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By mfinn, September 22, 2009 2:33 PM

Many contractors load up their bids with caveats and other statements regarding what is not covered in the bid. We have never taken this approach and it has been a successful way of doing business for many years. I’ll knock on some wood here!

We have used the approach of stating very clearly what we are doing for you and then delivering on that promise. I believe people are much more open to positive statements than negative ones. The customer will not have to wonder if anything else is “not covered” and this method opens the door for us to do more work than what was originally stated. Many customers have asked us “can you do this for me also” which I believe is a result of remaining open and positive in the work statement. A laundry list of negatives does not give someone a warm and fuzzy feeling about the undertaking about to begin.

This point of view is all about trust. Not only having it in the person sitting across the table but building theirs in you so that a long term relationship can blossom. When a job is successfully completed and the customer is not only satisfied but genuinely happy about the transaction then you have the beginning of a long and successful partnership.

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By mfinn, September 16, 2009 5:29 PM

The foundation of a house is something most people don’t give much thought to. But in talking to an architect friend he confirmed just how important it is to the whole house that sits above it. It may not be near as expensive as all the wonderful things that make the home above it but if it is not well made than all the things that make a home a home are at risk from day one.

Simple cabling, what we call the plumbing of networking, is not even considered in the ISO model yet it is the foundation of all that sits above it. Everything stacked above it costs exponentionaly more and is usually seen as mission critical to one’s business model. Each layer above is a tool supporting the tools above it which eventually create revenues which become profits for any given business. Many studies have been done to determine the relationship between downtime and lost revenues. Yet businesses are built from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Nobody builds a perfect network infrastructure and then says now we can create any business we like because we have a solid foundation that will stand up to any application. We always come up with a product or an idea and then build the support below it to make it work.

Unfortunately this leads to the foundation being an afterthought. And when things become an afterthought a limited budget usually follows. With so much money being spent on the tools above there is only limited amounts left for the “plumbing”. At this point cabling contractors are pitted against each other to race to the lowest price possible. I’m sure you can understand why some might decide to take shortcuts if they win the business. Following this model will be sure to leave everyone unhappy and your business at risk. So if the foundation is not going to be the first thing you think about at least make it the second. You will at least be assured that your dream won’t crumble down around you.

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By mfinn, July 1, 2009 2:37 PM

Remember Cat 4 cable. The standard that had no application. Just a little better than Cat 3 but not good enough to run the protocols just lurking over the horizon. So I ask why are people still putting in Cat 6? Cat 5E works great with 1 gig Ethernet. The next jump is to 10 gig and Cat 6 just won’t cut it. All the big players are working hard to sell Cat 6 augmented. And by the way I hate that term. When a cable is redesigned from the ground up why call it augmented? Cat 7 is already defined and since Cat 6 augmented does not have improved properties beyond Cat 7 you can’t call it Cat 8. Augmented sounds so interim. Is Cat 6 augmented the end of the line for copper cabling? What is on the horizon and how long will it take to reach critical mass. The bigger question though is why fiber with its greater bandwidth remains on the margins, not making the inroads to the desktop I would like to see? It could jumpstart the industry and maybe even help the economy as a whole.

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By mfinn, June 25, 2009 7:24 PM

When you first start using new technology to help your company grow there are many bumps in the road. Having someone to hold your and through the initial p[phase of the project allows you to have confidence in your new system. And includes a complete new wiring infrastructure or just a simple piece of web based software.
I am lucky enough to have the support I need to get through these early stage blogs. And I believe that our customer get the same kind of experience when working with us. Are you getting a good first impression with your new undertaking?

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By blogadmin, June 9, 2009 2:13 AM

New York Times has an interesting article on Data Center Overload….

Here’s an excerpt:

“We have an almost inimical incuriosity when it comes to infrastructure. It tends to feature in our thoughts only when it’s not working. The Google search results that are returned in 0.15 seconds were once a stirring novelty but soon became just another assumption in our lives, like the air we breathe. Yet whose day would proceed smoothly without the computing infrastructure that increasingly makes it possible to navigate the world and our relationships within it?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users. To appreciate the scope of this phenomenon, and its crushing demands on storage capacity, let me sketch just the iceberg’s tip of one average individual digital presence: my own. I have photos on Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, so they reside in a Yahoo data center, probably the one in Wenatchee, Wash.); the Wikipedia entry about me dwells on a database in Tampa, Fla.; the video on YouTube of a talk I delivered at Google’s headquarters might dwell in any one of Google’s data centers, from The Dalles in Oregon to Lenoir, N.C.; my LinkedIn profile most likely sits in an Equinix-run data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and my blog lives at Modwest’s headquarters in Missoula, Mont. If one of these sites happened to be down, I might have Twittered a complaint, my tweet paying a virtual visit to (most likely) NTT America’s data center in Sterling, Va. And in each of these cases, there would be at least one mirror data center somewhere else — the built-environment equivalent of an external hard drive, backing things up.

Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud. Trying to chart the cloud’s geography can be daunting, a task that is further complicated by security concerns. “It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ ” says Rich Miller, whose Web site, Data Center Knowledge, tracks the industry. “The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”

Continue reading 'An interesting article on Data Centers from New York Times.'»

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