MSPNetworks Blog

As much as we hate to admit it, the first thing that many people still think of when they hear the term “tech support” is the experience that comes with an antiquated approach to technology services: the break/fix method. Fortunately for us, we are seeing many businesses make the better decision, and turn to the clearly superior option, managed IT.

Therefore, as a managed service provider, we know that all we have to do is wait.

The Inherent Issues with Break/Fix Services

When business computing really took off in the 1970s, break/fix IT made sense. Businesses were able to deploy standalone microcomputers or distributed mid-range server systems that operated through remote terminals. Then, in the ‘80s, the personal computer combined the benefits of the two, and really highlighted the benefits that computers could offer a business. When Windows 3.1 was introduced to business users in the 1990s, the computer’s place in business was cemented in forever.

For all this time, computers would have their issues… but it just didn’t make sense to call in for repairs or put an internal IT team on it. If it could still operate somewhat, that was good enough. Should the computer break down completely, IT was brought in to fix it.

So, Were Break-Fix Services Once Okay?

Yes and no. Of course, this situation has always presented all the issues that have led many businesses away from the break/fix strategy today. For instance:

• IT costs could quickly stack up (and up, and up, and up) for a few reasons.
  
  • Recurring issues mean return visits, which mean additional costs.
  • Recurring issues can occasionally motivate insufficient repairs, to ensure repeat business.
  • Longer visits mean more billable time, and more money spent by companies.
• Final IT costs are only clear on the final invoice, preventing accurate IT budgeting.
• It discourages providers from upgrading technology or considering future needs. 

So, break-fix services were unpredictably expensive, and generally prevented any innovation or future planning for the client’s benefit, so issues had the tendency to repeatedly return. However, it wasn’t as though there was another option to compare it to at the time, either.

That option came around in the mid ‘90s, when the amount of technology in the office and its overall complexity increased greatly, with the introduction of fax machines, printers, and other hardware. Computers took much longer to repair when broken. The Internet exploded in popularity, adding an additional element of complexity.

A New Paradigm Emerges: Managed IT

This all meant that break/fix services soon became too inefficient to support businesses properly. Computers were no longer a convenience, but a legitimate necessity in the office, not to mention the other tools and devices that became key components to their processes. Downtime had evolved into something potentially devastating for operations, and expenses ran rampant.

As the new millennium came along, the modern managed service model was brought to the fore. This was thanks to an assortment of developments in information technology, including improved Internet, cloud technology, and automation. Using these tools, some IT providers saw a new opportunity and shifted how their services were delivered.

Gone were the days of waiting for operations to be in jeopardy before doing something about it. 

Now, IT providers have the capability to remotely access and monitor a client’s network from afar, allowing them to more efficiently identify potential issues and mitigate them at effectively all hours—often, before a client ever encounters an issue. The biggest change, however, was how this approach was able to impact the way that managed service providers were able to charge for their services.

Rather than charging at an hourly rate, the nature of the service allowed it to be billed at a very inclusive monthly rate. This simplified matters for the client, as a set-rate service is far easier to budget for. As an added benefit, this also motivated those providers who made the switch from the flawed break/fix approach to deliver a better service to those who signed on to their services.

Service Options Today

With managed services having been around and innovated upon for about two decades, there are even more opportunities for businesses to improve their processes and achieve greater goals. Break/fix is still around, too, but more and more businesses are seeing the comparative benefits of the managed service model and making the decision to switch. Managed services are a source of confidence. You no longer need to be concerned that your technology will bring issues into your business, because someone is there to take care of it for you.

Every so often, a new method is introduced that changes a foundational paradigm. Despite the relatively short time frame that business IT has been around for, managed services did just that… and therefore, break/fix services will eventually be—for all intents and purposes—phased out.

If you want to keep up with all the methods that will improve your business’ operations, reach out to MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001 today!

Augmented reality has been one of the most cited emerging technologies for the past few years. It was the technology that was supposed to fuel Google Glass, the failed attempt at creating a pair of revolutionary smart glasses. Since then, there hasn’t been much press about AR in the mainstream media and not much is known about major tech companies’ attempts to improve AR technology. 

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is an interactive experience where the resources of the smartphone coupled with AR software produce objects over the display of a device. Examples include the first down line they superimpose on a football broadcast, the filters that many messaging apps have integrated, and the immensely popular mobile game Pokemon Go.

Of course, these mostly are novelty uses, but businesses have made big efforts to incorporate AR technology into their marketing efforts over the past few years. IKEA famously uses AR technology in their IKEA Place app. It allows people to forecast what a room in their house would look like if they purchased a piece of furniture.

Google, understanding the extraordinarily useful applications of AR, launched their ARCore platform in March 2018. ARCore features three innovative technologies that provide mobile application developers the tools they need to build AR apps. They are:

• Six degrees of freedom - makes device movement in any three-dimensional space possible.
• Environmental understanding - allows the AR app on the device to detect the size and location of horizontal structures. 
• Light estimation - provides current environment’s lighting condition. 

This platform is allowing more developers than ever to integrate real time information into their applications for the user’s benefit. This has resulted in record growth for the technology in 2019, and that is only scratching the surface. 

Google is not the only company that is all in on AR. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are also making serious commitments to the technology. This is leading to a major boost in application development.

In the future, AR-fueled applications will be used in dozens of industries for hundreds of purposes. In fact, more than 100 million users have already used AR-enabled shopping applications. You will have to expect that as 5G wireless technology gets rolled out that number will be dwarfed by the number that will over the next few years. 

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We hope we aren’t dating ourselves too much by mentioning computer punch cards, but they were once the means of inputting data into a computing device… at least, until the now-ubiquitous mouse and keyboard came into the scene. This variety of interfacing with our devices now seems to be one of the few ways to practically use them. However, other interfaces have emerged - do any of them stand a chance of unseating the keyboard and mouse?

Honestly, it really all depends on how (and if) the interfaces that are being developed are practically adopted. Here, we’ll go over how these interfaces are likely to be developed and how technology may be influenced in the future.

Today’s Familiar User Interfaces

As you’re reading this blog right now, there’s a pretty fair chance that you accessed it using a keyboard and mouse. Despite other interfaces, like touch gestures and voice responsiveness, being popular on many new devices, there are still plenty of devices that leverage the mouse and keyboard combination. However, this is not to say that there aren’t other upcoming interfaces that we are already seeing more and more. Take augmented and virtual reality, for example. These two interfaces are being seen more and more commonly, making it more likely that they will be leveraged for practical work purposes sooner than later. The same can be said of digital assistants and their capabilities to streamline many of the day-to-day operations that would otherwise take up your employees’ time.

The User Interfaces of Tomorrow

The whole point behind a user interface is to make it easier for a user to, for lack of a better term, pick up and play with whatever solution they happen to be leveraging. It was precisely this phenomenon that made the smartphone such a successful technology, as the highly hands-on UI made the devices remarkably intuitive to use. However, we may not even need to touch our devices at all in the near future. One of Google’s many ventures, Project Soli, is dedicated to creating a touch-free manual interface that uses radar to “read” the gestures of a user.

This kind of user interface could likely lead to a more three-dimensional version, similar to what can be seen in films like Minority Report. In fact, the researcher who assisted in creating the movie, John Underkoffer, has made strides towards the practical creation of such an interface.

Another potential route for UI to take in the future, haptic holograms, can be seen in the Iron Man franchise. Instead of the “typical” holograms, which function as little more than projections of light, haptic holograms can be manipulated by the user - allowing them to be edited, reorganized, and reexamined. As seen in the movies, these holograms could even mimic physical computing components, like keyboards. This suggests that the need for these physical components may not be quite as much of a need as it would be a preference in the relatively near future. Putting it simply, we find this idea pretty darn cool - and this is just the tip of the UI iceberg.

Using Your Brain to Talk to Computers

Yes, you read that right… the future of UI will likely allow us to use computers with only our minds. Advancements in bioelectronics and what is known as Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology have enabled us to scan a user’s brain waves and have a computer translate these waves into actionable commands.

Tests are already in progress to apply this technology to robotic limbs, motorized wheelchairs, and other accessibility tools. There is also research being pursued to enable us to use BCI technology to control the many devices and household utilities in our lives.

BCI has also been heavily featured in solutions to help restore a person’s capacity to communicate, or simply to augment it. There are implants that now allow a user to use their mind to type, while others are in development to directly convert brain waves into text. Astoundingly, there have been experiments conducted that have pretty much granted human beings the gift of telepathy. A subject in India was instructed to think the word “hello.” This thought was then converted into binary code and emailed to France, where it was reformatted into brainwaves and received by a second subject.

BCI has even been used to record dreams. Admittedly, these recordings aren’t of the highest quality, but the fact of the matter is that we have recorded dreams.

OF course, it should go without saying that practically using BCI for computing is a long way off, so you don’t have to give up your mouse and keyboard just yet. However, it is also a little fun to imagine how these advanced interfaces could potentially be used to improve the human experience sooner than later. We’ll just have to wait and see.

But, what do you think? Are any of these applications of advanced user interfaces of particular interest to you? Discuss it with us in the comments!

If your business is one that depends on transportation, you know that coordination is extremely important. With consumers’ reliance on a company’s distribution arm, today’s companies are turning old practices on their heads and utilizing a more technology-driven approach to effectively manage their company’s transportation initiatives. This technology is innovating quickly and could mean a major transformation for businesses before too long. Today, we’ll go through three innovations that are working to change how transportation-dependent companies do things.

Fleet Management

The first technology that we want to talk about is fleet management. Fleet management is actually a makeup of several different types of software that has been combined to create a comprehensive fleet management platform. The fleet management software includes an easy-to-use centralized dashboard. In this dashboard you can find all the information that needs to be known about your fleet, including:

• Work pending in priority order
• Any issues holding up progress
• Equipment status, permits, or other admin items
• Repair orders and repair status
• Employee information (Driver’s License, physical, and other administrative information)
• Approved and unapproved work orders
• Predictive maintenance schedules
• Predictive fleet schedules
• And more

Since fleet management software is designed to manage large numbers of vehicles, drivers, and combinations of the two, having one outfitting your distribution or transportation section of your business is a complete game changer. Not only can you tell who is driving what vehicle, you can see what it will ultimately cost to run the routes, providing actionable information in which to make decisions.

Internet of Things

An ever-growing part of modern-day technology, the Internet of Things, is beginning to revolutionize the way companies are able to track their assets. Since any manufacturing company relies on its procurement processes and its distribution, the IoT is a major benefit to manufacturers. With IoT-enabled asset tracking solutions integrated, you can remotely track your equipment, vehicles, and inventory on both ends to more effectively manage your assets.

IoT-enabled asset tracking provides the following features:

• Use real-time data to adjust your business to build efficiency
• Theft and loss prevention
• Comprehensive inventory management
• Negative impact reduction through predictive analysis
• On-point customer service
• And more

If your business has problems with route inefficiency, costs of doing business, or any other logistics-based aspect of your business, utilizing asset management software powered by the Internet of Things can be a good solution for your company.

Autonomous Vehicles

Finally, we get to the creme de la creme of transportation innovation: the driverless vehicle. It’s been years since the first driverless car was tested and today there are working trucks shipping products on southwest U.S. highways. While today’s driverless trucks aren’t advanced enough to make dock-to-dock runs, navigating the open road is no problem. Uber subsidiary Otto completed the first-ever autonomous delivery, delivering beer from Fort Collins, CO to Colorado Springs, CO. In the next few years it will be a viable alternative to hiring shipping companies; and, beyond may just make the truck driver an endangered species. Some of the main benefits of driverless trucks include:

• Fewer traffic accidents
• Reduction in-road congestion
• Cost reduction
• Lower product prices

Since there is a long way to go until autonomous vehicles will be the predominant form of shipping used by most businesses, finding out what solutions can work today to help you benefit your company is important. Call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001 for more.

Even if we’d like it to last forever, business technology can’t possibly do so for a number of reasons. Due to the fact that businesses and their technology are constantly upgrading and changing, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll have to upgrade your technology at some point, whether it reaches its end-of-life event or just simply becomes obsolete for your organization. In fact, failing to update your infrastructure from time to time can have serious negative side-effects for your business.

We’ll show you why solutions eventually reach their EOL and how to handle this event when it arrives.

Why Do Services and Solutions Have an End-of-Life?
All good things must come to an end. For example, you probably can’t remember the last time you used an actual rotary phone (if ever), and there’s a very good reason we don’t carve messages in stone or drive horse-and-buggies around anymore--there are better, more efficient options for these solutions. While they may have been game-changing for the time they existed, there was always an effort to improve and innovate. This process continues for as long as people can dream of making better business decisions and improving their operations. After all, if there’s one thing that all businesses can agree on, it’s that faster and more efficient solutions are better than old, outdated ones.

Technology in general has improved substantially over the past several decades. Computers that used to fill up entire rooms are now dwarfed in power by the devices we carry with us in our pockets. Of course, this change was gradual and occurred over a rather long period of time. The same level of change can be seen in automobiles. The first automobile was built in 1885 by Karl Benz, but it took another 15 years to introduce a proper steering wheel and 24 years for the addition of a radio. 1958 saw the addition of the seatbelt, but it wasn’t until 1970 that it became a front-seat requirement. Considering just how far vehicles have come in this span of time--driving themselves, connecting to space radio services, and warning drivers if doors or seatbelts aren’t used properly--it’s quite easy to see just how out-of-date a revolutionary (at the time) vehicle like the one Benz produced is in today’s society. The same aspect can be applied to business technology.

How to Approach Your Business’ IT
You don’t always have to wait until the end-of-life event for your technology to upgrade it. We recommend taking the following steps for replacing your IT:

• Evaluation: Take a look at your business’ IT from a big-picture perspective. How does your business want to make progress? Is your technology able to meet this progress? An inventory system for your technology helps considerably in this regard, and it can help you keep track of which upgrades are coming when.
• Emphasis: Once you know where your business wants to be in the near future, you need to take micro-steps in the right direction. If the budget exists for this, then you need to consider which equipment should be prioritized, as well as whether or not you can afford them. Consider how many opportunities are being missed due to the upgrade not being done, as well as how close the system’s EOL is. There might even be a warranty on it that is preventing your business from reaching a specific goal.
• Execution: Once you’ve figured out what your greatest needs are and how you can afford them, you’ll have to put your plans into motion. This might mean completing the upgrade process in its entirely or separating it into portions.

MSPNetworks can help your business implement the right technology at the right time. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.