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SpectorSoft: Weekly Training

We had SpectorSoft come over for a visit to MNJ Technologies recently. SpectorSoft has been over before and let me tell you, I am scared to death every time I hear their name. SpectorSoft really only does one thing and that is to give your IT admin complete insight into what you do on your desktop or notebook. With this software you can see everything that a single user is doing or you can pull it back and use that info to see what an entire network is doing. Very scary and very informative data. SpectorSoft records: Web sites visited, Online Searches, Emails (including webmail), Chats/IM, Keystrokes, Program Activity, Network Activity, File Transfers, Documents Saved/Printer and Screen Snapshots.

Pros:

-By far the best software that I have seen for monitoring users. This software will give you a detailed list of time spend on each individual site, site/application category, or even screen shots from each site. This includes both active and passive time.

-Very small footprint. Also, administrators can choose if icon is visible to end users.

- Very robust dashboard that can display up to 30 different reports.

- License options: per user, concurrent or subscription

Negs (besides scaring me to death):

-No mobile devices

-Can handle Citrix, but nothing is yet created for VDI.

While I am personally scared by the Big Brother nature of SpectorSoft, I am equally impressed with it’s performance. For whatever your reason: increase in productivity, investigations about violations, policy enforcement, “insider” theft protection, or compliance requirements, SpectorSoft offers a number of different views and reports to make the job easier. A great product who doesn’t really have competition.

BTI (Battery Technology, Inc): Weekly Training

This week BTI (Battery Technology Inc) came to MNJ Technologies to share the wonders of 3^rd party batteries.  I have used BTI for years and it has always been a good experience.  Unlike OEM battery manufacturers, BTI quickly picks up their phones for either VARs or end users.  Since batteries are their business, they are able to give very focused feedback and quality tech support. BTI has batteries for a number of items (UPS’, notebooks, cameras/camcorders,…), however, I primarily use them for UPS battery replacements.  Needless to say, I’ve been a big fan of BTI for a long time and will continue to let my customers know about them for the following reasons:

 Pros:

-First and foremost, cost.  BTI UPS replacement batteries are anywhere from 10-45% less than their OEM counterparts. 

-Quality.  While BTI has the same warranty as OEM (usually APC in many of my orders), I have never had to work with a return for a DOA or battery with short life.

-Configurator.  The BTI configurator is extremely easy to use.  You can either enter text into the search field or use a series of drop down menu’s to get the exact unit you need.

-Availability.  Unlike OEMs who depend on purchase cycles and can often be out of stock, since BTI manufactures everything themselves, they always have stock on hand, or at the very worst, a week(to custom create) away.

-Built in the US (so they are trade compliant)

-They completely reverse engineer their batteries.  This is key for notebook batteries so that both the color and slot/grooving is exactly the same as an OEM battery.

-A full line of batteries, they have most of the APC RBC product line except for the big boys for Symetra’s and such.  The two remaining batteries they don’t have RBC 31 and RBC 32 are coming next month.

Con:

-There is one con, that is really the only reason I suggest OEM batteries to my customers and that is the return of old batteries.  APC sends a call tag with their replacement batteries, so a customer can return the old dead battery.  BTI does not.  BTI does send a return shipping label, but they don’t pay the return freight.  These batteries can get heavy, so that can be a problem.  Usually, the saving far outweighs the cost of return shipping, but it’s an extra step.  The other alternative BTI offers, is they share with the customer the closest local battery return center.  Most Sears or  Batteries Plus locations will take batteries back (for free), but you just have to drop them off.  It’s a small thing, but some customers are willing to pay the extra 10-45% premium to not have to worry about the battery return.

A good training by BTI.  I was pleased to hear about RBC 31 and RBC 32 coming into their portfolio.  They also mentioned that they are expanding into projector bulbs.  This is a great market due to the high cost and margin that OEM’s make on bulbs, but I have not seen any pricing yet, so I’m not sure if it will be a benefit to customer yet.

TrendWatch

Here is a fun little widget from Trend that helps you find out the safety of a given site.

 

HP and 3Com merge- projection and customer effect

 

 

 

So as almost everyone has heard by now, HP has purchased 3Com for $2.7B. While all of the final signatures are not in place, it looks like this is most definitely going to happen. Yesterday I received an email from Alex Dobson, the VP and GM of 3Com North America (full letter is below). The letter was focused on sales partners like myself, but it got me thinking about how this is going to effect my customers.

 First , the 30,000 ft overview from everything I can collect so far. When this goes through, HP will have enterprise Ethernet switching options (through H3C), routing, VoIP, security (through TippingPoint) and even telephony (through NBX). So HP has the potential to go from the core to the edge with products in almost every category in the data center. I don’t think HP is going to rebrand and start selling all of these products (especially the NBX). They might become integrated into current HP products or a new product line, but HP is definitely not going to start off by biting off more than they can chew. In the near future, I expect HP to leave 3Com alone and not force the companies to merge quickly and have similar product lines compete. I think HP has learned this lesson from EVA and MSA which competed with each other (and still do) at the detriment of HP.

This acquisition will give HP the horsepower to be more competitive with Cisco’s networking superiority (and ego). Cisco is very comfortable with their 70% of the networking share. Their annual profit shows that they do not feel as if they have competition and can price accordingly. The new HP/3Com line should be able to change some of that. With 3Com technologies, over the next few years HP should be able to product a line of products that are comparable to most of Cisco’s networking line-up. HP (and 3Com) have both done a very good job competing with low end Cisco and price (including warranty/support price) has been a large driver in that. If HP can start to move up the enterprise network ladder, I think they can provide comparable and much less expensive products than Cisco. This will either provide a large market share increase for HP or a drop in price from Cisco (probably a combination of both).

 From the perspective of the customer, not much will change right now. According to this letter from Alex Dobson, it’s business as usual at 3Com (probably not so, but they are at least selling like it is). If this acquisition moves along the standard track, HP will probably begin phasing out 3Com products over the next 12-24 months. However, HP will probably keep a decent number of 3Com techs around to support the legacy 3Com products well past the product end of life. How well this service goes will weigh in heavily on the 3Com customer’s decision to move to HP or Cisco. I’m guessing HP ProCurve will continue with their same immediate product line releases as well. For the next 12-18 months I’m guessing the only change will really occur for current 3Com customers who will see their current products go end-of-life. They will need to make an HP or Cisco (or Brocade) decision for their immediate needs.

The real customer change will happen around the 2011 time. I’m guessing that is when HP will begin releasing Enterprise networking that will give customers an HP or Cisco choice. Current Cisco customers should see a price break as Cisco will need to drop their prices to stay in line with HP. I don’t think SMARTnet is going anywhere and it shouldn’t, while it isn’t free like other manufacturers support, it has value comparable to it’s price. At that same time, unhappy Cisco customers along with non-Cisco customers will then have a choice to look at the HP line. While Cisco has always dedicated a lot of budget towards R&D, we will see a lot of HP focus on R&D for this new networking product line and that should bring about some great new product features. This development fight will only benefit everyone.

The wild card here is Cisco’s new SmallBiz Pro product line. Cisco made a pre-emptive (psychic… maybe) move and came out with a product line for small business that competes directly with HP ProCurve and 3Com’s line. This Cisco product addresses a number of customer complaints (support price and GUI interface) but still has Cisco engineering. I feel as if Cisco’s migration of the small business line along with their enterprise products might keep Cisco a step ahead of HP on this one.

No matter how you slice it, the 3Com acquisition is going to change the entire networking world. Customer’s will be the ones who benefit most as this will bring about choice. And this choice will yield lower prices, increased product development and a merged network structure that will allow products to play nice with each other.

 

 

VMWare vSphere upgrades – why and why now

 

The VMWare vSphere upgrades are out and from what I have heard from customers, they are pretty confusing.  It probably doesn’t help that VMWare is changing its mind on the lifecycle of the vSphere Enterprise.  So here is the breakdown on what is happening with vSphere Enterprise and vSphere Enterprise Plus, the differences between the versions and what migrations that may or may not want to be performed.

First of all, it’s rumor control time.  When vSphere Enterprise Plus was announced, VMWare said that after December 15^th, vSphere Enterprise would no longer be sold.  That means that any customers who are currently standardized on vSphere Enterprise would be forced to pay the premium for Enterprise Plus on all future licenses.  Well the masses spoke (more of screamed from the rooftops) and VMWare listened.  Last month VMWare announced that they would remove the end-of-life on Enterprise. 

So now that Enterprise has been given a stay of execution, the real question is do you want to upgrade to Enterprise Plus.  And  it would behoove one to answer quickly, because there are pricing benefits if you do so (more on that later). 

Assuming everyone is on vSphere Enterprise, here are the additional features in vSphere Enterprise Plus according to the key feature and benefit list

New – Centralized virtual network management.—

Simplify provisioning and administration of virtual

networking through a centralized interface. Create and

manage a single distributed switch with distributed

virtual port groups than span a Datacenter wide array

 of ESX/ESXi hosts.

New – Support for Private VLANs. Simplified setup

and monitoring of Private VLANs, segmenting network

traffic easily in shared environments

New – Network VMotion. Retain network runtime state

centrally as virtual machines live migrate from server to

server in shared DRS clusters; simplifying network

troubleshooting and monitoring.

New -Bidirectional Network Traffic Shaper. Enhance

virtual machine traffic prioritization and management

through bidirectional rate limiting

New -Third Party Distributed Virtual Switches. Enable

Monitoring and control of your virtual networking

environments through the familiar interfaces of third party

networking tools, with the capability to plug in third

party software virtual switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1

000V.(note: third party virtual switches are purchased separately.)

New – vStorage APIs for Multi-pathing. Support for 3rd party

Multipathing plug-in extension modules from vendors such

as EMC,  Dell/Equallogic and others to enhance high availability

and load balancing for critical applications.

New 8-way Virtual SMP™. Enable a single virtual machine to

simultaneously use up to 8 logical processors on your server

(increased from 4 for VMware ESX/ESXi 3). With 8-way Virtual

SMP even the most processor intensive software applications

like databases and messaging servers can be virtualized.

Resource pool access control and delegation. Secure resource

allocation at different levels in the company. For example, when a

top-level administrator makes a resource pool available to a

department-level use, all virtual machine creation and management

can be performed by the department administrator within the

boundaries assigned to the resource pool.

New – Host Profiles Establish standard configurations for

VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and automate compliance to these

configurations, simplifying operational management of large scale

environments and reducing errors due to misconfigurations.

So if you take a look at the features in vSphere Enterprise Plus and decide that Plus is the platform for you, I highly suggest you start your upgrade before December 15^th.  From now (well since May) until Dec 15^th all upgrade licenses, including vSphere, are over 50% off.  In fact, the PDF below will give you the upgrade skus for the entire VMWare server line.  My customers have mostly expressed relief that they will not be forced to upgrade to Enterprise Plus and are planning on sticking with the Enterprise line.  For those of you who do with to upgrade, act now!

 

Weekly Training: Ricoh and the GelSprinter printer

This week Ricoh came in house to talk about a single printer line, the GelSprinter. While I have heard of the GelSprinter before, I didn’t know much beyond “a low price, high quality ink”. Well after 40 minutes meeting with Ricoh, I’m happy to report that my initial thoughts were both right on yet not even close. The GelSprinter is a mixture between an ink and laser jet printer. It takes the low cost of ink and cartridges and mixes them with the printing quality and belt transfer system of laser to create a low cost B/W and color print that is almost-laser quality. And all of this is at a price of either $199 or $279. That couldn’t come at a better time, with HP LaserJet printers still MIA, and with a reported 90,000 units on backorder, it might be late Jan 2010 before printers become available.

Pros:

-Price/Quality ratio. This is probably the best bang for your buck out there. Print qualities are far superior to ink, and almost-laser, with prices that match a mid-level ink printer.

-Waterproof prints: I’m serious on this one, the viscous ink (which gives the GelSprinter it’s quality) also keep a color image on the page after being soaked in water. While this does not have a ton of use in most applications, there are niche applications where this could be crucial (think about advertisements or flyers that are left outside when it rains).

-Vacuum sealed ink carts: While normal ink carts will start to try out if not used for a week or so, these vacuum sealed carts will last much longer. -Multiple quality options: This printer gives you two color options. A standard color and a “level color mode” which provides a draft-style color print using half the color ink.

-Very low cost on consumables (3 colors and black)

Cons:

-While close, still not laser quality.

-Potentially a new printer manufacturer for a customer, which means non-standard supplies

-10K monthly duty cycle may limit a number of business applications

 Overall, I think this is a great niche printer. While I don’t think Fortune 500 companies are going to replace their entire fleet with GelSprinters, I think the GelSprinters have a very respectable place in a business, school or remote location and can handle the color printing jobs of most departments that aren’t named “Marketing”. The cost and availability make this a very viable option for anyone who is looking to bring down the cost of color printing or is looking for something to “hold them over” until HP gets its act together with their IPG line.

Managed Print Services- solution of the year?

Over the past 6 months the murmur regarding managed print services has been getting louder.  And now it has become an all out scream.  This has fallen directly in line with the 2009 business mantra of “do more, repurpose employees, save money and do it NOW”.  While there are a number of partners now in this game, Xerox seems to have taken the lead and is growing fast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the early part of this decade the term “paperless” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue .  Now people have realized that paper will never go away entirely. In fact, new 2009 estimates say that an average worker will be responsible for 3,000-15,000 pages per year.  Michael Scott’s commercial on The Office, might be more spot on than the joke it was initially supposed to be “Limitless paper in a paperless world.”  In the current paperless world, companies are responsible for hundreds of thousands of pages per year and the current strategy is failing miserably.

Problems with the current printing landscape:

- Companies purchase and roll out far too many printers for an environment.  The band-aid quick fix clogs the system and results in overconsumption of toners and excess use of IT staff to manage.

- Printers account for 25-30% of help desk calls. 

- Typical IT staffs do not have printer technicians.  They usually have IT generalists who end up learning as they go.  This is a poor allocation of IT staff since they are spending excessive time figuring out printer issues instead of using their IT knowledge for company driven initiatives.

- Lack of control over spending.  Printer consumables are not consistently ordered, IT staff spend countless paid hours working with printers, when a printer line ends the company is stuck with the remaining supplies. 

Now here are some ways that managed print services can alleviate these problems:

- strategically placed print units that maximize user productivity and usually decrease the number of units in the environment.

- Cost control.  Managed print services work on a cost-per-print basis, so total monthly usage can become budgeted as a business decision and not as an ad-hoc purchase.  Hourly employees will not need to spend time servicing units or ordering product.

- IT staffs can become more efficient by spending their time in skill specific IT initiatives and plans without the interruption of help desk calls for product in which they have no training.

The fix for all of these ailments is pretty simple.  A managed print service partner will work with you to get a reading on your print volume and types of prints.  The partner will then use this data to give you a larger 30,000ft overview of your print environment and projections.  Typically this includes reallocation of print resources so you can optimize the printers and multi-function units you already own.  If you see the benefit, you can then partner with the managed print service partner to handle your print needs.  Outsourcing desktop printing services takes the uncontrolled spending and usage of printers and ropes it into a manageable and easily budgeted process.

IT Forecast-strategic technology in 2010

In the first part of our breakdown of Gartner’s 2010 projections, we looked at total IT budget moves for next year and beyond.  Today I want to talk about Gartner’s Strategic Technologies in 2010.  They are pretty similar to their 2009 Technologies, but the changes are noteworthy.

 

 

The top 10 Strategic Technologies are:

     Cloud Computing

     Advanced Analytics

     Client Computing

     IT for Green

    Reshaping the Data Center

     Social Computing

     Security – Activity Monitoring

     Flash Memory

     Virtualization for Availability

The first thing I notice when looking at this list is that outside of the emergence of Flash Memory the list is not focused on new/hot hardware as much as it is on optimizing current hardware and software that increases productivity.  This falls in line with Gartner’s previous projections that  currently show large declines followed by flat hardware growth going forward.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a pretty nifty chart that shows the movement from 2009 technologies to 2010 technologies.  When I check it out the first thing that surprises me is that cloud computing has moved to #1 on the list.  Everything I have seen on the mid-sized to enterprise side has shown that businesses are very reluctant to move their data onto the cloud, even Tier2.  Far be it from me to get into a disagreement with Gartner, they are much smarter than I, but I just don’t see the cloud entering the mid-sized to enterprise space for a few more years (even if it should be there today).  There just aren’t enough successes out there yet.  I’m concerned with my differed option and I’ll do some follow-up in the next few weeks.

The other thing that jumps off the page is the dropping of Unified Communications and Servers from the Top 10.  While I think some of the drop in Servers may fall in the realm of decreased hardware.  However, I think they both fall because customers simply are cutting all of the unnecessary fat.  UC and Server upgrades are far from being fat, but I feel that when it comes to absolute necessities for a budget year, those are easy cuts.

Virtualization, as a category unto itself, has dropped from #1 in 2009, to being part of a number of different categories in 2010.  This doesn’t surprise me one bit.  The mythical term of “virtualization” that was difficult to grasp in 2004 and 2005 has finally been realized and now broken up into smaller chunks.  I have a feeling that this is the same know-it’s-good-but-not-quite-sure-how-to-use-it lifecycle that cloud computing may follow.  However, virtualization was essentially a technology driven by a single source, VMware, in its infancy; whereas cloud computing is the exact opposite and is being driven by hundreds or thousands of individual partners.

Looking at the Gartner projected strategic technologies for 2010 I see it being a year of long nights for CIOs and IT Directors.  Searching similar products for feature benefits is going away and 2010 will have  more conceptual changes making their way into daily IT conversations.  While a huge pain, I think these new technologies will drive huge savings both in budget and man hours.

IT forecast- 2010 and beyond

 

Gartner has come out with 2 huge projections this week regarding both the short term and long term IT forecast as well as top initiatives for 2010.  While they are not pretty (looks like 2008 #’s wont’ be seen again until 2012), these #’s do help us to see that the next few years of IT planning and spending will need to be seen through some new eyes.  Over the next two posts I will address both of these projections.   

The first projection I would like to jump in on is a press release Gartner released on Oct 20th that discussed their 2010 fiscal projections.  According to the release, after a projected 6.9% drop in 2009, we will see a spending increase of 3.3% in 2010.  Additionally, Gartner says it will be 2012 until we see spending up to the 2008 totals. 

Peter Sondergaard, senior VP at Gartner and global head of research added the following:

“While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012.  2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.”

It looks like hardware was the hardest his category in 2009, with a projected 16.5% decrease.  This makes sense as during the “Great Budget Scare of 4th Q 2008″, cutting hardware from 2009 IT budgets was the easiest way to immediately feel as if they were saving money.  At the same time, it was the easiest way to show dollar savings to other departments across an organization.   Luckily Gartner expects hardware spending to neither increase nor decrease in 2010.  Getting a sneak peek at a few customer’s 2010 budgets, I fully agree with Gartner.

Looking forward, Gartner also focused on 3 new items that IT leaders must consider in 2010 and 3 items from 2009 that will remain important.

The new items include: 

     A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget

     Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware

     IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases

And the 2009 concepts that will continue to remain at the top of an IT leaders list will include:

     Business Intelligence

     Virtualization

     Social Media

What this means is that IT planning, procurement, sales and IT’s role in an organization is making another huge shift.  IT made it’s last major shift when the dot-com bubble burst and budgets were hacked and reformed.  The days “use it or lose it” are gone for most and were replaced with budgets in silos. Those silos were categorized by quarters and by product group and left little wiggle room for IT leaders.  I think that this next shift will mesh IT budgets even more as the Sever-budget and Desktop Budget, which was handed by an IT director and CIO, will be replaced with a Managed Printing Budget, Infrastructure Budget and Business Continuity Budget which will incorporate CFO’s, CEO’s and become a part an entire corporate objective.