InterOp and More News

I served my sentence at InterOp for a half-dozen years or so starting in the early 90s, so I no longer have to slog to Las Vegas and wear one pair of sunglasses for the desert sun outside and two pairs for the neon inside. The early days were nice because there were more engineers in booths than marketing droids, but that changed as the boom heated up toward the late 90s. At least InterOp didn’t fold like many other shows.

Reward the unlucky reporters slogging through the Convention Center by reading all the InterOp News fit to print. This initial outpouring of product promises will turn into product deliveries through the summer and fall, so consider the news a heads-up of potentially helpful tools in the pipeline.

Not all the news pouring out of Las Vegas (what happens there certainly doesn’t stay there during InterOp) concerns only products. Sage Software announced a new financing program for small to medium businesses that rolls hardware and software into one lease. You can even make deals for as little as $1,500, although that seems a lot of trouble. But rolling up a new server or two and required software into a lease may keep your budget from breaking. While you probably have a lease vendor you like, another option never hurts. You may even use a quote from Sage to beat up your current vendor, a common and often successful business strategy.

Seagate’s new 750GB hard drive gets a first look over in PC World. This came out a bit before InterOp, but close enough to mention here. Keith mentioned the external USB backup drive version of this here, again illustrating how none of us can clean out our computer hard disks any better than we can clean out our junk drawers and closets.

Glad to see more and more of you are trying out the search wiki on the main SMB Research Center page. Are you used to the presentation of more popular searches in larger, bolder type sizes?