Wayne Rash

I could hear the frustration in his voice as Brother Barnabas described the year’s chaos in trying to upgrade his Web site so that it could handle more orders. A year ago, this Cistercian monk at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., was trying to find better ways to earn money for his highly regarded […]

For many resellers, especially those that provide hardware with little value-add, staying close to customers can be a problem. While it’s true that you’ll probably keep those who like your prices or your delivery times, it’s not always a sure bet. After all, there’s always the chance that some company will offer a better price […]

“We’re a very tech-savvy community,” said James Palenick, city administrator for Rio Rancho, N.M., explaining why his city of 63,000 was working to provide Wi-Fi access to its citizens. “We’ve always wanted this to provide economic growth,” he said. “It sends a very important message to the country and the world.” And of course, it […]

I was poring over the minutiae in an RFP (request for proposal) when I found the bad news. The computer that was proposed for a disputed contract did not, in fact, meet the requirements. Because of the way the contract was written, the reseller would have had to provide an upgrade at its own expense […]

When I talked to Michael Chang a few days ago about his company’s decision to sell Microsoft XP Media Center in quantities of one, it soon became clear that this wasn’t a mom-and-pop operation screwing computers together in the backroom. No, what Chang and his company Directron.com have become is a maker of custom solutions. […]

At least one reseller has been quick to act now that Microsoft has relaxed the rules about how its Windows XP Media Center can be sold. Michael Chang, president of Houston, Texas-based Directron.com, said his company has worked with Microsoft to make Media Center available to end-users in single-unit quantities. “It was never distributed that […]

When I was interviewing resellers and integrators for a recent story about Windows XP SP2, I was struck by the unanimity of one piece of advice. It revolved around one word. “Test,” they said. And they were right. It’s something I’ve come to appreciate since it’s saved me in many ways. It was just a […]

A year ago when I was testing 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches at the University of Hawaii, several things became clear. The first was that those switches were really fast. They really can pump data at their rated speeds, and that means sometimes three or four parallel 10-gig channels. That’s a lot of data. At the time […]

The announcement that Windows XP with SP2 (Service Pack 2) will be preloaded on computers when they’re delivered to customers is causing some concern in the reseller community. The concern isn’t about SP2’s importance. Rather, it’s about custom applications that reseller customers may want to run on those computers. “I guess it’s really mandatory,” said […]

It wasn’t exactly a huge integration project. In fact, it was tiny, but not as tiny as its budget. I had to upgrade the computing environment in an office so that it would handle a lot bigger workload. In this case, the job was to replace PCs with something much better to handle changing requirements, […]

The beauty of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is that it’s a real standard. Unlike earlier IP telephony standards such as H.323 that were more notable in their exceptions and proprietary extensions, SIP devices are designed to work together. Even better, for the most part they do. For example, Pingtel Corp.’s PBXes are designed to work […]

Corey Mandell knew things weren’t good when he got the ransom letter. Mandell had experienced such things before, and he knew that Authorize.Net, a Bellevue, Wash., credit card processing company, would be in for a tough time. What he didn’t realize until later is that it would be much worse than he had anticipated. The […]