Charlotte, North Carolina, February 22, 2017 – Internetwork Engineering announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named IE to its 2017 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category. This annual list recognizes North American solution providers with cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services. Their offerings help companies navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of IT, improve operational efficiencies, and maximize their return on IT investments.

Part One Of a Five-Part Series One thing that seems constant regardless of the organization is the struggle to reconcile the relationship between vendors and the business. Every theory and strategy out there. Some want a different vendor for each architecture: the different eggs in different baskets theory. Some take every purchase as a challenge to get an ever-cheaper price: the pit them against each other theory. While others go with my personal favorite, “I like to spread it around:” the I want everyone to like me and get an equal cut of my budget theory.

In the spring of 2016, a monkey caused a nationwide power outage in Kenya, leaving the entire country without power for 15 minutes. While we don’t have many monkeys in the US, the list of potential disasters that can affect your business is nearly endless (power outages, natural disasters, broken water pipes and of course human error). Now that healthcare records are electronic, it’s important that the industry look beyond disaster recovery and build a full business continuity plan to remain fully operational in the event of a disaster.

Update (2/14): Cisco has an update on its clock signal component issue, and has announced that those elgible for defective device replacement include:

We are quickly entering a time in which the laws and regulations are outpaced by the exponential growth of technology. Who will be held accountable when an IMD (Implantable Medical Device) -- such as an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators) -- with Wi-Fi connectivity receives an erroneous data transmission from a spoofed doctor’s account changing the patient's normal heart rhythm for an abnormal one?

For years I’ve worked in the telephony industry, both on the customer and reseller side. While on the customer side, it was always a struggle to get my leaders to even accept the fact we had a contact center (call center in those days). They would respond, “No, no, no. We just need some people to answer customer calls. We don’t need a call center.”