Axxys Technologies Gets A New Home

Axxys has completed a deal to move the company's headquarters to Granite Park III, located at 5601 Granite Parkway, Suite 110 in Plano.

The move is prompted by an uptake in the managed services business and employee growth, including the recent additions of senior account executive Nathan Adair and director of marketing Chris Hansard.

Originally founded in Dallas, Axxys Technologies is currently based out of a 2,100-sf facility in Hall Office Park in Frisco. After almost six years of successful operations at this location, Axxys will move once again to accommodate market, corporate and staff growth. The new Plano office sits at the southeast corner of State Highway 121 and the Dallas North Tollway, providing  3,900-sf to support the addition of new staff throughout the next year.

"We are excited about our relocation to a larger facility as one of many steps this year to further expand our business, along with expanding our internal team with dedicated sales and marketing experts," said Jack Safrit, Axxys president and CEO. "We see a common misconception that IT in the small-to-medium business space means having a computer guy available to fix problems - we want to change that. Axxys is invested in our clients' successes, and our goal is to develop and implement technology plans that meet their business and budgetary needs while continuing to deliver the highest levels of support."

Nathan Adair Joins Axxys Technologies, Inc.

Many of you already know Nathan Adair as Axxys Technologies' go-to consultant for telecom and business class Internet services. Nathan has helped a great number of Axxys clients and businesses throughout Dallas/Fort Worth set up a communications strategy that saves them money and provides a higher level of connectivity. We are now proud to announce that Nathan has joined Axxys team as a Senior Account Executive, overseeing outside sales and new business development for the company.

Previously, Nathan was a Business Development Manager for Paetec Communications, cultivating new clients and sales opportunities through telecom consulting for business appropriate voice and data convergence. He also held prior sales management positions with Qwest Communications and Logix Communications operating in a similar capacity.

"I have had a professional relationship with Axxys for many years providing consulting services for their clients. When I heard that Axxys was ready to start growing the company more aggressively, I knew I wanted to be a part of the Axxys team. I have no doubt that the level of expertise and professionalism that our team encompasses will enable us to set a new standard for managed IT services across the North Texas area."

Nathan is available for business discussions and can be reached via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or directly by phone at 214.297.2133.

Maximize Your Virtualization ROI
reprinted with permission from HP

Virtualization technology is a great way to increase business agility while reducing infrastructure costs. But it can also add another layer of management complexity, resulting in higher management costs and lower ROI. You need the right software tools to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

Managing virtualization becomes even more critical as virtualization projects move out of the development/test environments and into production. That's why it needs to be incorporated into your operation management framework. Rather than manage virtualization as its own silo, a better approach is to integrate virtual and physical management-based on proven best practices. Then you can administer resources uniformly to monitor, manage and automate key management functions seamlessly across physical and virtual environments.

The results: dramatically reduced IT costs, improved business agility and the ability to increase IT efficiency. Here are the five key areas to accelerate and simplify the adoption of virtualization in your data center.

Key One: Automate manual process
Virtualization adds complexity to existing processes such as configuration and change management. This complexity can make it more difficult and costly to manage. That's why automation is fundamental to virtualized service management.

Indeed, virtualization will not be effective without the right automation tools. With a single, integrated management solution, you can easily automate tasks and processes associated with change detection, configuration updates, provisioning and patching. And you gain visibility to all activities and changes in the virtual/physical environment so that you can enforce policy compliance.

By automating daily tasks at the operations level, you can make sure that you are not trading capital expenditure savings for added operational expense. Through automated auditing and reporting for mission-critical compliance issues (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, etc.), you can improve IT governance and reduce business risk.

Key two: Monitor virtual and physical environments
Enterprise-level service monitoring is the second critical component for virtualized service management. Rather than managing virtualization through specialized point products, an enterprise-wide service monitoring approach allows you to visualize the entire technology stack. This means you can detect, isolate and prevent service problems across heterogeneous environments-for physical and virtual servers, networks, applications and storage devices.

Key three: Comply with software licensing contracts
One typical challenge with virtualization is managing virtual machine sprawl and the software licenses that reside on them. The ideal solution is one that automatically discovers, identifies and reports assets-both physical and virtual-throughout the usage lifecycle. Based on this, IT can monitor contracts, track usage and manage charge-backs to help with software license compliance.

In addition to daily monitoring, comprehensive asset management can also provide vital insight. For example, a comprehensive asset management approach can reveal the financial and compliance impacts of software upgrades. IT can also realize savings by identifying over-provisioning. In fact, one organization saved 10% of software license costs by reducing license over-provisioning.

Key four: Protect your virtualized application
When a new virtual machine is instantiated on a host server, it runs backup and recovery to guard against data losses. Conventionally, backup is accomplished by a script-running agent in the virtual machine-quickly expending shared resources and effecting performance.
A better method is to offload backup processing to the storage array. This process increases the number of virtual machines on a given host server without impacting performance. You get a consistent production replica of your virtualized application data that, in turn, allows point-in-time recovery. The result: error-free recoveries that are measured in seconds and minutes rather than hour and days.

Key five: Validate the performance of virtualized applications
Virtualization requires more robust risk assessment tools to proactively detect and correct security vulnerabilities and defects associated with virtual assets. You need end-to-end capabilities for load testing business services in hybrid physical/virtual environments. Plus, you want the ability to quickly pinpoint the root cause of business service performance problems. Finally, you need to test from the end-user perspective to allow you to understand how virtualized business services will perform in real-world environments under peak load conditions.

HP offers software solutions in these five key areas to help you manage virtualization and maximize your virtualization ROI. Through automation, you empower support staff to work more effectively and efficiently. End-to-end infrastructure monitoring supports faster problem detection and remediation.

With solutions that help improve compliance and protect data, you can simplify the complexities of deploying virtualization technology. Most importantly, an integrated approach to virtualized service management means you can lower operational expense (OPEX) and reap the rewards of business agility.

Technology Financing
by Christopher Elliott, used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

Your growing business is ready for new PCs or software. How do you buy it?

It's a common challenge for small businesses. New technology purchases top the list of capital expenditures in a survey of small businesses, with 43% of respondents saying they planned to make a buy in the next six months.

But that's easier said than done.

"Increasingly, small businesses are delaying necessary upgrades," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow for the Yankee Group. "We only see about a quarter of companies doing an upgrade every two to three years. Half of the companies are on a four, five or even a six-year upgrade path."

How important is new equipment to your business? About a third of small businesses surveyed for a IT toolbox study found that they expected to increase staff productivity through the purchase of new computer equipment.

Getting money is a major obstacle for small businesses - some 16% of small businesses report having been denied for a loan or line of credit. The American Express survey, for example, cites several barriers to securing financing, including:

•  
  • the size of their business was the biggest challenge.
  • the overwhelming paperwork requirements were an obstacle.
  • the limited knowledge of financing resources.
  • the lack of documentation to support their loan application.

And when it comes to financing IT purchases it's often more difficult to secure financing because lenders are uncomfortable financing software and implementation services.

So when it comes to technology purchases, here are your choices. (The last option is Microsoft Financing, a new financing program designed for small businesses.)

1. Pay with cash

•  
  • When to use: Smaller purchases such as a new personal computer (PC) or a few software licenses.
  • Advantage: You pay for it up front, and there are no further finance charges or fees.
  • Disadvantage: Your business has to come up with the money immediately, which can cut into your budget for other important items, like payroll. Even a few thousand dollars is enough to be a deal-breaker for some companies.

2. Use a line of credit

•  
  • When to use: When technology costs more than $5,000, for, say, a complete IT infrastructure, including servers, PCs, LAN or WAN access, security applications, storage, peripherals software, licenses and support contracts.
  • Advantage: You don't need to come up with the money right away.
  • Disadvantage: Your company's line of credit is finite, and you may want to save it for something more important, such as payroll or an emergency expense - especially if there are other options available.

3. Leasing

 

• Advantage: Leasing also preserves your company's credit. There can also be tax advantages to leasing computer equipment, but it is best to consult with a professional accountant to find out how your business would specifically benefit. Some leasing agreements also allow you to trade your old leased equipment out at the end of the term for new equipment.
• Disadvantage: The agreement is typically limited to hardware so you'll still have to find funds for software and/or implementation services on certain leases. Note:When you dispose of the equipment prior to the end of the depreciation term, you can lose your tax write-off.

4. Microsoft Financing

•  
  • Advantage: Microsoft Financing addresses some of the other shortcomings of traditional loans, such as technology and services that are usually not covered. This new financing program will finance technology purchases that can start as little as $3,000 and offers fixed payments for the loan term.
  • Disadvantage: Your business is still taking out a loan, so some of the disadvantages of a traditional loan still apply. Check with your accountant to find out if this option makes sense for your company.

Whether you decide to pay for your new purchase with cash, take out a traditional loan, or opt for the Microsoft Financing plan, experts say timing is essential. Wait too long to make an upgrade and your company could fall behind, lose business and risk becoming uncompetitive.

"Each successive version of a new operating system improves reliability and performance by between 20% and 30%," said DiDio, the Yankee Group analyst.

What's more, the business applications are more scalable, reliable, secure, longer-lasting and with better features and functionality. And it has the potential to give your company a boost -- for greater efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.

•  
  • When to use: For larger purchases, such as when you want to get everyone in your company on the same hardware or software version. Or the solution includes a large amount of software and/or implementation services.

•  
  • When to use: If you are only purchasing PC hardware and want to upgrade it every couple of years.