A Tale of Two Years (part one)

I’m not looking to ride the ink trails of Charles Dickens here, but it’s awfully hard to resist when he laid down so apt an all-purpose summary of a year. Because it is always the best of times—and the worst. A little of this, a little of that. Some highs, some lows. One day you’re an American journalist getting an escort from North Korea by Bill Clinton, the next you’re Taylor Swift and your stage is being stormed by Kanye.

Certainly if you were Miss California or Roman Polanski in 2009, you’ve had better revolutions through the lunar cycle. But if you were Susan Boyle or the guy who won that dream job on that Pacific Island, well, you had yourself a bit of a party over the last 12 months, didn’t you?

As for us here at 360 and our journey through the latest calendar pages, we feel confident laying claim to Dickens’ more positive category of assessment. Prominent among those best-of times was our growth. In spite of the so-called “recession,” we managed to pass another year in expansion mode.

Our growth rate over the last six months? 46 percent.

More than that, we hired six new people in the last four months of 2009 and, in December, moved offices to a spot that is almost triple the size our original space.

Rising above negative ambient circumstances seems to be our thing: we launched the company during the last recession.

As for the folks we served over 2009, I will say they are grateful and better off for their encounter with us. Smart companies did not hold onto their cash when the pace slowed; they upgraded their systems!! Imagine that, and some of the best deals are made during a recession. And today these folks purring with efficient operating structures that are poised to capture business from a recovering economy.

And what of the rest? Well, they’re kind of preoccupied right now with the matter of enacting a system upgrade of their own. Still running Windows Server 2000, 2003 or perhaps Windows XP or better yet Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007? Have a look at your daybook, fella: It’s 2010 and the latest technology is Win2008, Window7, Exchange2010.

Hmmm, what else of this past year? In April, the Standish Report released its latest survey: an increase challenge and failures of in ERP and CRM implementations, 44% and 24% respectively. No surprise there, eh. I’ve been doing this for 15+ years and the scene was ever thus. Hence, why 360 Visibility was established with its innovative Solution Centre of ERP/CRM implementation methodology.  Try it, nobody likes to be burnt twice.

Certainly server virtualization continued to grab the attention of companies wanting to do more with less. Plasma and LCD are dead; LED TV is here to stay. And the results finally came in for the Beta-vs-VHS debate – Blu-ray won. So why does your IT disaster recovery plan still include “Tapes” – please shelve them along with those 8Tracks. Resistance is futile – Remote Online Backup is taking over.

Traditional phone system vendors that have been around since the mastodons continued to play catch-up while true voice-over IP systems like those that hail from AltiGen, Cisco and Microsoft Unified Communications laid the true pavement for 2010.

2010, a new decade! Set your goals, because “Vision without Execution is Hallucination” This year will be the best of times.