The Product Trap. That’s where your IT guys and their product vendor buddies come to you with a neat little story about how this here latest-and-greatest gizmo should be deployed companywide because it’ll save a gazillion dollars. Except that …

1. They don’t have meaningful data or metrics to back up the claim. 
2. They neglect to mention that making it actually work in the real world requires significant changes to a raft of related processes and organizational structures. 
3. Or that this amount of change will take so much time and spawn so many other costs that it could well generate the kind of gridlock that disrupts, in various and unpredictable ways, the very ability of your business to do business. 

That’s why it’s essential that you explore all viable technology alternatives when you’re considering process improvements. For any goal, there are multiple means of achieving it, and it’s up to you — not your IT staff — to figure out which approach best serves the business.

My advice?  Talk to a trusted, vendor-neutral provider with no stake in selling you any particular type of product – someone who can offer extensive expertise, an informed independent perspective, and a business-oriented focus on IT capabilities and solutions rather than just products.

As every CEO and CFO of a smaller business knows, credit is very hard to come by these days. According to one national survey, last year only 40% of smaller businesses could get all their credit needs met. Several years ago, 90% were able to get all the credit they required.

Now a new $30-billion government program aimed at helping small businesses secure credit is winding its way through Congress. But that money will flow to banks, not directly to businesses — and some, like TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren, have expressed doubts about whether making more money available to banks will actually translate into increased lending.

We know that many of our clients cannot afford the long wait to find out. They must put information technology to work now to stay competitive.

That’s why we’ve developed the QuestFlex SLA. With a QuestFlex SLA, you can toss out the old ways of thinking about buying or leasing. Instead, you’ll get the IT capability your business needs from a trusted, experienced technology partner — without having to find the money to boost your CAPEX budget.

These challenging times demand that we all be open to new ideas and creative in our thinking. I invite you to discover how QuestFlex can help.

There’s an old saying about necessity being the mother of invention. If that proverb contains any truth, we should soon see a good deal of invention triggered by the very real necessity to do more with less.

Invention can have another mother, too — the desire to do the best job possible. A good technology partner will always listen to clients and try to develop innovative solutions that match a client’s goals.

For us at Quest, VoIP is a good case in point.

When we found that the typical options for implementing VoIP — in-house or hosted — were not meeting some of our clients’ needs, we went exploring for other approaches. And we hit upon one: a hybrid VoIP approach that combines the security, flexibility, and performance of an in-house implementation with the ease and cost-effectiveness of a hosted service.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the best solution emerges in response to a dire need or a desire to make something good even better. What matters is that you have a technology partner willing to be as creative and resourceful as you need them to be.

Real-time traffic, streaming traffic, bulk traffic, transactional traffic, and web content are the reasons your network is being asked to work harder than ever. Delivering these services to users, however, requires not only bandwidth, it requires the network itself to have the capability to determine how to accommodate the flow of that traffic.

Why? Because not all traffic is equal. Just as a speeding ambulance has priority in a sea of traffic on the highway, your business’ time-sensitive and mission-critical applications should have right-of-way.

Traditionally, the method used to accommodate network traffic can best be described as first-come, first-served: whatever bandwidth the application needs it gets, no matter what the repercussions. The result is delays, congestion, packet-dropping, jitter, unhappy users, and frazzled network managers.

The good news is that technologies such as quality-of-service (QoS) are available to help provide better service for network traffic by managing bandwidth allocations. With QoS, realtime and high-priority applications are handled differently than lower priority data applications. And QoS can also help limit the amount of undesirable traffic, including security threats.

If your business is now or will be utilizing any of the rich network applications available—voice-over-IP (VoIP) or videoconferencing, for example — you’ll want to think about where QoS fits into your plans.

This issue of our newsletter is devoted to infrastructure. Although it comprises the very cable and wiring on which every network and application runs, it’s not unusual for organizations to do an initial infrastructure design and installation and then never think about it again. Even when laid in place 10-15 years ago, infrastructure gets noticed only when there’s a major problem or move.

But two reasons make it worth noticing: performance and unnecessary expense.

Performance and cost
Performance troubles begin when new bandwidth hungry applications are routinely layered onto existing infrastructure with no real analysis of the impact. These problems typically get blamed on the network or applications — and that’s where the unnecessary expense starts.

Because infrastructure is low on most folks’ radar, performance problems get ‘solved’ by upgrades to software or networking equipment...money spent everywhere but on the fundamental problem.

Performing an audit of your existing infrastructure every year or two to determine if what you have at the base level — your cables and wiring — are up to delivering what users expect is essential. If you don’t have the time or expertise in-house, ask a trusted partner. And if you’re building a new data center, be sure to let experts manage the infrastructure installation. Don’t leave it to an electrical contractor.