Meet a Team Member: Marc Silverman
Marc is the Vice President of Vertilocity and the Director of our Network Infrastructure Team. He is responsible for the Field Engineering Group that designs, implements and supports clients’ technology infrastructure. In an interview I asked him to share some knowledge with us about the industry, below are his responses.
What is the latest tip you can share with our customers?
This tip is for Windows 7 Laptop Users. I take my laptop with me everywhere but most of the time I am either in the office or working from home. One of my favorite features of Windows 7 is called Location Aware Printing. If I am in the office my default printer is automatically set to the office printer and when I am at home the default is my home printer. Here is a brief article on how to set it up.
What are common misconceptions about what we do?
I think one of the common misconceptions about what we do is that we are seen as always trying to sell something. I truly believe that the differentiator with Vertilocity compared to other technology providers is that we never try to sell our clients anything just for the sake of selling technology. We stress to our entire staff to learn our clients businesses, ask lots of questions and then provide them with solutions that will add value to their business. Our job is to solve problems and make our clients more efficient, not to sell product. Our primary goal when dealing with our clients is to become a trusted advisor. We would never achieve that status if all we did was sell product.
What is the hottest thing you see in the market right now?
We live in the technology world – everything is hot. So my son calls me from college and tells me his 3 year old laptop is broken. I happen to see him that weekend and look at his laptop and sure enough it is broken. It’s really tough to spend $500 to fix a three year old laptop so I ask him what he wants. He proceeds to give me his laundry list of “wants”. Has to be lightweight since he is carrying to class, library, etc. (right), also needs to have a really good battery because when he uses it he can never find a plug, also good sound and graphics would be nice. So I’m thinking there is no way I am going to find what he wants with what I am willing to spend. Well I was wrong, I found an HP 3115m laptop. It weighs in at 3.5lbs (almost half the weight of my laptop), has a 9 ½ battery life , twice as much as mine and a 128GB Solid State Hard Drive. With Windows 7 Professional it cost me $700. The next day I bought three more, two for new staff members and one extra to have in the office as a spare. For those on my team that know me, the spare laptops have a tendency to end up on my desk so that I can break them in for the next person we hire.
What is the last article you read relating to technology?
As with most professionals, I am inundated with email newsletters with hundreds of articles. In my case most are technology related. The last article I read was on data security as it related to in-house server installations, public cloud offerings such as Google Apps and private cloud offerings such as our hosted ERP solutions or full hosted infrastructure. The private cloud came out on to as the most secure. The reasons are actually obvious, you have the security of the in-house solution because you are working on a private domain plus the added benefit of having your data hosted in a secure data center. This is actually the fastest growing area of our business and if we have not spoken to you about it yet, if we think there is business value for you, we will be soon. Data Security seems to be my client’s biggest concern. In conversations with clients, I like to ask “What keeps you up at night?” The overwhelming response is data security. I read almost every article I can regarding backup and disaster recovery. We have gotten to the point where the security of our data is integral to our success or potential failure in business. Businesses can no longer afford to have servers down. As a firm, we try to be able to offer our clients options that suit their needs in this respect. That is how we add value.