According to Forbes Tech contributor Louis Columbus, “U.S.-based companies are budgeting $1.77M for cloud spending in 2017. He is so excited about it he suggests we Tweet this information, twice. There’s lots of chatter about the shift to cloud computing, and certainly, there will be profits made offering cloud services. Is it a revolution or just a change of location?
Old IT hardware has a habit of multiplying. One afternoon during a system upgrade, you put last year’s server in the back of a maintenance closet. Before you know it, the mop bucket ends up in the hallway because the closet has become the IT graveyard. Most businesses avoid thinking about the closet, storeroom, or warehouse full of old IT hardware. Unused servers, switches, and routers are the dust bunnies of the IT world. Everyone knows they’re there, but no one want to talk about them.
In IT, the words End-of-Life loom large. A manufacturer can designate a product end-of-life for no other reason than they are no longer supporting it. Manufacturers describe products as EOL long before the end of their usable service. Even the Wikipedia definition clarifies; EOL indicates, “the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor’s point of view).” That would be the same vendor hoping to sell new hardware.
Do a google search for “damaged package” and you will find hundreds of photographs of carelessly packed shipments destroyed in transit. We have all received shipments from major on-line resellers with questionable packaging—sensitive equipment thrown loosely in a box with an air pillow that doesn’t quite fill the empty space. Packing is just one of the concerns when you buy on-line, even from trusted sellers. When shipping electronics, packaging is critically important, which is why Frontier Computer Corp. maintain our own, in-house department for packing and shipping.
IT administrators are integrating extremely powerful networking solutions into their data centers for a fraction of the cost of purchasing new solutions. Refurbished networking equipment can deliver similar performance to new hardware for 50% or less than retail.
Oracle strengthened its position as the leader in the race to the cloud with their purchase of NetSuite. The $9.3 billion dollar acquisition cements Oracle’s position as the biggest provider of Software as a Service in the industry. NetSuite’s market share in small to mid-sized companies complements Oracle’s strength with enterprise companies and governments. The purchase gives Oracle a diverse software portfolio of affordable cloud solutions for businesses of all sizes, across almost every industry.
When your employees cannot connect to your server, the Internet, or their clients, they are essentially not working. Every failed connection, every minute down, is lost productivity and wasted payroll. Any successful enterprise requires stable, reliable connectivity. In point of purchase, self-checkout, and other customer-operated applications a lost connection is simply not acceptable. However, maintaining a constant, secure, fast connection has been a massive undertaking for businesses all over the world.