Ira Apfel

How do you make hundreds of changes to 500 desktop workstations without touching them? That was the seemingly Zen-like challenge for Mike DeBruin, senior systems engineer with RS Information Systems, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, near the city of Lompoc. Employees at Vandenberg are like many others—they operate in a Windows Office environment […]

When the time came for California Distribution to upgrade its copiers, David Friday wanted more than just photocopying capability. His company based its performance and reputation on accurate record keeping, but it was getting buried under a mountain of paperwork. If a customer had a question about an old order, it could take an hour […]

Nearly everyone dreads missing the annual April 15 deadline for filing their personal income tax return. Companies that provide tax information to tax professionals hate missing the deadline even more. So, when Spidell Publishing Inc., an Anaheim, Calif., company that offers tax information, missed its deadline to update its Web site by the end of […]

Calpine, an independent power producer with 102 sites across the country, is required to conduct network compliance audits for regulators. Nearly a year ago, however, Calpines infrastructure engineering manager, Sean Curry, realized there was way too much firewall data for his team to track. “Each of our six firewalls were generating 60GB of log data, […]

For too many years, hardware and software manufacturer Kingway CAPS was the victim of its own antiquated technology, juggling paper reports and several versions of two out-of-date customer tracking software programs. When sales representatives for Kingway CAPS, a division of Kingway Material Handling Co., had to report their activities, an executive assistant had to type […]

If youre wondering about the future strength of indirect IT sales, consider recent findings from Gartner Dataquest, which predict that indirect IT sales will surpass direct sales by 2007. According to a 2004 study by the IT research company, the preference for direct IT sales of products and services will fall from 59 percent in […]

Case study: Sana Security needed a better way to keep on top of its revenue forecasting and goals. BlueRoads offered a much better solution than spreadsheets. John Zicker may be chairman and CEO of a software company, but the way that quarterly revenue projections used to be done at his four-year-old company was decidedly low-tech. […]

For the law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, there was no catastrophic incident—no defaced Web site or data theft—that pushed IT administrators to a security crossroads. For Adam Hansen, manager of IT security at the Chicago firm, the need for change came in a swelling, relentless wave of alerts and security events his staff […]