Systems Alliance Blog

The concept of Just-In-Time manufacturing has been around for decades. More recently we have seen the extension of this concept into the IT infrastructure arena with on-demand or dynamic provisioning. Even with these advances, bringing new data center capacity online has continued to be very time consuming, labor and capital intensive; that is, until the advent of modular data centers several years ago.

The escalating cost of data center construction is not sustainable, particularly in challenging economic times¹. Construction costs alone for a large-scale enterprise data center can be in the tens of millions and take years to complete. In our work, we see an ever increasing number of clients looking to investigate data center construction and/or co-lo site selection options. Often these initiatives are a result of a client unexpectedly approaching the limits of available power and/or cooling capacity....Click here to read more.

From feature phones to smartphones, small tablets to large tablets, desktops to netbooks and ultrabooks, the variety of devices people use to access web content is growing rapidly.  Times have changed from the days of just computers and smartphones. Even then, optimizing content for site visitors was a bit of a challenge. The first initial attempt was building a separate mobile website.

So, you had your regular desktop-based website and your separate mobile website, and maybe even different content between the two. You may have been dealing with different tools and different content management systems serving both. This approach was a maintenance nightmare, since in some cases, you were maintaining essentially two separate websites....Click here to read more.

Facebook, Twitter, and now Google +. The social landscape definitely had its share of changes and updates this past year. And the number of businesses logging on and using these social platforms continues to increase. Social media can be a great tool, but you need to know how to use it in order to gain the most value.  

It’s not a popularity contest. Having a lot of followers or “likes” is great, but it really doesn’t matter how many your company has; it’s about the relationships that you create and sustain....Click here to read more.

A follow-up to my last post about where we’re heading with mobile in 2012, effectively leveraging social media marketing is another topic that I’ll be very focused on this coming year.

Again, nothing new here – social media is big news all around, but best practices for leveraging social media for marketing purposes are still in flux. With Google+ and Twitter recently deploying more business-friendly capabilities, many more opportunities for organizations to engage with customers, business partners and potential employees through social media channels now exist. But the key to effectively leveraging social media is, first and foremost, to have a strategy. Too many organizations jump into social media because everyone else is doing it without really thinking through the implications. You need a marketing strategy for social media just like for any other marketing campaign, even more so since with social media you don’t have full control of the message....Click here to read more.

Well, this is the obligatory time for reflections on the past year and predictions for the next. I’ll try to minimize that here and just share my thoughts on two topics that I’ll be particularly focused on in the coming year – social media and mobile – or more specifically, how best to leverage both for business-to-business and business-to-consumer engagement. Let’s start with mobile…...Click here to read more.