Looking Back on 2009

As each year draws to a close, it just seems natural to look back and reflect on how the last 12 months have gone. You’re probably doing it, and so are we.

It’s been a difficult year for everyone, but most of us have made it through by doing what we always do in difficult times: tighten the belt a notch or two, make hard choices, and focus on business fundamentals.

First and foremost, we’d like to thank our customers. Without your continued loyalty, we wouldn’t be here. We’ve tried very hard to bring value to your businesses as well – and we trust that if we have fallen short in some area, you’ll let us know. Constructive feedback is how we all get better at what we do.

2009 also saw considerable evolution in our Web presence, and our involvement in social media as another way to communicate with our customers. This blog you’re reading launched in October, and so far, we’re very pleased with the reception it has received. Earlier this year, we launched our Facebook Fan Page, and linked it to our Twitter feed. Social media has proven to be a great way to get breaking news – like critical security alerts – into your hands quickly.

We’ve also taken advantage of the not-quite-so-frantically-busy times to further our education, look at some new technologies, and come up with some ideas that we’re pretty excited about and will be sharing with you over the next few months. We welcomed the release of Hyper-V R2, and believe that it will be a great addition to our virtualization “toolbox.” We’ve learned a lot about Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager, and think that it can be a great alternative to tape-based backups for small- and medium-sized businesses. We’ve partnered with Sun Microsystems, whose Intel-based servers make great virtualization platforms and great DataCore SAN nodes – with more storage packed into a 2U rack-mount chassis than either Dell or HP can currently offer.

The people who get paid lots of money to look into crystal balls and make predictions are predicting modest growth in 2010, with IT spending rising 3.5% or so. It’s a safe bet that more and more servers will be virtualized, and that virtualization will continue to expand into smaller enterprises now that it has become recognized as a mainstream technology. It’s also a safe bet that more and more organizations are going to be investigating desktop virtualization as they think about how best to roll out Windows 7. We also believe that a lot of the organizations that are just getting into virtualization are going to look at the cost of VMware and decide that “free” is a pretty good price for Hyper-V or XenServer. And we’re betting that the Citrix story will ultimately win out in the desktop virtualization space.

Our commitment to you is that we will be there with you in the coming year, doing what we’ve always done – which is to look for ways to help you make your business better, whether it’s by taking routine maintenance concerns off of your hands so you can concentrate on building your business, or by looking for ways to use technology to help you reduce costs, boost productivity, and improve agility and reliability in your IT infrastructure.

So here’s wishing all of you a happy and prosperous 2010, and we hope we can help you make it so!