Over the years of providing IT support services to clients, friends, and family I have come across several constants, the one most glaring being the desire to get things done cheaply. Now, this is not a always a bad thing, especially in a recovering economy that still has a way to go. All of us whether business or residential consumers are looking for the smallest hit on our wallets/pocketbooks in any way we can. While this is basically a good approach in some things, it can be a disaster when it comes to your business technology. Here are five reasons why going cheap in your business technology lowers your chances of business success. 1. Buying low-end consumer-grade equipment or overly-used equipment can and in most cases will end up costing you more than the original business-grade equipment you passed up. The fact is that consumer level equipment is not built to the same standards of it's business level counter-parts. That doesn't mean that consumer equipment is junk, not at all. It does mean that consumer equipment is not built to withstand that daily rigors of a regional sales executive traveling to 10 cities a month and having their laptop go through multiple airports and baggage handlers.  2. Business-grade equipment may cost you more upfront, but consumer-grade equipment will cost you more in the long run. Business-grade equipment tends to cost more than consumer-grade equipment because of the higher quaility components, and it's quality of build. They tend to be constructed...

If you read most of the market research data it tells you that small business tends to move faster on newer, cutting edge technologies and applications than their larger, Fortune 500 counterparts over the next three years or so.

After taking a pass, in most cases, on Windows Vista small busineses are starting to seriously consider moving away from Windows XP and migrate to the new Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft Vice President Brad Brooks said in an interview on Tuesday. "Windows Vista was a generation of the operating system that was passed up by small businesses; they stayed with XP," Brooks said. "We're seeing a lot of trends at retail that are telling us small businesses are starting to come back in the marketplace." According to Brooks, office and electronics retailers are starting to stock more PCs with the professional version of Windows 7. "That's a good early indicator for us." Earlier on Tuesday, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein noted that the company has now sold 90 million licenses of Windows 7, up from the more than 60 million it had sold as of the end of December. "Windows 7 is growing incredibly fast right now for us," Brooks said, noting that the only electronics category that saw more sales in the holidays than Windows notebooks were flat-panel TVs. Brooks said that while Microsoft continues its big advertising push for Windows 7, it is also seeing the kind of marketing it can't buy (and hasn't had for a while)--word of mouth. "We are sitting in a very different position than where we have been in the last three years," he said. John's take on it As a user of the Windows 7 operating system, I have to add...

Your Clients Need You Available In the current business climate one thing is clear, the competition for customers is at an all time high. For every customer you have, there are 5-10 of your competitors out there trying to take them from you. In your daily routine of meetings and hopefully exceeding customer expectations, the last thing you need to worry about is what your technology infrastructure is doing. CEO's, CIO's and others are under a great deal of pressure to make every penny spent on IT and IT infrastructure count and worth it's weight. Meeting these expectations can be extremely difficult, most especially for startups, and businesses in their infancy. Having an in-house IT solution can be successful, but can also cost a great deal and can eat into the profit margin of a business very quickly. That's where the managed services solution comes in. What Are Managed Services? Managed services (as defined by Dr. Gerard Macioce) is the practice of transferring day-to-day related management responsibility as a strategic method for improved effective and efficient operations. This means that managed services help you save time and resources', leaving you to focus on your business and your clients, and that is where your focus needs to be. BY implementing a managed services solution you can regain control of IT costs, IT issue, and IT reporting. The client is in control, you as a client decide what services and/or solutions are accessed, how they are accessed and delivered (helpdesk, network monitoring, on-site...