Recent changes in the technology landscape give us pause to consider the future of our business as well as the advice we are providing our clients.

The success of hosted services such as Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Freshbooks has proven two things: customers are willing to have business critical data stored on equipment outside their physical control and, from a cost perspective, it's in their best interests to do so.

Power costs are rising.  Toronto Hydro's plans to charge higher rates for electricity during the business day are well documented.  This misguided scheme will hurt three groups especially hard: the elderly, families with young children and small business.  Each of these groups will, of necessity, consume most of their power during the most expensive periods.

The spam problem is not going away.  In fact, it's worse than ever.  Email, the single most utilized computer application of all time, is in danger of collapsing under the weight.  One of our clients, a web based sales organization with only 5 employees, gets over 8 million spam messages a month.  Even if their self-hosted email server and spam filtering solution could handle the load - it couldn't - the cost of exceeding  their monthly bandwidth allocation was prohibitive.  Hosted filtering was the only viable solution.

We've listened.  We've learned.  We're making some changes.

Effective May 15th, we're closing our own web and email hosting service.  Others can do it better and cheaper but can't offer the personalized service that we provide.  To give you the best of both worlds, we're partnering with the leaders in hosted applications.  We'll provide assistance with procurement, implementation, data migration, support and training.  More information will be coming soon.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be introducing our new on-premise server with full support for virtualized computing environments.

It's all about choice and offering you the best, most reliable, cost effective, business computing platform available anywhere.