Linux Specialists

alt THE PROBLEM

Are you finding doing business more challenging in the post financial meltdown era?
Are you fed up with mounting IT expenses?
Are you confused by the myriad options you are constantly being bombarded with?

If you answered yes to most or all of the above questions you're not alone... The exuberance which was driving businesses in the mid 2000's has all but evaporated (at least for the time being). Leaving businesses scrounging to maintain profitability.

So how do you survive in such a hostile environment? The answer is through more judicious use of resources. Too long have we lost track of the fact that IT is supposed to make companies more efficient. But instead of IT helping the bottom line, it has been making it worse, thanks to a large part to the enormous price tag most proprietary software demand.

THE SOLUTION

But what is the solution you might ask? One way is to have a specialist in open source design a custom made solution that leverages the best of what open source has to provide. The only cost (apart from hardware) would be the one time fee you would incur for our extensive in house know-how. What our expertise provides you, is a solution that fits your needs; no more, and no less. Proprietary software is designed to encourage you to depend ever more on their products (thus bleeding you of more vital funds in the process).


So what areas can we help you with?
- secure connectivity between offices so as to consolidate servers
- advanced telephony solutions which not only rival but actually exceed existing out of box proprietary solutions 
- CCTV solutions
- file servers, file visioning, and backups
- email including local hosting, remote hosting, as well as protecting against SPAM and email borne malware
- web filtering and restricting
- embedded devices when cost, physical dimensional, and durability are at the forefront of your concerns
- virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery 
- and many more...


LINUX

All of these areas have one thing in common (other then being open source) and that is Linux. Yes you must have heard about this incredible operating system which is used in everything from the smallest embedded controllers (think printers, faxes, etc...)  to the largest supercomputers. And if you think that is all, realize that Microsoft has openly admitted to using BSD Unix to create it's own networking modules. BSD Unix being an open source Unix clone and a close cousin of Linux. Not only that, but the beautiful and much vaunted OS X from Apple computers actually has at its core another variant of BSD Unix. So needless to say, Unix/Linux is everywhere. Even the ever more popular Android phones use as their kernel (the heart of any OS) linux.

But what does this all mean to you and your business? Well, it means that with the right know-how, one can deploy a whole array of these superior software to provide you with the solution that best fits your needs. No over the counter proprietary solution would do that for you, at least not without milking your budget dry.

RELIABILITY

So what about reliability? Well, it's no secret that Microsoft products suffer from the ever mounting onslaught of malware/virus/spyware which might be fine for a user's desktop/laptop but not so for a company's servers and data. Linux while not 100% immune to such unwanted complications, is inherently more resistant by design. To date, it is a lot more difficult to compromise a Linux/Unix system then it is a Microsoft system.

But aren't free products inferior to proprietary ones? The answer is a resounding NO!!! First of all free and open source are not synonyms. Open source (GPL) makes sure that no matter how you distribute the software, you must provide users the source code so that they could at their discression modify/add/improve upon it. This over time, tends to generate a much more robust software with more features and less vulnerabilities. There are too many examples of very successful projects that prove this point but here are a few you might recognise:
- Linux itself
- BSD Unix and all of it's variants (forming the Base for Apple's OS X, and providing networking under all modern Microsoft Windows variants)
- Google uses linux for it's server farms
- London's FT stock market
- Apache dominates the world's web servers (at last count 61% versus IIS's ever dwindling rates now at 11%)
- Sony's PlayStations 1,2, and 3
- Firefox which single single handedly dethroned IE (Microsofts bundled Internet Explorer)
- Android OS
- MySQL database
- PostgreSQL database
- OpenOffice which provides a compatible alternative to Microsofts' Office Suites (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc...)
- etc...

THE CATCH(if any)

So you must be thinking, all this sounds very good, but why is Microsoft and other proprietary vendors so successful in peddling their wares to companies like mine? The answer is simple: although open source solutions are usually superior to their proprietary kin, they lack two very important attributes:
- One is that being open source products, there is very little advertising that is used to promote these solutions.
- Two is that some of these solutions are not designed for a specific purpose like most proprietary are. So the sheer number of options you need to enable or disable when installing these solutions can be a little bit overwhelming for non experts.
This is where we come in. Our long history with Linux and open source goes back to 1994 (Linux was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991). Our experts have had the experience in installing and setting up countless solutions since then. So we know what are the caveats of some of the solutions and what are the strengths. And we build our solutions for you based on that knowledge.