CMC R3 New Features and Improvements

As part of our ever growing effort to provide the best service possible, we would like to share with you some of the newest improvements to our Managed And Monitoring system as well as some enhancements that are on the way. With the R3 release we now have a Power Management option that allows us to track power consumption by your equipment. This allows us to see where money is being wasted in your environment, by running scripts to turn unused items off or even just determine bad power supplies that need to be replaced.

Another new advantage is that we can now monitor cloud services. We can manage your Google Docs or Office 365 implementations right from Service Center. Admin tasks like adding and removing users or resetting passwords can all be done by PEI in one convenient place.

One of the biggest improvements is the way we remote into your systems. We used to need an outside IP or even a VPN set up to allow us access to your systems. With our new Remote Tools, a PEI engineer can remotely connect into your devices through our Service Center securely and quickly. With this new enhancement, and engineer can securely access your devices from anywhere. This ensures that we are able to provide prompt and emergency service as quickly as possible.

As your environments continue to grow and evolve, you can trust PEI to do the same right along side so that we can continue to support your growing companies needs.

How Do You See UC?

PEI has been involved in the IT Business for a long time.  After over 23 years and thousands of projects, we’ve been a part of almost every major shift in business IT strategy.  Many of these changes were short-lived and could only be adopted by specific industry segments, but there were also were a few that were profound and ubiquitous.

In the late 1980’s, the Internet was emerging and organizations began to develop a new presence.  In the 1990’s we helped hundreds of organizations integrate office automation and E-Mail.  Can you imagine business without email?  At the start of the new millennia, Voice over IP took businesses by storm.

In the last couple of years, we see another “perfect storm” emerging with profound implications for those organizations bold enough to grasp the impact and benefits to their organization and customers.  How we do business, communicate, collaborate and interact with our co-workers is undergoing a fundamental change that will once again sort out successful organizations, and those in decline.

We don’t believe we’re overstating the impact of Unified Communications when we call it the next great mega-trend in IT.  It’s not a matter of whether you adopt a Unified Communications strategy; it’s a matter of WHEN you adopt it.

There are dozens of reasons to embrace Unified Communications.  The industry is flooded with Whitepapers, Business Justifications, Return on Investment Models and Case Studies.  Business decision makers are inundated with information that all points to the same conclusion – Unified Communications makes good business sense.  If you still need proof, I encourage you to speak with our experts and our customers.

Like any emerging technology, there’s a lot to learn, understand and translate into a model that fits your business.  That’s where PEI comes in.  PEI began on the UC journey over 10 years ago.  We’ve committed our organization to being expert in UC.   Whether you’re just starting to understand UC, or have already started and need to “take it to the next level”, PEI is uniquely suited to serve as your GO TO partner.  Questions about the how the cloud fits in?  Questions about Return on Investment?  Questions about developing a long term strategy?  Concerns about culture and adoption?  PEI can address all of these.  We’ve crafted our business to help you navigate this perfect storm and emerge unscathed.

We’re here to help. Investing a few minutes of your time to find out what PEI can do for you may be the best investment you’ve made in years.

-Tim Krueger, PEI

PEI – Winner of the IT Project of the Year Award at the 2011 CSIA Apex Awards

Boulder, CO – July 13, 2011 – PEI was announced today as the recipient of the IT Project of the Year award.  The Apex Awards are prestigious technology awards recognizing outstanding accomplishments and leadership by Colorado’s advanced technology industry.   

“PEI’s IT project began with the goal of providing a virtual sales force with an enhanced online environment to drive community and communications for their client.  Their client had a largely remote workforce, and they wanted to up level their employee engagement,” explained Su Hawk, President, CSIA.  “PEI seamlessly integrated instant messaging, web conferencing, and video conferencing to take their client even closer to presenting coworkers with a single interface for information,” she continued. 

“We’re honored to be named a winner for the IT Project of the Year award,” said Tim Krueger, President/CEO, PEI.   “Great clients like New Belgium Brewing, coupled with top notch engineers lead to successful projects like this one.   We have an outstanding team of people at PEI and it really shows through the work that they accomplish for all of our clients.” 

About PEI:

PEI is a technology consultancy and service provider serving a dedicated client base across the United States. In business for over 23 years, PEI focuses on several areas of technology: Networking, Infrastructure, Unified Communications, Virtualization, and Managed Services, with security always top of mind. By partnering with industry-leading companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, HP, and VMware, PEI enables their clients to realize the competitive value of technology solutions that drive real business results.  For more information about PEI please call (303) 786-7474 or visit www.pei.com

About CSIA, the Colorado Technology Association:
CSIA is the technology industry leader in uniting and growing Colorado’s information technology industry by providing advocacy, education, business connections, and information, while supporting economic development, unification of technology stakeholders, and larger recognition of the industry and the people involved to develop and promote Colorado’s technology industry.  CSIA also works nationally to ensure Colorado’s technology voice is heard, through TECNA, a coalition of technology associations across the United States and Canada, as well as with TechAmerica, the national lobbying organization for federal issues.  Since 1994, CSIA has been involved in legislative issues and public policy to represent the information technology industry in Colorado, and has provided a number of annual programs, events and connections to support business success.  For more information on CSIA please call (303) 592-4070 or visit www.coloradotechnology.org

No Forklift Needed

With the ever growing interest of Microsoft’s Lync, a common question that is asked to PEI by customers and prospects is, “We’ve already invested into a different phone system, can we still use Lync?”  The good news is, yes, you can run Microsoft Lync alongside your current phone/communication infrastructure.   From its very beginnings of LCS then onto OCS and now Lync, Microsoft has understood the fact they are competing against established communication providers and that in order for them to be able to compete and win market share, they need to create a product that can “play nice” with the big guys out there.

Through a direct partnership with Microsoft, PEI’s engineering team has been able to implement Lync for many of our customers who have already made the big investments into other systems (e.g. Cisco’s Call Manager/Unity) but would like some of the features and benefits that Lync has to offer.  By utilizing a customer’s current network and server infrastructure, PEI is able to easily implement Lync to provide a customized communication platform for clients.  Whether it would be starting off with the basics of Instant Messaging and Presence, all the way to having multiple phone systems ringing a single person, PEI is able to work within your investments to give a truly unified communications platform.  For more information on how PEI can work within your current environment to give you all that your company needs, please contact sales@pei.com or 303.786.7474.

-Arash Zadeh & Jon Eyberg, PEI

Web Conferencing

There is no substitute for face to face interaction with clients and vendors when it comes to building and maintaining relationships.  However this may not always be possible depending on your location and area of coverage.  Web conferencing including audio, video and data sharing is an excellent alternative to maintain communication “between handshakes”.  Web conferencing or as some people know it electronic meetings come in a variety of configurations and can be used in several modes.  Whether you are a project, sales or IT manager there are a myriad of uses for such a tool. 

Web conferencing takes the power of your PC and creates an interactive environment for sharing documents, training materials or even live applications.  The inclusion of audio can be one way for two way interaction depending on your needs.  File or application sharing a can also be interactive or one way for training or project meetings.  For instance a PEI client today utilizes Microsoft Web meetings to incorporate members of their engineering staffs across the US to coordinate on projects.  Through their Outlook they can schedule all resources, provide a dial in number and include content for quick, efficient and successful sessions.  PEI has assisted customers in every vertical with understanding how web communication tools can benefit them.  Allow us to enhance your “virtual handshakes” with web conferencing.     

-Jennifer Smith, PEI

Microsoft Unified Communications Competency:
Got Gold? …We Do!

PEI is excited to announce that we have achieved the Microsoft Gold Unified Communications Competency. When working with us you are working with one of the best! There are 27,000 IT Companies listed on Microsoft’s Partner Finder, Pinpoint; there are only 21 companies in the United States that currently hold the Gold Unified Communications Competency. Which means only .07% of all 27,000 partners demonstrated the level of excellence required to achieve the gold level competency.

To attain the Gold Unified Communications Competency, we had to demonstrate greater value to our customers by showcasing best-in-class solutions that have been subject to rigorous and auditable approval processes. Some of the completed requirements included:

Several of our Microsoft Certified Professionals were required to test proficient in several areas of technology such as; Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

Along with completing numerous engineering exams, PEI completed licensing, sales and marketing competency assessments. Finally we were required to provide multiple verifiable customer references, and participate in Customer Satisfaction Indices.

We have worked hard for this competency to earn your trust to create an IT environment that will increase your efficiency and cut your costs!

-Andrea Leonhardt, PEI

303-786-7474
andrea@pei.com

The Dividends from VMware and HP Storage Upgrades

Many of our customers run a PEI designed combination of VMware virtualized servers and HP Storage.  The architecture has proven to be both powerful and agile.  If you rely on either, or both, there are times when version upgrades pay real dividends. 

The latest VMware vSphere 4.1 upgrade is one of those times!  vSphere 4.1 offers a number of compelling solutions that addresses key pain points and enhances the value of your VMware investment.   For small and midsize businesses, the new vSphere 4.1 delivers higher efficiency, greater agility, and more freedom of choice than ever before, making it easier than ever to optimize existing assets and get always-on IT with comprehensive, cost-effective backup and recovery, resulting in a solution that can help customers achieve rapid, sustainable growth.

 Efficiency through Utilization and Automation – vSphere 4.1 enables higher consolidation ratios with unequaled performance by providing groundbreaking new memory management technology, and by expanding its storage, networking, and automation capabilities.

 Agility with Control – vSphere 4.1 extends its award-winning availability and security capabilities with the world’s fastest live migrations and the ability to respond in parallel to any business need or change. Application services enhancements deliver new status details for high availability, tighter integration with an existing directory services, and advanced patching.  New features are provided with vMotion™, High Availability, Data Recovery, Active Directory Integration, and vCenter Update Manager

If you’re also relying on the Hewlett Packard P4000 SAN (formerly known as the Lefthand SAN), the latest 9.0 software release is a tremendous complement to the VMware upgrade.  The new 9.0 release is a comprehensive release that includes significant enhancements with:

• New global configurations done at the management group
• Automated online upgrade management to apply updates more easily
• Alarms and Event enhancements
• Network RAID 5 and 6 enhancements
• VMware VAAI vStorage offloads – faster VM deployments and less server load
• Central Management Console enhancements
• Improved Host server cluster management
• Many other benefits

What does this all mean?  In a nutshell, these upgrades deliver real performance gains and extend the useful life of your server/storage investments.  If you’d like to learn more, we encourage you to speak to your PEI Sales or Technical representative.  Given the reasonable time necessary to perform these upgrades, this may be the wisest investment you’ll make all year.

-Tim Krueger, PEI

The Lync Experience

Microsoft Lync ushers in a new connected experience transforming every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, engaging and accessible from anywhere. A single interface unites voice, IM, audio-, video-, and web-conferencing into a richer, more contextual offering. This includes a visually compelling experience that is consistent throughout Microsoft Office and other business applications, including color-coded presence icons, pictures, high-resolution video and desktop sharing. End-users can instantly see the availability of their contacts, start a conference call from right within Office applications, or sit down for a “face-to-face” video-conference. A single identity connects users to contacts inside and outside of the organization with communications that are federated with corporate and leading public IM networks. And a single experience across the PC, phone, web or mobile means that users have the choice to connect from many devices. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable system that works with Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint and uses Microsoft management tools to facilitate easier management and lower cost of ownership. Interoperability with existing systems enables smoother deployment and migration.

PEI is Rapidly Expanding

We are pleased to announce five new hires.  PEI has brought aboard two highly sought after infrastructure engineers, a highly experienced new project manager, a sharp inside sales and contract manager, and a bright new engineering admin.  We know these individuals will be an asset to PEI, but more importantly an asset to your organization and future IT projects.  This is an exciting time for PEI and we plan to continue growing from here through the New Year.  Look for new faces and information about all our new hires coming soon!

- Andrea Leonhardt, PEI

Is your 2011 IT Budget in Place?

Wow its December, how did the year fly by so quickly?  It seems like only yesterday that shorts and t-shirts were the norm and year-end seemed so far away.  Now everyone is looking forward to their holiday season to spend time with loved ones, but one thing needs to be taken care of before everyone jets off for the holiday’s… your 2011 IT budget.  We at PEI would like to take this time to remind you of the importance of creating a well-planned 2011 budget.

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