Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Acquisition of NTA’s Technology Consulting Assets

I’m pleased to announce that PTS has officially acquired critical components of Nassoura Technology Associates, LLC (NTA) including all of its technology consulting assets. If you are not already familiar with NTA, they were a leading technology consulting and engineering firm based in Warren, New Jersey who in-house developed the widely acclaimed software product, dcTrack3.0. Recently, Raritan, Inc. purchased NTA’s dcTrack3.0 product in a separate transaction.

NTA’s assets will enable us to expand our existing technology consulting service offerings including network, structured cabling, security, and audio/visual design. Furthermore, this acquisition enables us to enhance our existing library of technical drawings, specifications, and request for proposal (RFP) documentation. Also included in the acquisition was the transfer of documents for all NTA’s completed client projects across a broad spectrum of industries.

If you are a previous client of NTA, we will continue to maintain your design documents and provide you with the expert level of service you had become accustomed to as an NTA client. We are extremely excited to expand our customer base and to have this opportunity to improve our client deliverables by acquiring the assets of one of the most influential design firms serving the data center industry.

In addition to the acquisition of NTA’s technology consulting assets, we are also pleased to announce the addition of six (6) new employees to our growing family of data center experts. We are sure they will contribute substantially to PTS’ continued growth in 2009. The new employees include data center solutions professionals, Andrew Graham, Peter Graham, and Michael Piazza as well as architect, Michael Relton, and senior electrical engineer, Alex Polsky, P.E.

The latest new employee is data center software development and pioneer, Dave Cole. Dave has a storied history of developing software and hardware products for System Enhancement Corporation, later purchased by APC, and Hewlett-Packard. Most notably however, Dave founded and then sold his company, The Advantage Group, along with his industry leading data center support infrastructure device monitoring product to Aperture, later purchased by Emerson. Stay on the lookout for further announcements as to what Dave and I are up to.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Data Centers Understaffed and Underutilized?

The following news snippet from SearchStorage.com caught my eye and I couldn’t resist sharing it here:

Symantec Corp.'s State of the Data Center 2008 report paints a picture of understaffed data centers and underutilized storage systems.

The report, based on a survey of 1,600 enterprise data center managers and executives, found storage utilization at 50%. The survey also discovered that staffing remains a crucial issue, with 36% of respondents saying their firms are understaffed. Only 4% say they are overstaffed. Furthermore, 43% state that finding qualified applicants is a problem.

Really interesting numbers, particularly when it comes to staffing issues. With so many layoffs and other cutbacks happening, it’s not so surprising that firms feel understaffed. However, with the national unemployment rate reaching 7.2 percent for December, I don’t think finding qualified applicants will be as much of a problem in 2009. As for the underutilization of storage systems, this is a major contributor to high data center costs. If corporate budgets continue to get slashed, I can guarantee that virtualization is going to stay right at the top of most data center managers to-do lists for the foreseeable future.

(By the way, if you’re an unemployed techie, you might want to check out this article from CIO.com. Socialtext is offering its social networking tools free to laid-off workers who want to form alumni networks and share job leads.)