Priority Queue

People start businesses every day. I live in Georgia, just north of Atlanta, in a part of town where retail storefronts have been multiplying without end. Many of the businesses are branches of larger corporations, or franchises. Some of them are independent stores. Every single one of the franchises and independent stores were opened by someone who had the courage to invest a significant portion of their savings into their dream, then work hard and sacrifice to help it to succeed.

Those are just the visible aspects of entrepreneurship. For every storefront business that opens up, there are just as many if not more businesses started by people in less visible locations. There are office parks without storefronts tucked away around every corner, and home based endeavors like services, multi-level marketing, and online businesses.

I started a business in just about the most unsound way possible. The errors I made were numerous. read more »

Even though it is very convenient to look up pricing for servers, switches, routers, firewalls and the like online, that is the worst way to purchase. I have been on the inside of IT sales for a long time, and can give you many reasons why you should by from a local Value Added Reseller, as they are known:

1. Best price. If you talk with a local reseller, and either pretend or actually let them help make a recommendation read more »

Two and a half years ago Cisco came out with Call Manager version 5. There were a few notable changes in this release. Besides running on linux, it was the first version that supported both SIP phones and SIP trunks. As fortune would have it, one of our customers at the time had more prescience than I, and had researched the cost savings capabilities of using a SIP trunk for PRI replacement. Since I have never shied away from deploying the latest Cisco voice technology, we agreed to put the system in place.

The cost savings of the SIP trunk is what funded a majority of the deployment. read more »

I was on the phone with a customer the other day discussing issues with the current installation we were doing for them. Even though all the web filtering system was set up properly for them, the customer had an expectataion that we would set it up in a different manner. The scope of work was unclear, and the lead deployment engineer said that we had had the discussion on how to set it up, with customer agreement, but apparently there was a communication gap at some point.

Because we value our customer relationships, we decided to do the additional work at no cost. read more »