Tag: IBM

Affordable Consumer Electronics And Goods For The Small Business

As a small business owner, you probably know what a hassle it can be to shop for electronics and other business goods. You need products that are dependable, affordable, and easy to use. Computers, office equipment, mo bile phones, and many other business necessities are available both online and off-line, so you have many options to consider.

Tips for In-Store Buying

When shopping for electronics or computers at a local store, compare brand names, features and pricing carefully. Sometimes a low price means sacrificing the quality or features you really need. For instance, if you’re planning to buy a computer desk, consider the design of the desk and all its features. Does it have drawers or shelves to make organization easy? Does it have a pullout keyboard or a desktop keyboard? Also, consider the size of the desk and the quality of its materials (steel, solid wood or particle board).

When buying a computer, consider brand name, size of the hard drive and memory, as well as any pre-installed software it may contain. Avoid buying computers that have “advertising” menu bars pre-installed on the Windows screen. These tend to hang up often and are not worth the hassle although they are usually lower in price. Look for reputable brand names such as Dell, Pentium, Acer, and Compaq. Dependable laptops are available from these companies: Dell, Averatec, Compaq, HP Pavillion, Acer, Gateway, and IBM.

Avoid rebate offers. Rebates are often more trouble than they’re worth, and your name might get added to hundreds of mailing lists! Instead, shop around for a great value up front to get the PC or laptop that will meet your needs.

Refurbished Products

With refurbished electronics or computers, find a reputable company that has a good standing with the Better Business Bureau. Some companies will advertise refurbished items, but will not follow through with a guarantee. Before buying a refurbished item, check for a guarantee and do a little research on the company to find out if other customers were satisfied with the products and service. If buying refurbished computers online, use the search engines to find out as much information as you can about the company.

Buying Electronics and Computers Online

Shop around online for great bargains on brand name electronics and computers. If you’re pressed for time, there are discount home electronics online superstores that carry almost everything you’ll need for your small business. Some of the products you might find include cables, office equipment, TV and video accessories, scanners, GPS, power protection products, mobile phones, digital recorders, formatted diskettes, CDs, and more.

Online electronics stores for small business can offer you better prices because they have few overhead costs when operating on the Web. You can usually expect to save up to 20% on items.

You’ll find shopping online to be a great time-saver because you can shop from your home or office without visiting busy stores.

Use these tips to find electronics, computers and other products for your small business at great prices without sacrificing quality.

Software as a Service or SaaS Technology Definition and Advantages

It truly is a more competitive world out there. Businesses know that to be at par with the competition and to grow at a rapid pace, they need to drive innovation within the company and find partner organizations that are cutting edge and would help them dominate the market quickly using practical, simple and cost effective methods.

Rob Purdy, CEO of Carlton Group, a leading edge technology provider, said that in 2011, the IT Channel Planet reported on an IBM survey which said that “mid size businesses are shifting investment priorities more towards innovation and growth and a significant portion of resources are likely to be allocated towards “SaaS” computing. About 70 % of the respondents intended to work with a local channel partner to help meet their technology objectives.”

What exactly is Software as a Service or “SaaS” Technology and why has it become important for businesses?

Information technology research and advisory company Gartner describes SaaS as software thats managed, delivered and owned remotely by providers which could be one or more. The infrastructure and the IT operations that support the applications are also outsourced to the vendor or a different provider. The application that the vendor delivers is an application thats based on one set of data definitions and common code which are then consumed in a one-to-many model by customers at any time. If the software needs to be installed on-premises using the companys infrastructure, that is not SaaS technology.

A Gartner Group estimate put the 2010 sales of this technology at $10 billion and the 2011 sales at about $12.1 billion. By 2015, the IT advisory company estimates that sales figures for SaaS will double the 2010 numbers.

Purdy, citing the Wikipedia definition, said that Saas is “a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and accessed by users using a web browser over the internet.”

Why are more and more companies choosing Saas? Purdy said the following reasons:

1. He said that many large performance improvement companies have made the decision to migrate their client solutions to SaaS technology because it is much more affordable than traditional software to maintain, faster to implement and in most cases can be fully managed by the end customer.

2. SaaS technology delivers secure, affordable, scalable and easily accessible method to deliver employee recognition performance, loyalty training and even global reward management solutions all on a global scale.

3. SaaS keeps companies competitive. Purdy said, “Companies stand to reap massive rewards by incorporating SaaS solutions into their offerings. Performance improvement companies who do not offer SaaS solutions are less competitive simply because most enterprise level organizations are already using or considering using SaaS technology.

4. Software as a Service or “SaaS” Technology delivers simplicity. “In the words of Martin Henry Fisher, knowledge is a process of piling up facts,” Purdy shared. “Wisdom lies in their simplification. And nothing speaks volumes like simplicity to your customers.”

Evolution Of Computer Technology

Today computers are an indispensable part of the lives of human beings but at one point of time there were no computers. Knowing the history of computers and how much progress has been made can aid us in understanding just how complicated the invention of the computer really is. Unlike other devices, the computer is the one invention that does not have any one specific inventor. Throughout the development of the computer, various people have made contributions to making a computer work. Some of these inventions were those of complete computers or other additions that helped revolutionize the computer that existed at that time. One such invention was the Integrated Circuit.

The single most important year in the history of computers is 1936. It was in 1936 that the very first computer was created by Konrad Zuse who called it the Z1 Computer. This was the first system that was fully programmable. Even though there had been devices that had come and gone before this but they didnt match upto it because of its superior computing power. Till 1942 no business saw profits and opportunities in computers. The first computer company was called ABC computers and was owned and operated by Clifford Berry and John Atanasoff. Two years later in 1942 came the Harvard Mark I computer which furthered the science of computing even more.

The age of computers saw its biggest change ever in 1953 with the introduction of International Business Machines known today as IBM. The company has always been a key player in the development of new systems. This was the first real competition to bee seen in the world of computing and helped to encourage faster development of better computers. The first contribution of IBM was the IBM 701 EDPM Computer. A year after this the first high level programming language was brought to the centre stage. This was a programming language that had not been written in ‘assembly’ or binary languages and was called FORTRAN which was written to enable more people to be able to program computers. In the year 1955 Bank of America, Stanford Research Institute and General Electric joined hands to introduce the very first computer for use in banks.

After that the evolution was quick. Computers like Apple I and II, The Scelbi, Mark-8 Altair, TRS-80, the Commodore Pet computers and IBM 5100 were the leaders of the sector of home computing. The micro processor was like the heart of the computer and began with the Intel 4004. from then it has evolved into todays Pentium IV, Dual core and Core 2 Duo processors. Along with the evolution in Hardware came the evolution in software which went from assembly languages to todays languages like C++, Java and PHP. There is more to come in this field and that more will surely be AI or Artificial Intelligence. The term was coined by John McCarthy and is today a major field of study.