A 15 minute interview on WSMN Radio 1590 in Nashua with Greg Vrakatitsis, Vice President of Sales & Business Development at WorldWide Computer Solutions, on the benefits of Managed Services and Software Development for small and midsized businesses that need to improve productivity and increase the speed of implementing innovation. Radio edit with Kevin Willett.  Greg extends his availability to business managers who need solutions quickly and professionally. Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio

Until March, 2009, WorldWide Computer Solutions (WWCS), dba Computer Solutions of Keene, was located at 160 Emerald Street. Our retail storefront was mostly quiet, with the exception of customers seeking PC service and repair. Our location was all but invisible to potential customers, and our modest radio advertising and yellow pages listing were the extent of our efforts to promote our business.

In April, 2009, WWCS decided to commit to the whole “location, location, location” concept and moved our business services and Computer Solutions of Keene storefront to 117 Main Street. There was an immediate positive impact. At a time when other businesses were cutting expenses, bracing for decreased revenues, and weathering the economic down-turn, Computer Solutions, inspired by the effects of our visibility, became more aggressive. We doubled our workforce and developed a bold strategic plan that will guide our continued aggressive growth.
WWCS’s business structure is multi-faceted and continues to evolve as we grow to meet the needs of our expanding business client and retail customer base.
Retail Sales, Service & Repair – Located at 117 Main Street, our Computer Solutions of Keene retail store is highly visible and competitive, and our service and repair division enjoys a reputation among the best in the Monadnock Region. While we can’t carry the quantities and diverse stock of the larger box stores, our offerings are similar, and if you don’t see it on our shelves, we can and will gladly order it for you! More significantly, we custom build systems to satisfy from the most basic to the most complex of needs. Our retail website, www.csofkeene.com, will be revamped in 2011 and will include, among other things, an online storefront and greater detail about our service and repair offerings.
WWCS’s most impressive growth has been realized within our professional Software Services & Application Development and Management Division, where we expanded from four full-time developers to ten within a year. We have accumulated a significant amount of experience in the Insurance and Financial Services sector, and have leveraged that experience to more than double our revenues in 2010. We are currently engaged with firms throughout southern New Hampshire and have completed projects in Maine and Vermont this year as well. We will continue to grow our team of consultants and our clients needing quality services and solutions. With the launch of our new IT services website in early 2011 (www.wwcs.com), we expect to further expand our geographic reach throughout the New England region.
We feel we have significant potential for accelerated growth in our Business Network & Managed Service Division. We are establishing new partnerships in areas of network security and developing competitive Remote Network Management service offerings. Additionally, we are releasing an exciting new product that has been in development for the past two years. This product, which we anticipate introducing to market in early 2011, will bring new meaning to disaster recovery and redefine the concept of easy back-up and restore!
WWCS has by no means escaped the effects of recent economic challenges, but we intentionally chose to respond to them in an active and aggressive manner by on-boarding energetic, goal-driven individuals who complement our professional team, establishing a strategic plan with ambitious goals, and charging forward as if our lives depended on it. So far, so good!
For more information about our business and software services, contact Greg Vrakatitsis, VP of Business Development, at (603) 493-3174.

Source: http://sentinelsource.com/news/special_reports

Christensen posits two type of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining innovation is that which extends existing technologies, improving them incrementally. As an example, at one point auto manufacturing moved from body-on-frame to unibody construction. Christensen points out that it is very difficult for a new market entrant to gain traction with an incremental innovation, since the market incumbents can easily incorporate the new technology while maintaining their other advantages like brand awareness, cost efficiency, and so on.
By contrast, disruptive innovation represents entirely new technology solutions that bring a new twist to an existing market — typically at a far lower price point. Christensen offers numerous examples of disruptive innovation; for instance, transistor radios disrupted the existing market for vacuum tube-based radios. Christensen notes that typically, disruptive innovations come to market and are considered inadequate substitutes for existing solutions by the largest users of those solutions. Tube radio manufacturers evaluated transistor capability and found that transistors could not run table radios with large speakers that required significant power to generate sound volume.

Consequently, disruptive innovations must seek out new users who are, in Christensen’s term, overserved by existing solutions and are willing to embrace less capable, cheaper offerings. Transistor radios were first embraced by teenagers who wanted to listen to rock and roll with their friends and wouldn’t be caught dead listening to it in the company of their parents, at home, in front of the vacuum tube-powered table radio. They didn’t mind that their cheap transistor radios sounded tinny. They were affordable and allowed teenagers to listen to their music in the company of friends.

Sending Old Solutions Packing
The denouement to this dynamic is that disruptive innovations gradually improve over time until they become functionally equivalent to the incumbent technology, at which point they seize the market and consign the previous champion to the dustbin of history. One of the most poignant comments about this process I’ve ever read was the statement by a former Silicon Graphics executive lamenting how SGI was put out of business by the shift to x86-based graphics systems — he said that everyone at the company had read The Innovator’s Dilemma, but, even knowing the likely fate of their company if they didn’t dramatically change direction, were unable to do so, and inexorably found themselves in bankruptcy.

Continue: http://www.cio.com/article/677204/Cloud_Computing_A_Sustaining_or_Disruptive_Innovation_

Microsoft is making available for download on November 9 the first test version of its next-generation SQL Server release, code-named “Denali.”

The company announced the availability of the Community Technology Preview (CTP) build — available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers today — at the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit in Seattle. The first Denali CTP is slated to be available at 11:45 a.m. ET on November 9, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft said in February that its next release of SQL Server would be codenamed Denali, but declined to say anything more about the release at that time. Now the Softies are sharing more. Here’s a list of some of what is on tap to be included in Denali:

• SQL Server AlwaysOn, a new high-availability “solution that will deliver “increased application availability, lower TCO (total cost of ownership)  and ease of use, according to the Softies
• Project codename “Apollo”, new column-store database technology aiming to provide greater query performance
• Project codename “Juneau”, a single development environment for developing database, business intelligence (BI) and web solutions
• Project codename “Crescent”, a web-based, data visualization and presentation solution, and follow-on to the PowerPivot technologythat is part of SQL Server 2008 R2
• SQL Server Data Quality Services (based on technology fromMicrosoft’s 2008 Zoomix acquisition)

Like the SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 releases, Denali will be focused on providing users with more high-availability, self-service and BI functionality, officials said.

SQL Server isn’t just a database, but an entire “information platform,” said Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Business Platforms Division. Information platform implies the ability to handle structured data, unstructured data, XML and more, as well as offering customers tools and services like analytics and reporting to interpret this data.

Going forward, the SQL Server team will be focusing on three things, Kummert said: Incorporating more mission-critical features into the platform (on the data warehousing side and beyond); making BI available for every end user; and insuring that the platform continues to evolve as a cloud service.

It seems Q3 2011 may be the availability date for this unique upgrade.

About 72% of small businesses — defined in the survey as firms with between two and 50 employees — reported using mobile apps in their operations. And 38% said “they could not survive — or it would be a major challenge to survive” — if their mobile apps vanished. AT&T polled 2,246 small business owners and IT stakeholders in December.

PS and mapping topped the list of most popular services, with close to half (49%) of companies utilizing them. Roughly one in four small businesses are using social media marketing and document management apps on their mobile devices. Location-based services (24%), time management (23%), travel and expense tracking (22%), and mobile credit card payments (20%) followed closely behind in terms of regular use. Saving time was the chief reason given by businesses for employing mobile apps. The smaller the business, the more likely it is to seek to save time with mobile apps, according to the report.

While business apps might be maturing — in turn helping fuel increased adoption of mobile devices by SMB users — it seems clear that they still have plenty of room to grow. A study conducted in January by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland, for instance, found high awareness but relatively low usage among small businesses of various mobile marketing tactics. For example, 59% of respondents in that study said they were aware they could develop a mobile app for their business, but just 3% had done so.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/smb/mobile/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229301287