Kenneth Hess

The most valuable assets in any company probably aren’t what you think they are. They’re not your inventory or your capital equipment. They’re your employees — you know the people out on the front lines making a profit for you. Sometimes I think that fact slips by the well-meaning penny-pinchers. Their only plan is to […]

You’ve quietly rocked along with Windows XP for a few years and now you feel compelled to upgrade to Vista or the upcoming Windows 7. You’ve heard bad things about Vista or experienced them first-hand, and you’ve heard that Windows 7 is a promising replacement for XP. Which is it? Do you trade in your […]

Ah yes, there’s that all too familiar sound of tightening budgets and the tossing aside of those things perceived as non-essential. Training’s death knell reverberates in my head like the sound of an ill-tuned vesper bell. Your dilemma is that you need to learn Linux but you have no money to buy training — what […]

Do you have several employees with salaries approaching or breaching the six-figure mark and carry service contracts on your hardware assets? Consider stepping-up those service contracts to full 24×7, 2-hour response, on-site versions and dumping some of those chatty, annoying, vacation-taking, sick day scamming, office supply stealing leeches from your budget. Yes, I remember what […]

The best-known global telephone company isn’t really a telephone company at all — or is it? Although Skype promotes itself as “The Global Internet Telephony Company,” it’s really more of a Software as a Service (SaaS) company whose software allows you to make phone calls to any phone or other Skype user in the world. […]

Going green doesn’t mean joining some radical organization, using pig waste to power your data center or flying the ecology flag at your place of business. It does mean doing your part to save electricity, fossil fuel and your own money. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh great, another ‘green’ article telling me I have […]

Oh sure, you purchased some expensive backup and restore package that’s serving you quite well and you don’t need a replacement. What’s that? It isn’t serving you well? That’s odd. The expensive stuff is supposed to be awesome and failure free-after all, that’s why you paid so much for it, right? Cover Your Assets: Backup […]

If you think you’re the only one still using DOS applications to run, or help run, your business, you’re wrong. Many manufacturing and engineering companies rely on DOS applications that run on x86 computers connected directly to printers via LPT ports. Do you still backup those systems to floppy disk or to tape? Cover Your […]

Can you save money by converting from a physical to a virtual infrastructure? Yes. Can you do it without spending any money? No. Can you do it without spending more than you would on conventional architecture and technology? Definitely. Cover Your Assets: When you convert from a physical to a virtual infrastructure, is the money […]

You might think I’ve lost my mind saying that buying commercial software is the frugal choice du jour. I haven’t, and it is — or it might be. Some open source advocates, like me, will sing the praises of free, open source software from the mountaintops to all within earshot of our rants and raves […]

Later this month, you’ll have the opportunity to purchase a shiny new copy of Windows 7, but will you make the investment in it or will you wait for Windows 8? Most likely, you’ve created dependencies on Windows XP over the past eight years, and it’s going to be hard to move away from it. […]

More on open source servers and server virtualization Considering a switch to a virtualized infrastructure strikes fear into the hearts of even the most educated among today’s CIOs. Technology confusion and vendor choices aside, the physical-to-virtual transition dread stems from security concerns, performance uncertainty and scalability questions. Red Hat’s Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) attempts to […]