortel Sales and Services - Norstar, Option 11, Option 61 and Nortel parts.
trixbox Pro IP PBX
Disaster Recovery and Data Back-Up
Accessories and parts - Headsets, Battery Back-Ups Music on Hold Services.
AT&T Voice & Data Services
Cbeyond Voice Services
So that's a quick recap of our services and what we do.
Stay tuned and I'll get you update about our products and services.
RG
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