IT Consultants Help Companies Outsource IT Support Services

When executives are asked to identify the most important aspect of their business, most will pick their information technology (IT) configuration. While these configurations provide businesses of all sizes with benefits, they can also be very costly to acquire and maintain. Business owners are always looking for ways to cut costs. Fortunately, there are ways that businesses can reduce the cost of running an IT configuration without sacrificing performance and capabilities. Executives that hire IT consultants will receive tips and advice for minimizing the cost of the IT infrastructure, as consultants use their years of experience and training to analyze current configurations and make recommendations. Companies can also choose to outsource services related to IT maintenance to IT management services firms that eliminate high administrative costs associated with completing these services internally. By outsourcing these services, businesses are able to cut costs and can allocate resources more efficiently to only perform the responsibilities that do not need to be outsourced.

A number of responsibilities can be outsourced to IT management services firms, who are able to complete these tasks at a highly efficient level while reducing costs. Frequently outsourced responsibilities and services are:

Data back-up: information is protected in the event of a crisis when a IT management services firm is hired to back-up important data.

Reasons Why Linear Algebra Should Be Taught In Any Engineering Course

Linear algebra is the branch of science that deals with linear equations, vectors, vector spaces, linear transformations, and systems of vectors. It has many applications that spread from science and engineering to the natural and social sciences.

Analytical geometry can express three dimensional space i.e. a graphs can not have more than three dimensions. Nevertheless, with linear algebra one can express a space with more than three dimensions and represent it in the form of data sets then computer simulations can be used that use certain techniques to represent and manipulate multidimensional systems without the need to represent data visually.

This subject's applications in science and engineering are not only restricted to modeling but extend a lot further than that. This subject has many other applications for example the analysis of rotation in space, curve fitting techniques and the differential equations solutions. It has more advanced applications like the engineering modeling of satellite and airplane engines. This is just a small example of linear algebra applications in science and engineering. There are many books written only on its engineering applications.

In arts, humanities, and social sciences, on the other hand, linear algebra has a saying. Imagine a musician or an artist playing on an instrument or a singer tuning his or her voice to make a pleasant sound that is appealing to the ear. Sound is all about wave frequencies. When a sound appeals to the ear this is because it is tuned in a certain frequency range and it has specific wave characteristics. By analyzing the frequency domain of the sound that appeals to the ear one can produce the desired tones at will and become in control of making the sound desirable to the ear. The knowledge of the frequency spectrum is used in the tuning of musical instruments.

Frequencies have many interesting applications in our every day lives. There is a very interesting story I heard about and I would like to share. In the nineteenth century in Manchester soldiers were marching on a bridge and the bridge suddenly collapsed. The reason for this was because the frequency of the waves produced by the soldiers as they marched across the bridge was equal to the natural resonance frequency of the bridge this caused the bridge to oscillate and collapse. In our day today soldiers are required to cut the rhythm of their march while crossing bridges.

Why Business Needs to Be Involved in Implementing an IT Solution

Companies are often in trouble when they realize afterward that the IT solution that they implemented was not what they really wanted. This is usually an afterthought in which prior events were they sunk millions of dollars into the technical solution which was branded as the next big thing for the company. When the organization realizes that the technical solution was not the case then this leads to high ranking officials taking the fall for the lack of planning that was not performed to select the best solution to meet the company's needs. This is a common theme in business which is worth repeating because of the number of failed projects which are still occurring in the information technology discipline. This is a very common problem to implement enterprise solutions when IT is decentralized in organizations.

All too often we hear about a technology product that someone has experienced in working in the past and they bring it into an organization without any system review procedures in place to only fail in the organization. Organizations need to develop processes, build governance, and use an enterprise architecture approach to getting the right stakeholders involved in developing a solution that would optimize the business. We need to connect the business strategy of the organization with the technical recommendations that makes sense for the organization.

PHP MySQL Development - Best Blend for Website Development

In order to meet with the high preset standards of competition, a website must be well developed and well designed... because let's face it, online sales and businesses can rocket only by power packed websites! The fusion of PHP website development along with MySQL has materialized an easy and powerful way to create dynamic web pages. PHP development and MySQL development, as a combination, help develop well formatted - interactive web pages. They also allow end users to make Boolean choices, calculate and carry out various such tasks. The only drawback they come with is that to develop such exceptionally operational websites using the combination of PHP website development and MySQL requires a skilled and experienced developer!

Some of the noteworthy features of PHP MySQL development include:

Compatibility with all operating systems
Runs smoothly on Apache and IIS
Multi-lingual, multi- browser support
Multiple database support
Maintains content and designing part separately
Both, PHP as well as MySQL are open source software and thus are free for installation and use. It is a widely known fact that PHP is considered to be among a developer's preferred languages to generate dynamic and interactive web pages. MySQL, on the other hand is a highly popular database management program which is mostly used with the combination of PHP. MySQL is an excellent RDBMS (Relational Database Management System), which supports flat files too for database integration allowing easy modification in database.

Web Crawlers: How Do They Work?

Web Crawlers or spiders are nothing but a computer program that crawls the web from a given seed page. For example, once a web-crawler is initialized for a web page it'll fetch all the links present on this page. After fetching these links, it'll push these links to the list of to_visit which internally is being implemented as a stack. Each link is popped from the stack and all the links are pushed one by one onto the to_visit stack. The link which was popped is being added to a list named visited. Similarly the web crawler goes on and on until the to_visit stack is empty.

Following is the stepwise function performed by the web spider:

Visit the given web page and the get the source code of the page.
From the source code extract all the links present on the web page
Add the visited page's link to the list named "visited".
Push the extracted links onto a stack "to_visit".
Pop the link from the stack "to_visit" and repeat the procedure from step 1 until the stack "to_visit" becomes empty.
By understanding the concept of a web crawler one gets to know a lot about the various concepts of computer science. You have a number of languages at your disposal to build a web-crawler. However, the Python language is mostly used and for obvious reasons. Python constructs are easy to understand as they are very much English like. Python is portable and extensible i.e. it is platform independent. Suffice is to say that Google's uses Python as the development language for most of it's products.

Using Python we can easily build a web-crawler with indexing feature in a couple of dozen lines. The keywords are mapped to it's respective link and maintained in a Dictionary type. Dictionary type is a built in data structure provided in Python. the Dictionary type stores value mapped to it's respective key. Therefore, the Dictionary type can easily be used to store the links(values) mapped to it's respective keyword(key). When searching for a specific keyword(key) the Python runtime extract the links(values) associated with that key.

Search Engine Friendly AJAX Navigation

AJAX is an excellent technology for providing interactive responsive websites. Most popular websites today use AJAX in one form or another. However, AJAX is an organic technology that has grown out of a need to lever more interactive techniques into a system that was never designed to work this way.

The fundamentals of the world-wide web are quite simple. The web is composed of web sites which in turn contain pages. All these pages are linked together in various ways by interconnecting links between each other. The address of a web page describes its exact location, and returning to that address should give you the same page.

The problem comes because AJAX moves significantly away from that paradigm. With AJAX, pages are modified on the fly by a combination of client side code and requests to the server for additional information. Obviously this means that the page available at a particular URL is fluid and constantly changing. This moves us away from the original World Wide Web idea of static pages linking themselves together.

So the problem we need to address is, how do we make our page's URL reflect the contents that our user is seeing? Firstly, if the modifications are slight and down to a user selecting various options, it may not be important to you that users returning to that URL see exactly what was on the screen when the URL was recorded. For example, a holiday site allowing users to select dates, times, number of people travelling, etc., would wish to have users start afresh without seeing the data that another user had entered.

However, if a site made fundamental modifications, for instance navigating between pages using AJAX, then it would more than likely be preferable for someone following that URL to see exactly the same page. For example, you may have designed a site where navigation between the pages uses some funky client side code that requests the page and fades it into a central area on the screen. In this instance, for all intents and purposes the user experience is one of having navigated to a different URL.

Ways To Learn Coding IOS Apps

There are tons of great ways out there to learn iOS these days. The great thing is that most of those resources are free and available instantly online!

In the early days, the only resources out there were books that you had to buy and read through. In fact, that's how I learned iOS. I wouldn't recommend learning this way today because one of the greatest learning resources available today are the Stanford iPhone Programming Course videos that are free on iTunes. There are about 50 videos and they are basically the course lectures taped and provided for free so that you can download them and watch them as if you were sitting in the classroom at Stanford University!

Even with this great resource, make sure that you do some actual coding and practice exercises throughout watching the videos. When I learned iOS development, I read through the whole book from front cover to back and realized that when I sat in front of the keyboard to write code, I didn't know where to start!

Just like reading the book front to back, if you watch all the lectures without ever doing any exercises, you won't absorb the material and at the end of the lectures, you'll have a deceiving confidence in yourself.

Only when you sit down in front of XCode (the development environment where you write code to build iOS apps), you'll realize that watching video lectures is not the same thing as actually doing the coding!

Everyday Heroes and the Theatre of Cunning

In Timothy Findley's novel The Wars, a young officer, Robert Ross, defies orders and releases horses and mules confined in a barn. It is WW1 and he is in an area of France being shelled by Germans. Releasing the animals is a way of saving them as the structure is an obvious target for the enemy. Ross is with the CFA - the Canadian Field Artillery - and it's his love of animals and justice that motivates him. It's also his last act before desertion. Afterwards, he tears the lapels from his uniform and goes AWOL.


Days later Ross is walking along train tracks and he discovers a lone mare and her companion, a mixed-breed dog. When they lead him to a convoy of boxcars carrying horses bound for the western front, Ross releases them too and travels north, leading them all to safety. When he passes a military encampment and a private tries to stop him, Ross shoots him. He is not court-marshalled, however. In the following standoff, he sustains burns so serious he is deemed unfit to be tried. He dies six years later, in England, of complications from those injuries. Having brought shame on his wealthy family, none save his father will ever visit his grave.

The point of The Wars, of course, is to assert that Ross' actions were heroic in context. His liberation of the horses is cast against the shadowy psychopathy of WW1, a psychopathy so hideous it kept high-ranking military men from touring the front. Had they done so, the carnage of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele might not have materialized. More soldiers, from all forces involved, might have made it home.

I taught Findley's novel for many years and the poignancy of its message was rarely lost on my students. Its depictions of war are rendered through the voice of a historian calmly sifting through documentary evidence. Via transcripts, interviews and photographs, Findley's characters come to life and we see that war's damage, its pathology and momentum. These forces are felt as far away as Toronto and are powerful enough to cause Ross' mother, a society matron, to stomp her way out of a "bloodthirsty" sermon to sit in the snow outside her church. To the dismay of her companion, she gets out her flask and starts sipping.

Mrs. Ross adjusted her veil but did not put the flask away. "I was afraid I was going to scream," she said. She gestured back at the church with its sermon in progress. "I do not understand. I don't. I won't. I can't. Why is this happening to us? What does it mean-to kill your children? Kill them and then... go in there and sing about it! What does that mean?

Top Six Trends That Will Power The Travel Industry In 2013

Consumers are evolving and the travel industry will need to keep up with their evolution with respect to the demands they have, their changing interests, and the technologies they are using to make certain travel decisions.

So, let's take a look at the top trends that I believe will define the travel industry in 2013.

Increased Digitizing of Marketing

The travel industry will digitize their marketing efforts. Not that they aren't already doing it, but now their digital marketing efforts, will get even more pronounced. More importantly, the travel industry will start using the power of mobility to target their customers. So, you will increasingly see in-app travel ads staring right at you out of your mobile devices.

This is just a small example of how marketing will and can get even more digital in its outlook.

Innovation will be about the Consumer

Again, this is something that has been happening in the travel industry for quite some time now, but now it will become even more so. A consumer like you and me wants a lot of choices; he wants the ability to make that choice in an environment of his choosing, and he wants to make that choice backed by solid information. What's more, he also wants to know whether he is making the right choice or not and the kind of travel choices others are making.

Well, for this consumer, focused innovation will be the key and more importantly this innovation needs to be convenient and integrated with social media. 2013 will be about going all out to meet the customers through a platform or channel of his choosing.

The Best Way To Find An IT Support Company That Suits Your Needs And Budget

Questions To Ask When Choosing An IT Support Company

Choosing an IT support provider that can provide solutions to your business needs can be quite complicated, especially for the uninitiated. It will help to have a checklist or a list of questions to ask the provider prior to hiring:

1. Do you offer a wide range of IT Support services that are adaptable enough to suit our needs and cater to our company's potential growth?

2. Will our business be entitled to unlimited support, or any discounts to any of your services?

3. Will our network be constantly monitored and will there be other relevant services offered to us, such as updates, server administration and maintenance?

4. Can we expect to receive a guaranteed response times whenever we encounter issues with the IT support you provide?

5. What industry standards, competencies and accreditations does you IT company have and are they certified by Microsoft?

These are but the questions that you need to ask the company you are considering to hire.

A prospective IT company which is in tune with clients' expectations is one that has been in business long enough and has been trained well in relevant disciplines. It should also have worked with both large and small enterprises finding viable solutions to their every need.

How Outsourcing IT Support Can Benefit Your Business And Turn In More Profit

Why Outsource Your IT Support Needs


When running a business, it can be tough making a decision regarding whether to hire an in-house IT support department or outsource instead. There are instances when it is far easier to just hire an in-house IT department, but as you will see within this article, there are more benefits in outsourcing IT support.
At a glance, here are some of the outstanding benefits in outsourcing your IT needs:

• It is easier to find experienced and cost-efficient technicians via outsourcing
• Outsourcing allows call sorting which gives more time in dealing server side and smaller side aspects
• Higher saving potential, as there is less overhead in outsourced IT support, compared to the financial downsides in supporting an in-house team and the equipment necessary
• Outsourced IT support teams may be able to provide 24/7/365 support

While it may not seem like a logical choice from the get-go, outsourcing IT support can actually do a lot to transform a business for the better. Below are much more concrete examples on how it can do that.

Cost-Efficient

Outsourcing IT services can mean a huge reduction in operational costs for the business. Today's outsourcing trends usually involve outsourcing work to countries abroad, who, more often than not, have lower costs of living. Because these countries do enjoy a lower cost of living, then it will mean that the company who pays for these employee's jobs end up spending less, while still being able to give them fair rates. This is where companies who choose to outsource can save a lot. One can employ an IT team abroad with the exact same number of workers, but spend significantly less on their salaries.