As 2017 comes to a close, we take a look back on 2017 and its effects on Compulink. Every year has its ups and downs and its highlights. Every person and company will experience these types of things themselves, but here at Compulink it was very good overall. We are happy to end 2017 on a high note and look forward to a strong 2018. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from 2017.

All the accomplishments we achieved as a company are all due to the outstanding leadership of our CEO. Whether we are riding high or are on the lowest of lows he keeps everyone focused and together. All employees follow his lead and we achieved great things by doing that.

Primarily is our sales, as with any company this is how we keep the lights on. Sales had a great year, but we don’t settle for what we get. We are hoping to increase the numbers next year. Of course our success in sales is due to the driving force of our VP of Sales. She outdid herself as always. She even won a sales contest for HP Inc Printing.

Another highlight was brining on our new Chief Operating Officer. This major addition to our company is to bring big changes going forward. In less than a year he has enabled our Compulink team to be more efficient and better at their jobs.

As we move into the new year we hope to continue our success. Thank you to all our customers and business partners. To learn about our plans for 2018, make sure you read the blog post A Look Compulink’s 2018 plans. There we outline some of the biggest initiatives we plan to undertake as a company. We hope build on all the good moment we have for 2018 and hope you come along for the ride.  

Food and Wine Festival.

Thank you to Ingram Micro and HP Inc as our valued partners who also played a key role in this success. Thank you to all the customers who came to Compulink for their printing needs. A special thank you to the sales team that worked diligently under Denise’s guidance.

HP Inc is a longtime partner for Compulink Technologies. Just as with every partner we do our best to increase their sales through Compulink, regardless of contest. Compulink is dedicated to sharing its success with any and all partners who choose to join us.

As more and more businesses adopt the cloud, they are finding that the cloud is lacking in security, compliance, and application performance. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel are teaming up to tackle these challenges with hybrid IT driven by HPE Gen10 servers.

What is hybrid IT?

It is a mix of both on premises and off premises IT environments. That means you have a data center that handles the most important data and workloads. While also using a cloud solution to handle other data and workloads. It’s scalable and provides a lot of flexibility and on demand capacity to operate across application in data center and cloud environments.

Why do you need hybrid IT?

Well because in today’s world businesses need cost effective ways to improve agility and collaboration. That is what we use the cloud for. To put it into a visual example, imagine a company designing a new product. That company has product designers if offices across the country. Rather than pay for them to all be in one location. They can collaborate from where they are through cloud and collaboration solutions. An hybrid IT environment can allow the accessibility of the cloud with the security, performance handling of a data center.

HPE and Intel Team up

HPE will use Intel-Xeon Processors to power their brand new Gen10 servers. End users can adapt performance to application using the HPE Intelligent System Tuning. HPE says that this creates the world’s most secure industry standard servers. The Intel Xeon Processors in Gen10 Servers allows the performance to handle the most demanding applications such as big data and database workloads. Gen10 Servers play a key role in any IT infrastructure modernization and IT agility. They can accelerate business insights across a hybrid world of traditional IT, public cloud, and private cloud.

Read more about this team up on HPE blog page. Click Here

Compulink Technologies is a certified Minority Owned Small Business we were recognized for being one of the most successful MBEs in the state of New York. That does not make us a billion dollar conglomerate, but it does make us a very successful and profitable small business. Now what is an MBE certification you may ask? It is a certification given by city states and government agencies, that classify you as a minority owned business. That means if you are African American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, Indian, or anything non-white, you can be a minority owned business. This certification gives you special access to grants, loans, business opportunities, tax breaks, and other special considerations. There is also certifications for women owned businesses WBEs and veteran owned small businesses as well. If you fall into these categories, you should have the matching certification.

The best things these certifications do, is allow you to do business with the government. So if you are in the business to business world, you may be able to sell your goods and services to the government. Now people don’t think about doing business with the government, because they either think its not profitable, or its too complicated. Well it is definitely a complicated process to do business with the government, and its very hard.  However, by no means is it not profitable. Compulink is a multi-million dollar company, just by selling to the government. The public sector is just like any other business market you can think of. They need common goods and services that any business would need such as IT, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, Staffing, Janitorial Services and Supplies. You name it, they need it.

The MBE certification was a foot in the door for Compulink. We used it to fulfill small IT purchases at first, but overtime, we became a preferred vendor. Eventually when we started to compete for the larger contract, we had an advantage. Agencies knew us and knew we were dependable, and the trusted big contracts to us. We are often in a good position to compete for the large contract, and small purchases are always being sent our way.

Now a certification is not going to be the only key to success. You need to be aggressive and chase opportunities down. You also have to start small at first, nobody just gets a million dollar contract out of no where. You have to build relationships and get discretionary purchase that are small in amounts. After you build a reputation for reliability and performance, you can start to compete for larger contracts. This is by no means a way to become a billionaire, but it can help you build ans sustain a successful business.

On April 13th 2017, Compulink Technologies’  CEO and Founder Raphael Arboleda gave a speech at the New York Empire State Development Minority and Woman Owned Business Regional Expo at Lehman College. Mr. Arboleda was asked to speak about using his New York State Minority Owned Business Certification to create a successful company. Compulink Technologies has been in business for 30 years and has become one of the most preferred vendors for the city and state of New York.  The New York State Empire State Development agency has recognized both Compulink and Mr. Arboleda as on of the most successful MBE certified businesses within the entire state.

In his speech Mr. Arboleda talked about how tough it is to do business with the government. As Mr Arboleda said ” doing business with the government takes time, patience and determination. You are never going to get every opportunity you compete for, and you will lose more than you win. The key is to keep trying and to keep learning. “

Congratulations to our CEO Rafael Arboleda who’s leadership and determination have made Compulink Technologies a major success today. Thank You to New York Empire State Development for acknowledging Compulink’s and Mr. Arboleda’s success, and for all the tools and resource you provide to help businesses succeed. Thank you to all the agencies that we have done business with, it has been a pleasure to serve you. We look forward to continuing our relationship with you. Lastly thank you to the employees past and present who contributed to Compulink’s success, and who keep the company going everyday.

Compulink met with executives of Hewlett Packard Enterprise to discuss bring HPE solutions to market in New York State. We met with the SLED executives and directors specifically. SLED stands for State, Local, Education, Division. We discus bring HPE solution to the public sector within New York City and State. HPE has developed programs to enable Compulink and other re-sellers to bring full HPE solutions at low cost competitive pricing. They have put in place a support structure to help us educate customers and achieve a better sales and procurement process.  It is an exciting time for both companies and we look forward to delivering great services and solutions with HPE.

VMware published a post that give you a brief guide on the things you need to consider when using cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. Cloud-based disaster recovery is becoming more and more used because of its cost efficiency. Also using a public cloud for disaster recovery puts a lot of the liability on the company providing the service, and not yours. The best thing is that you pay for what you need. So all businesses of all sizes can use this.

So VMware says that you must consider three things before selecting your cloud-based disaster recovery. You must consider Availability, Networking, and Security and Compliance.

Availability refers  having your essential and business critical data, applications, and workloads available quickly in the event of a disaster or outage. You want to make sure that you can get what is most important to your business up and running almost instantaneously after an outage. After decide the priority of what needs to be recovered first, you have to determine what order of availability you want your assets to be recovered.

Networking has to be figured out because you need to have the right amount of connectivity to move you to the cloud. You don’t want to wait once you make a decision. So make sure your network can handle it at first, and upgrade if it can’t.  

Security and Compliance is key because you want to keep your stuff secure and you want the cloud provider to comply with your policies. This is where cost can go up, because you want good security. Also having the cloud provider fall into compliance with your policies may also bring cost up.

Moving to the cloud is a great advantage for all businesses and organizations, but you want to do it right. Having settled the questions is these three areas will allow you to make that decision and transition easily.

To get more information on this. Checkout VMware’s original article. Click Here

Do you use a public cloud? Are you considering using the public cloud for your enterprise? For any business enterprises regardless of size and scope, you should really read this report by Gigaom. The often have helpful information about the world of technology for business and enterprise. So they published a report on how enterprise can be successful with the public cloud. It is very informative and has good details. Very helpful if your business is considering making that move, or uses the public cloud, but not to its full potential.

So they report talks about how enterprises use the public cloud currently, what other ways they can use it, and how the public cloud can bring them success. So a major of respondents use the public cloud for non critical uses or developments. This means they use things like google cloud to manage emails, write non critical documents and reports, and collaborate on more simple task. Business tend to use public clouds in that capacity.  The next large number of respondents us the public cloud for production, while keeping some assets on physical servers. To use a non tech company example, you may be a fashion designer. You would use the public cloud to manage production of a dress. You will keep the supply production information, which outlets your shipping it to, the inventory, and anything in terms of having the dress made and shipped. However, you might keep the design, the hemline, the fabric, colors, and concept work on a physical server. The third largest use from respondents is for development and testing.  So if you design an app, you may have your developers work on a public cloud, then you that to alpha test it. Essentially the app is built than a certain amount of people are invited to test it and give feedback through a public cloud access.

The report goes into why enterprises have not gone all in on the public cloud. It is understandable that the biggest concern is having more control over the public cloud. However; the technology to do that is coming along.

This report provides insight on how to use the public cloud. Public clouds are very cost effective ways to keep your enterprise competitive. Strongly recommend you read it. Click the link down at the bottom.
Gigaom Report: How enterprises can ensure success with the public cloud

Research firm 451 recently did a survey of over 320 organizations in the United States and Europe. They surveyed the adoption and use of cloud services for their company. Overall it looks like cloud solutions will be adopted more and more. We have some of the numbers for you to see what companies think about the cloud. You can read more about it on VmWare’s website. Click Here.

Here are the general numbers

70% rely on multiple clouds to meet different enterprise requirements

10% are deploying true hybrid architectures (single applications spanning multiple clouds)

52% indicate security concerns as key challenges in cloud adoption

Cloud Service Adoption numbers

68% expect to be in cloud within two years

62% indicated they are using on-premises private cloud today

56% are using a hosted private cloud

Application Deployment numbers

On-premises private cloud is the most popular solution for hosting applications for data and analytics, IT infrastructure, workloads such as storage, and security workloads. It means people like their own private cloud for essential business applications. Here are those numbers

44% select hosted private cloud as a destination for workloads and data

70% migrated applications or data that were primarily part of a public cloud environment to a private cloud

Challenges Supporting Cloud Business numbers

The challenges around cloud are primarily people and business related. It does not tend to be technology related. These are the top three concerns about the cloud.

52% security policies

47% organizational budget

40% regulation/compliance

Top Drivers for Cloud Projects

These are the top three reason organization move to the cloud.

40% improve availability and reliability

37% increase agility

33% scalability for peak demand when needed

Cloud Deployment numbers

These numbers reflect the number of organizations that will use one cloud or expect to use multiple clouds. Multiple clouds are referred to as Hybrid clouds. Hybrid cloud deployments enable smooth transitions, address concerns around security, and preserve skillsets and investments in legacy infrastructure.

Types of Hybrid clouds

Most common hybrid cloud is a combination of on-premises private cloud with public cloud

Second most common is hosted or virtual private cloud with public cloud

32% expect to use multiple clouds with little to no interoperability

30% of enterprises will focus on a single

28% expect to be able to migrate workloads among multiple clouds over the next two years

10% expect to have individual applications that are built to span multiple clouds- true hybrid cloud.

For more information, you can check out VMware’s blog post. Click Here

You can download the whitepaper. Click here

To see the infographic. Click Here

Platform as a service (PaaS) is one of the three main cloud solutions for any enterprise. However it is vastly different from Software as a service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS is more for collaboration amongst tech developers, and it is a great way for them to write their code together. Whenever you develop any technological applications of software, your coders need to collaborate to make it work. PaaS gives them the best tool to do that, and bring their application to market quicker.

In the growing technological world, you may decide to develop a mobile app for your business. You may use multiple developer from different parts of the world. It is very common in this day and age to do that. Your developers need to work together to craft every bit of code for your app. So the old way of doing in was, bring them in pay them a salary, accommodations and travel. With PaaS the developers can work from their location together. It is more cost effective for companies in the long run, and it decreases go to market time.

This cloud service seems to be gaining more and more use for many companies large and small. It helps if you outsource any kind of tech development, and it allows you to develop applications with making any infrastructure changes. If you develop an application for internal or market use, you have to make space to save it on your network, and you have to put in any software need to develop the application. With PaaS it is as simple as letting developers login and start working. You don’t need to make any changes to your network. Think of it as a google docs for developers

The next time you need any application developed, you should heavily consider using PaaS as a solution. It is very cost effective and help reduce development time significantly. .