Should you update your computer or not? For the average home user we would recommend updating the system as often as possible to make sure you are protected against known vulnerabilities, however, for the business user their work computer presents a more challenging decision because the uptime of the system is crucial to the business’ daily operations. When updating any piece of software, especially the operating system, one runs the risk of compromising the operating system, an installed aplication, or a driver. You may run a patch for the operating system (OS) which causes an important application not to function properly. One example of this was when Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows XP; although this was a Critical Update that addressed important vulnerabilities it caused significant issues for many applications. Many of these issues were not addressed until Microsoft released Service Pack 2 (SP2) months later. This was a minor nuisance for the average user but was a critical business issue for many organizations. The organizations that were managed by a knowledgeable IT staff did not suffer the same complications as those that were not. Many IT managers, and Managed IT Service Providers did not allow the Service Pack to be deployed because of the various issues they uncovered during testing. This was a relatively easy issue to diagnose because the update was so big that when something broke it was very evident what the issue was. However, there are many smaller patches and updates which get installed silently that have the potential to cause similar issues and are very difficult to diagnose; add to this the variety of environments that are out there and you get an almost endless number of possible outcomes.

A good Managed IT Services organization or IT department runs their own patch/update server and tests every update against the specific environment in question before approving the deployment of the update. This allows the IT administrators to ensure all approved patches will not interfere with the business processes.

Another reason for having professionals manage your patches/updates is that just because a patch is made available by the software manufacturer does not mean that the specific environment requires it. IT administrators can read the release notes put out by the software company and decide whether the patch is important enough to deploy. Reading and understanding the release notes is why a professional is needed to decipher between what should be installed and what should not. As with any profession (doctor, lawyer, accountant) you have to be able to understand the notes and correlate them to the environment in questions, once you understand the ramifications you can decide what is valuable to that specific environment and what is not.

The final and equally as important point occurs when something goes wrong; most users may not be able to reverse the damages caused by an update and may find themselves with a non-functioning system. This would affect the business’ work flow for some time and may even require a professional to intervene in order rectify the situation.

The best thing a business owner can do is to concentrate on what they do best and leave the IT management to seasoned professionals.

Many small businesses view IT and IT services as a break-fix scenario, meaning they call for help only when the computer issue has made it impossible to continue with their business function. The usual approach is to then pay an “IT Guy” or IT Company for the time they invest to fix these issues. This is a traditional hourly billing or “T&M” (Time & Materials) approach that many organizations still use today.

The new and more cost effective approach is a managed services contract where support for all the computers in the organization is covered under a fixed monthly contract. Some IT companies (like AIO) include additional features such as antivirus protection, system monitoring, software and hardware updates, computer maintenance, and remote backups in the monthly fee. This is unlike the traditional T&M arrangements where nothing is included and everything is billable.

So why do companies opt for the T&M approach? It’s simple; just adding up the annual costs of the T&M support doesn’t paint the full picture. You have to add up all the costs associated with poor performance and down time (including the underlying costs such as lack of employee productivity). A computer network runs more efficiently and has far less down time when all the pieces are managed and maintained proactively; as they would be covered under a managed services contract.

Below is a real example of a recent T&M customer encounter. We have highlighted the issues found and the time it took to resolve them:

A T&M engagement like this would have cost the customer an estimated $1,900 for almost a half a week’s worth of labor hours in addition to the cost associated with the 2+ days of down time. The down time could have been even more depending on the availability of the tech. This would, in turn, increase the total cost based on based on the average revenue loss that computer represents.

The same laptop covered under a managed services agreement would only cost the customer between $100/month and $150/month (depending on the Service Level Agreement); much less than this one T&M engagement represents. Add to this a Service Level Agreement (SLA) – a guaranteed response/resolution time – something managed service companies provide for in their contracts – and you also get a quicker resolution resulting in far less downtime.

The real cost to the business is the downtime and poor performance which are variables few organizations actually take into account. Managed services clients prosper from the fact that their systems work efficiently and downtime is minimized.

A managed services contract is similar to taking your T&M support costs and spreading them over time while at the same time reducing the amount of possible downtime by increasing the amount of proactive maintenance on the computers and adding additional features such as monitoring, maintenance, and remote backups. It becomes a win for the end user as well as for the customer’s bottom line.

Click here to read the entire article online.

Click here to view the article on page 71 of Texas Construction Magazine.

Leading PC firm selects AIO as direct rep for Lenovo products

DALLAS, Texas (Feb. 12, 2010) – Dallas-based All-In-One Network Solutions (AIO) has partnered with Lenovo, the Raleigh, N.C. based personal computer giant to recreate the purchasing experience for the Small-to Medium-sized Business (SMB) market.

“Lenovoportal.com is the new website purchasing destination for the SMB.” says AIO Vice President of Sales, Trey Scalf. “Lenovo has tasked the reseller with improving the client purchasing experience. As a Lenovo Business Partner, we chose to design the customer experience with a standard of excellence.

Lenovo is now the world’s fourth-largest PC vendor as a result of an acquisition of the IBM Personal Computing Division, in May 2005. Since then, Lenovo had been selling directly to the SMB until changing its business model late last year “This reorganization has grown, especially with companies like AIO, which in many cases for our customers, orders can be shipped the same day”, said Charles Damron, Lenovo Inside Channel Representative. “We wanted to identify partners to help reach our end-user customers more effectively and more proactively than we were able to do in the past,” Damron, said. “This opens up an avenue for a closer relationship with the small business community and also gives those end-user customers a personal touch from a Lenovo Partner.”

“For the SMB, we are now the distribution arm of Lenovo. We have inventory ready to roll and ship,” stated AIO President and CEO Michael Ehrich. “This new model provides Lenovo customers more efficient access to products as well as our pre-sales and technical staff. The old purchasing model doesn’t meet client needs effectively any longer…most businesspeople are working real-time, delaying purchases until a critical need arises, and when they have a need, its now,” Ehrich added. AIO is proactively engaged in reaching out to the Lenovo client base. “We need to make them aware of the transition to our partnership and cultivate the existing Lenovo relationships. Now, when an SMB customer places their next call for Lenovo products, they can call AIO”.

The AIO created site www.lenovoportal.com is a website anyone can visit, register with no obligation, and then search for in-stock items. “It is very usable and allows customers to create an account, find Lenovo products, generate quotes and place orders,” Ehrich added.

About Lenovo:
Lenovo is dedicated to building exceptionally engineered personal computers. Lenovo’s business model is built on innovation, operational efficiency and customer satisfaction as well as a focus on investment in emerging markets. Formed by Lenovo Group’s acquisition of the former IBM Personal Computing Division, Lenovo is a new world company that develops, manufactures and markets reliable, high-quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services worldwide.

About AIO:
All‐In‐One Network Solutions, Inc. is a global Information Technology solution provider with sales and service offices strategically located throughout the U.S. Managed IT Services (IT Outsourcing) and End‐to‐End IT Solutions are the core competencies and business focus.

Click here to download a copy of the press release (pdf).

Click here to read the entire article.

Ruben Amarasingham, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, conducted a study that queried 41 Texas hospitals about their use of technology. The study looked at physicians’ interaction with IT systems and followed 167,233 patients with statistics about in-hospital deaths, complications, costs, and length of stay.

According to a report at ModernMedicine.com, the patients whose doctors made use of database records were more likely not to die in the hospital, and less likely to suffer from complications. In addition, the more involved doctors were with information technology overalls, the lower the hospitals’ costs were. Read more at ModernMedicine.com.

Dr. Tarek El-Sadany, Senior Advisor to the Minister of Communications & Information Technology of Egypt for Technology Policies, wants to expand Egypt’s IT industry. He says that Egypt is a great choice for both European countries and the United States: Egypt is GMT +2, so it’s convenient for Europe, and Egypt is closer than India to the United States.  And did you know that Egypt doesn’t observe the traditional “weekend” that Americans do? Instead, Egyptian workers stay home on Thursday and Friday, which means finding people to staff call centers on the weekend is not a problem.

For a long time, Egypt wasn’t even on the radar for IT outsourcing. But recently, it made Gartner’s top 30 list of countries best suited to providing outsourcing services.  Egypt is marketing itself aggressively, and big US companies are starting to sit up and take notice: Intel has announced it will open offices in Egypt.

At this year’s VMworld Europe keynote address, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod says that one day, thousands of virtual machines will be manageable through one management console. Herrod hopes that day won’t be too far off, what with virtual machines these days being tapped with four virtual CPUs, up to 64 GB of RAM, and 9 Gbps of bandwidth.

Harrod says that machines using up to 8 CPUs should be commonplace in the near future. Still, if you’re not convinced yet that virtualization is the norm for coming years, perhaps nothing will move you.

Cloud computing

VMworld Europe is in full swing, and VMware is taking the opportunity to talk to its captive audience about vSphere, the virtualization operating system that’s making competitors out of companies like Microsoft and Red Hat.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz said “Our customers want the plumbing to disappear – in the datacenter, on the desktop and in the cloud – so they can focus their staff time and IT budget on delivering business value. They want cloud-like services so they can act as hosting providers to their internal customers….. The VMware vSphere generation of products, which are currently in development, will be a new class of software that delivers on this strategy. And, as customers become cloud-enabled, they will have the flexibility to securely and efficiently expand their internal clouds to tap the resources offered by external service providers through our VMware vCloud Initiative.”

If everything goes as it should, vSphere will stop being vaporware by the end of the year.

In a brow-furrowing turn of events, troubled outsourcer Satyam has asked the government to allow it to dismiss its auditor Price-Waterhouse and the government has given permission.  Price-Waterhouse had been checking on Satyam for over eight years, but stepped aside recently when asked to do so by the new government appointed board of Satyam, which got into trouble for book-cooking and false profit inflation. The problem is that because the fraud went on for so long without detection, PW is now coming under scrutiny on the chance that it had some kind of role in the fraud. In fact, to date, two Price-Waterhouse staffers have been arrested, according to information published in the International Business Times.  Meanwhile, according to the report, life goes on for Satyam. “Satyam’s government-appointed board said it had bagged fresh purchase orders and work extensions to the tune of $250 million since January 7, including a single order of $50 million,” the report states.