Happy Easter to everyone! By the time you read this Easter will be a distant memory as the reality of work sets back in <sigh>

With Easter of course comes the annual April Fool’s Day parade of humour from various sources, including my favourite which was Virgin who launched their glass bottomed plane; YouTube who announced they were shutting down after 8 years of video submissions and announcing an overall winner in 2023 after reviewing every video that has been entered; and of course the White house who released their special video message from the ‘president’.  Even Google Maps launched their ‘treasure island’ – an underwater mapping service. All very funny, but ultimately all this was only a minor distraction from some of the bigger stories of the month.

Dell has caused shock waves with an announcement that its financial future is looking grim, and blamed slow Windows 8 adoption, and slow PC sales.

What Dell and other manufacturers are now observing is that the migration of corporates to Windows 7 from Windows XP is now nearing completion and with the new advent of Cloud based ‘Virtual Desktops’, the need to refresh business PC hardware every 2-3 years is diminishing.

Trailing off the end of that, Microsoft have announced they will be launching the first and only preview of their next operating system.  Not to be confused with Gmail’s April fool’s joke, Microsoft have codenamed this new Operating system “Blue”.  Expect more information on what Windows Blue will offer after the developer conference demonstrates this product for the first time in June.  It looks like Microsoft has finally transitioned to their model of releasing new Operating Systems like Apple does – every 18 – 24 months and comes as no surprise to us as Microsoft anticipated this change after the 7 year wait between XP and Vista caused a bit of an uproar.

This leads us to a new opportunity for you which is Volume Licensing.  We have discussed this before but the cost of licensing versus the benefits hasn’t really been there.  Today with the advent of EtherTech Cloud, Office 365 and every small business wanting more bang for their buck, it seems the Volume Licensing option has arrived and is more attractive today than just 18 months ago.

Speaking of cloud (as we always do), we have witnessed a similar trend with a majority of our clients now moving to cloud based applications like Hosted Exchange and Hosted SharePoint.  Moving these technologies to the cloud are allowing business owners to focus more time on their business, rather than worrying about ongoing support and day to day IT operations.

These migrations are relieving the requirement for local and expensive on-premise File Servers and Exchange Email Servers. The next  purchase you make after your transition to the cloud is complete, is more than likely to be a small NAS device, saving you thousands in new servers, storage and support,  then we simply sync it to the cloud for backup and you have a set-and-forget solution.

So until next month, it’s time for us to lose those extra chocolate kilo’s…