1. Apple failure in the enterprise. 2012 will be the start of a general decline for Apple. While it will be subtle and not a function of revenue, the stock price cannot remain so high. Windows and Droid offer better features and more choice at a fraction of iPhone. With no tools to manage iPads in Active Directory, Microsoft will have a distinct advantage in the enterprise for Windows 8 tablets (without the need for the problematic iTunes) at less cost, and easier to use for consumers as well. The huge gamble with digital publishing will face stiff resistance from government, Google, and Amazon.
2. Windows will have 35% of smartphone market share, mainly because of choice of manufacturers (addition of Nokia worldwide), easier to use Metro style interface, and more productivity without third-party apps. Apple will still lead, followed closely by Droid, and then Windows. 2012 will be the swing year because of the high cost of iPhone with no foreseeable advantages in features.
3. Windows 8 Tablet takes the enterprise. Manageability will be key with Active Directory, along with integration for on-premise and online services from Office 365 to CRM and Dynamics (all without downloading apps).
4. SEO for everyone. You’ve been hearing the XM spots about the top 5 things all business owners should know to dominate the competition, but 2012 will mark an exponential explosion of content on the web. For those wanting to compete, the 10 page brochure site will be replaced by the average 125 page site for customers.
5. Big data forces storage recognition and online backup use. The average small to medium-sized business with have 2-3 terabytes of data in which technology like Storage Attached Networks (SAN) must be used for quick restore from snapshots and cheap replication for off-site backup. Tapes will take days for backup and failure rate and cost will be too great.
6. Social media rules as content marketing. Video will be a key differentiator along with learning the ins and outs of the major platforms. Don’t join the conversation. Listen to customers, monitor competitors, and broadcast useful content for visits to your site.
7. Software as a service or cloud computing will overtake on-premise options. Whether it is Office 365 or Google Apps, that business continuity thing that everyone wants but was too complex and expensive is now in reach (not including at less cost than on-premise with no upgrade concerns and better availability and security.
8. IT jobs are changing and many will be lost. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up in IT. That huge area of infrastructure need will be decimated by online services and everyone in the industry must bring true business skills to the table and do brain work to help your organization.
9. Managed Services will handle the majority of most business IT needs with more knowledge and resources at less cost than training, retaining, and growing full IT staffs.
10. Mayan Calendar will start over. Or maybe it won’t, but the world is definitely not going to end.

It’s time again for Matrixforce to earnestly thank and congratulate our clients for their loyalty and business savvy. We all endured blizzards, severe storms, tornadoes, sweltering heat, and now earthquakes – with the pattern seemingly poised to start again in 2012. A matching pattern happened for the economy with deep recession to limited recovery and now flat uncertainty with the pending Presidential election. 2011 was defined by 3 key trends:

1) Cloud Computing doubled over last year making Matrixforce one of the world’s leading cloud providers. It takes a user base of more than 5,000 users before cloud computing is a viable business, but this model showcases our business productivity expertise beyond just technology infrastructure and offers a win-win for lower cost for us and clients. Our Matrixforce Orbit clients have escaped the upgrades, maintenance, and backup and recovery of critical communications and key data for an average of 50% savings versus on-premise infrastructure. Start a free 30 day trial today.

2) Online Backup also increased several nearly three-fold versus last year as clients scrambled to get critical data offsite for less cost and better security. Organizations no longer need a secondary site for failover with the dual maintenance, cost, and risk. Maybe it’s time to review your specific needs?

3) Managed Services again grew nearly 25% this year as some clients decided to take control of IT and others decided to give existing IT staff much-needed help. The first group enjoyed an average 46% savings over existing support and the latter enjoyed a win/win of reducing cost and having internal IT staff focus on brain work of helping move the organization forward with more time for end-user customer service. Unlike other competitors, these clients enjoy a 34 year firm history of providing some of the world’s leading IT strategy and consulting along with Matrixforce Delta proprietary methodology resulting in over 3,000 successful client projects.

2012 looks to be more of the same as customers continue to look for savings in operations. Please contact Matrixforce at (918) 622-1167 Option 3 or sales@matrixforce.com to schedule a meeting and demo to review your specific savings.

Finally, no recap would be complete without review of last year’s predictions. Looking back now, maybe these were fairly safe:

1. Microsoft Office 365 did add more than 15 million users.
2. Google Apps only added approximately 7 million.
3. Verizon hasn’t quite caught AT&T with iPhone sales, but competition, new feature mis-steps, and the death of Steve Jobs may stall sales next year.
4. Droid is still comfortably number 2, but even with a big increase Windows Phone 7 has only approximately 17% market share.
5. RIMM did not decommission proprietary Blackberry messaging in favor of Microsoft ActiveSync and its stock is now below book value with the future looking increasingly bleak.
6. VMWare still holds 58% of the virtualization market, but anger over new licensing prices may tip the scales to Microsoft Hpyer-V next year.
7. It’s official. Flash is dead and Windows 8 will only support HTML 5.
8. Droid has suffered a great deal with malware and more virus scanners for iPhone/iPad seem to be released daily.
9. It seemed obvious, but neither Apple or Google have moved on the gaming front.
10. Just go to Dell and you’ll see Windows 7 x64 is the default for workstation operating systems.

Here we go. Geek Squad guy’s next answer is the wall of Droids. At least you don’t have the whole iRobot thing and have some choice of hardware and form-factor. The problem was each of the devices had various versions of the OS and some ran well while others were visually very slow to react. Plus, it simply followed the Apple paradigm of download this app, get some more clutter from who knows where, and we all want to look foolish counting like the fair pony going through screens. The experience is really hit and miss.

“Dude. How about those?” Huge eye roll with some kind of stoner shudder and a weak comment about hating those phones and not even knowing how to call someone they are texting. “Seems like you press the name or number at the top.” The look of astonishment on his face said it all. Typical Generation Whatever that ran up their parents’ cell bill in the previous 4 years texting and calling more than the local tower could handle. Now he’s graduated to adding a Gmail account and whatever feels easiest to add contacts and update Facebook. Beyond Angry Birds and the latest app there is little or no understanding of how a smartphone really works.

So let’s see. The tiles are much bigger and have active changing displays. Click the People hub and you have all the status updates from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Group button is just like Google+ so you can e-mail or text any group in one shot. Third generation voice makes Siri look as foolish as it sounds, especially with the recent edition of voice to text. Me tile to hit all your configured Social Media in one swoop. Built-in Office integration for Exchange and SharePoint along with direct posting from the phone. Post to your Sky Drive and find, wipe, or ring the phone all from Live.com – hmm no apps to download so far. And you get the latest games including favorite Xbox titles along with an excellent quality quick-draw camera and favorite music without the clunky iTunes?

The catch must be price. Nope. Superior technology and much cooler for $49 – $99. This looks like the phone for the future. Hell of a lot better than being a lemming at $400 an iPop. “Listen, Slick. Toke a little less wacky weed and start people with these first – and what’s with the white socks?”

Marcus now got it, but of course it was too late. The number of attacks at the same time was astonishing. His mind was still reeling on how employees - not thieves, hackers, or competitors – could do such a thing. The problem was what could he do? There was no hard proof for a civil action, the DA was gridlocked dealing with the meth epidemic, and killing the SOBs would just land him in prison. The dagger was many lost customers thought these pirates were the bomb. Few remembered his knowledge started the relationship or that Marcus trained and managed the staff that gave them service. He also couldn’t cry foul to the press, on the Internet, or to customers because of legal exposure and he would be perceived as the bad guy.

Marcus had brought Joey up in the business from ground zero. Eagle Scout Joey had no college education, but learned fast and worked his butt off. A couple of years later, Joey convinced Marcus to hire his other Eagle  Scout pal, Nick. Same drill, except Nick was in IT. The company prospered and things seemed to be going well, until one day Joey and Nick decided they could do better than old man Marcus. The plan was simple. Joey would run off the good people and tell others the company was going bankrupt, while approaching customers with his concerns and that he was starting a similar venture. Meanwhile, Nick had full access to all files, e-mail, and backup. By the time Joey and Nick quit to start their pirate adventure, Marcus’ business had been run into the ground with some customers buying products and services from the pirates while they were still employed by Marcus. Just for spite, Nick also gave an external hard drive to a competitor to try to fully destroy Marcus.

So, Marcus decided to hire a managed services company with an emphasis in business productivity and security. They were cheaper than Nick with a full staff and their only motive was protecting the company. Marcus was shocked to learn that the external hard drive backup could be restored to any workstation with a free trial copy of the backup software. It was also an eye-opener that Nick had full access to all files and could even read his e-mail and the e-mail of the other sales people. So then Marcus took the recommendation to move to online backup and cloud computing.

The backup was encrypted and keyed to a system that only matched one vendor, even though the software was widely used. Marcus could restore any files himself and better yet, the files were not in a readable format for even the vendor staff to access. Moving critical documents online meant only Marcus was the administrator of the site and access to all files was recorded by date/time and user.  Marcus eliminated a file and mail server and all the associated software and technical services to maintain and upgrade going forward. Better yet his costs were lower and he gained business continuity, regardless of disaster or harm to the physical brick and mortar of the company. Now 5 years later, Marcus is more prosperous and taking back customers from the pirates, after being forced to change virtually all business tactics and strategy.

The call came in early Friday morning. The customer was in a panic, fed up with their current support, and we were referred by one of their suppliers. E-mail was down and it was costing the business plenty. We were able to do a remote session within minutes and access the Exchange server. The customer had explained the environment was HyperV and it was a virtual Exchange 2007 server. The most common cause of e-mail failures is low disk space or a large message hanging the queue. With virtualization, recovery is usually easier. Should be just a walk in the park, right?

No, wrong. Exchange was 2 service packs behind. We didn’t need them, but couldn’t get help from Microsoft anyway because unified messaging was installed – which flat isn’t supported in a virtual environment. It didn’t make sense either as the customer had a Cisco Unity system that performed the voice mail to e-mail function. Exchange had not been given enough RAM and had just one processor. There were two storage groups: one for executives and the other for the remaining staff. The exec database was only about 18GB, but the staff was over 200GB. Why hadn’t all 5 storage groups been used to make the staff database 4 manageable files? We mounted and started the executives storage group and they had communication, but the staff database was corrupt and everyone else had no e-mail.

When a system is down, you don’t want to waste valuable time removing unnecessary components or installing needed service packs because the likelihood is more problems will be introduced and recovery will be more complex. While the big dogs temporarily had e-mail, we had to take them offline to run a repair utility. The customer only had one virtual host and one Exchange server or we could have left executives working and run the repair on the other machine. The databases also were not on any storage and simply part of the virtual hard drive. Because of the poor configuration, file access was slow and the repair was calculated to take more than 72 hours.

The customer was also paying an outrageous fortune for a Zenith Infotel store and forward system billed as online backup, that just simply copied files to a NAS. In the best of scenarios with a properly functioning Exchange, many seasoned veterans don’t know how to restore an Exchange database and merge the recovery storage group. A copy of a raw Exchange database would be corrupt too and require repair, after taking an initial 4 hours to copy across the network from the NAS.

So 90 minutes after the initial call, the customer is informed that she has a costly and extended outage of e-mail until mid next week or switch to cloud computing and have e-mail flowing within minutes. All of her problems could have been avoided by:

1) Giving the virtual machine more memory and at least two processors.

2) Utilizing storage so data access is fast and cannot get corrupt by being part of a virtual hard drive. Also, snapshots can be restored in minutes rather than hours.

3) Having a second virtual host and virtual Exchange server so maintenance or backup/repair functions can be done on  one machine while the other is servicing the rest of the organization that is functional.

4) Using a valid online backup solution that doesn’t simply copy raw files, but utilizes the Microsoft API to properly backup the databases.

5) Investing in managed services to keep current with maintenance by applying service packs and monitoring disk space.

To begin, there was zero planning or communication. Equipment showed up and sat idle for over a month before implementation was started. The customer wasn’t educated on options, involved in decisions, or informed of the conversion process. You knew it wasn’t going to end well.

In a power play, the startup was going to also replace the firewall, upgrade the domain, upgrade messaging, and implement online backup. This project definitely wasn’t about virtualization any more. The short story is that just about everything that could have gone wrong did: basic networking still remains flaky to this day, files were copied without previous permissions for access by all users, SMTP wasn’t restricted on the firewall causing the customer to be blacklisted, copiers and applications couldn’t send e-mail, everything was slow, and accounting and line of business application users were disconnected several times a day causing lost work and data corruption.

It turned out the startup had this nifty bundled package with virtualization and storage all monitored in India, using malware like agents on all machines. Data was replicated to a foreign-owned data center and the startup would get a call from India if there were any alerts. The customer of course never understood any of this scenario and it gets worse.

The first couple of mistakes were inadequate networking and storage. While the server was the right model with ample memory and processor, there were only two network cards. One card is required for the host and other cards are required for clustering, storage, and virtual servers with some high demand virtual servers requiring their own physical card. This configuration had 6 virtual servers with no Storage Area Network (SAN) and having high-capacity applications including Exchange and SQL that should have had their own physical network cards. It’s pretty easy to see why networking was slow as we usually specify 4 - 8 network ports on each virtualization server host.

The startup’s storage was only a hook for the monitoring and an on-site copy to store and forward data. It was a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device meaning all the data must be copied over the network, unlike a SAN which sounds similar but lets applications like Exchange and SQL run databases as if local drives. The virtual server hard drive files are then much smaller for quick copy or failover and snapshots on the SAN allow fast restore of databases in minutes rather than hours across the network. The startup combined data in the virtual machines so the Exchange virtual machine file was over 100GB because of the large Exchange databases. Copying a file that big over the network could take more than 2 hours on a fast network and a repair of an Exchange database in this configuration could take more than 24 hours.

The other major blunder the startup did was installing Hyper-V in core mode, which is designed for dense large data centers or specific purpose applications. Core mode is command line only, so it must be configured to allow a workstation with special software to manage the virtual host. While the startup thought this was cool, they didn’t configure the remote administration and you have to awkwardly RDP to another virtual machine to use the Hyper-V Manager to work with other virtual machines. However, in this configuration you are greatly hampered in identifying or rectifying a host machine that has numerous network and disk bottlenecks.

The customer did hold the startup’s feet to the fire, but our team still spent 5 times the support cases of similar environments for the next 6-9 months. For free, we migrated accounting and another line of business application back to old physical servers. In addition, we setup a virtual WSUS server, since updates were also forgotten by the startup.

The CFO was pushed out a few months after this debacle and our managed services contract was renewed. We’re in the process of moving e-mail and documents to the cloud for less cost than the startup’s gouging SPAM filtering. Plus, we’re reducing the client’s monthly cost for online backup and management with fewer servers and less data. Hopefully, the client has some budget next year, so a second virtual host can be properly setup for failover as you’re not really supposed to put all your eggs in one basket on one machine. Maybe at that time, we can then reinstall the first virtual host properly with a full OS and add some network cards. We hope this post gave you insight on avoiding common virtualization blunders.

1) Office 365 is a 2010 product set instead of the 2007 products for BPOS, so you’ll need to have Office 2007 or preferably 2010 on the desktop .

2) There are several SKUs for Office 365 for business with the most common of the E series for Enterprise with E1 ($10 per user per month) being the equivalent to BPOS and E3 ($23 per user per month) the most popular choice with web apps and always current full version of Office.

3) The Office 365 P1 offering during the Beta should be avoided as it has various limitations such as a hard user cap of 25, daily message delivery limit, and no ability to upgrade or downgrade to other products without backing up the data and starting all over.

4) It is not required to move external DNS to Microsoft. Just add the appropriate CNAME, TXT, and SRV records to your existing external DNS and do not interrupt the corporate website or customer facing settings.

5) Unless you have a large organization, Federation and Active Directory Synchronization make migration easy, but  breaks some of the benefits of cloud as mail still flows through the on-premise site first and you may not be able to logon if the on-premise site is down.

6) You can add Windows Messenger users to Lync and external company users to SharePoint without Active Directory Federation.

7)  If you don’t have an SSL certificate for ActiveSync or Outlook Web Access, you’ll need to get one to perform the Outlook Anywhere migration of Exchange mailboxes to Office 365.

8) It may not be Spring, but now is a good time to clean out mailboxes and archive documents which you’ll find that over half are not relevant.

9) Utilize the Team Site and try to eliminate a file server too. Know you’ll likely always have at least one server on-premise for policy and security, as well as any applications that cannot be moved to the cloud.

10) Buyer beware as Microsoft is pushing all 600,000 partners worldwide to sell Office 365, but there are only approximately 50 Cloud Accelerate partners with proven implementation aroud the globe.

Check out more about cloud computing, try a free 30 day trial, and contacts us for a demo or introduction meeting at sales@matrixforce.com or (918) 622-1167 Option 3.

However, before even discussing benefits, you have to know the online backup definition. The secret is one full backup on-site to an external drive  followed by incremental changes via the Internet from that point forward. Then you get the online backup benefits: no human intervention, better security, and better reliability.

Since many people don’t really understand online backup, there are numerous online backup myths. Chief among these myths are high cost and trustworthiness. What’s often forgetten is luck seems to be a major factor for most organizations backup strategy considering the numerous tape errors, regular practice of not changing the tape or taking an external drive offsite, and little protection for theft or loss in a purse or brief case.

While various players are clamoring after the large consumer market of online backup, you should do your due diligence and review the common online backup FAQ of providers. Consumer backup products are generally not appropriate for business networks or applications and it is important to select a managed service provider that can assist in restoring a system.

See the online backup  comparison tool to review versus your current approach and then contact us for a demo at (918) 622-1167 Option 3 or sales@matrixforce.com.

Just like Google, Managed Services are changing the way businesses deploy and utilize information technology. As a broad term, it’s important to understand the managed services definition:  flat monthly cost, unlimited support, regular maintenance, guaranteed response, business consulting, and vendor management. While break-fix companies, retail shops, and even staffing firms are trying to offer a managed services model, these entities do not have the core ingredients or motivations of a managed service provider. In fact, the main managed services myths are high cost and selling more product, when in reality cost is much less and there is no motivation to implement more product or take more time.

Managed services benefits offer a paradigm shift for companies to have less IT and infrastructure with more focus on business. Our managed services comparison shows an example of the savings using your organization’s variables. Customers are often overwhelmed with common sales lines for managed services from various players. What makes us different is Matrixforce Delta@, our proprietary methodology. We prefer to demonstrate a unique business approach whether providing simple managed services FAQ or insightful business planning. By constantly questioning why for technology and approach, we help customers become more efficient with less cost.

For more information, contact us for a brief review of your needs at (918) 622-1167 Option 3 or sales@matrixforce.com

Before even discussing benefits, you have to know the cloud computing definition. Cloud computing is a suite of applications provided via the Internet by major software manufacturers at less cost than on-premise infrastructure with greater security and reliability.

Part of the confusion is the myriad of cloud computing myths, from mistaking for virtualization and hosting to misguided beliefs. Cloud computing with data is like banking and money. Over 100 years ago, people stopped burying money in the backyard or stuffing in a mattress because of better security. What business value is it for you to be able to touch your servers and do you maintain high security like CyberTrust or Federal security guidelines at your office?

Even though cloud computing is a well over used buzz phrase, you should still do your due diligence and review the common cloud computing FAQ of providers. At the end of the day, a solution must be affordable with high value so it’s important to understand the cloud computing comparison in cost versus on-premise infrastructure.

Finally, after you’re up to speed and ready for more agile business with less hassle, contact us for a demo at (918) 622-1167 Option 3 or sales@matrixforce.com and begin a 30 day free cloud computing trial.