The office next door to mine is no bigger, about 270 usable square feet of space. For some that’s a refrigerator but for us it’s 3 people comfortably working in a rapidly-evolving modern office. Copper lines give way to one single DSL connection on which we use Skype, Google or Yahoo phone, and Vonage to make all of our calls. We are an experiment in shoestring technology to produce a premium product. We combine patience and technical savvy to overcome what technology is not yet perfected, and for when it has we are in awe of it.
And for my neighbor, it’s a bunch of rackmounted servers and 24/7 air conditioning–yes, even in the winter. And, when you pass his office door, the unmistakeable networking room hum can be deafening for us who are used to only the clatter generated by typing or clicking, and Ambient sound generated by an iphone application–this week’s background sound, the French cafe.
And here we are in the last quarter of 2009, and fast-approaching the year of the cloud, the year in which we trade in all of our servers for network drives, our Windows Server for Google Apps, and the expensive subnotebook for either a Netbook or an iPhone or both.
The rack-mounted status symbol is going out the door for something that is already remotely managed coming with 99.9% guaranteed uptime SLA and for a mere $50 per user per year! Save money and focus on running your business.
We are recommending giving the cloud a chance and to not get a traditional Windows Server. Though we can support you either way, you can save a bundle of money at this time on hardware and software that you might simply not need. And that’s okay.
We are in the process of reinventing Pillar. As the year draws to an end, we will spend most of December completing our own internal projects that will make us leaner, more nimble, more competitive, more visible and more profitable. These same tactics are what we will pass on to our customers. Some will kick and scream, others will be happy to hear it. This is the future, why wait for it to arrive?
Cheers,
Richard Lee
