Our biggest barrier to change is not technology, but our entrenched way of thinking about a given circumstance.
This holds true even for me, as I am reminded of my early days as a programmer. We were cutting edge, my colleagues and I, building powerful applications that would—once installed on a user's personal computer—talk to centralized servers where a thoughtfully designed database waited to return requested data.
Based on what I've seen and heard in any number of articles and podcasts recently, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of metrics. Metrics are a lens through which we gauge how we're doing. Perhaps the most fundamental metric is known as profit, or what's left after we subtract the cost of delivering our products and services from the revenue we collected.
Economic conditions have provided additional incentive for IT decision makers to explore open source technologies. Shrinking revenue streams have forced business to conserve cash. Using open source represents one way to do so, since not only are licensing fees eliminated, open source technologies can often be leveraged and supported at lower cost and with more widely available resources than
Our phone system is back up, on crutches. Digium is allegedly troubleshooting to try to determine what went wrong overnight. Let me issue a word of caution to you if you are in the market for a new phone system. Do not buy the Digium Asterisk Appliance. Run fast in the opposite direction should you feel the temptation.
Bear with us while we work to get our phone system back up and running. Since we converted to IP with an Asterisk Appliance a year or so, we've had a load of headaches. The Digium system is neither ready for prime time, nor are we capable of servicing it effectively ourselves. It's been a headache. Wish us luck.
In the meantime, you can call any of us on our cell phones. Mine is 210-414-6370.
