Evolve or Die: 5 New Service Areas You Should Be Looking At

Note: This was written in 2013 so not “New” service areas anymore. Kept for archival reasons.

If 2013 taught us anything about computer repair, it’s that our industry is changing, and changing fast. While traditional computer repair will not die for the forseeable future, as even the tablet craze hasn’t bumped users from their primary workhorse machines, technicians need to be forward looking so they don’t get caught with their pants down. There has been a lot of hot air in the media about PC sales being destroyed by alternative devices, but recent reports are proving this to be not as drastic as originally reported. Windows 8.1 is helping lift PC sales, with a US year over year drop in sales only at 0.2% which is negligible at best if you ask me. The titanic isn’t sinking, no matter how much the media blowhards love to scare us in the repair industry.

A dying PC market? IDC’s latest figures show anything but. Contrary to popular belief, Apple is getting knocked harder lately than anyone else, likely due to its own iPad trumping any leftover reason to get a Mac. Lenovo alone saw 25%+ growth in Q3 2013, which leads me to question how much of a true decline the PC market is in. (Image Source: IDC via Computerworld) Even in light of the above positive news, I am not advocating that technicians sit on their hind legs and wait for trends to pass them by. My own company FireLogic has been expanding fast, moving into hot areas centered around the cloud, VoIP, and VDI among other things, which have been proving to be excellent maneuvers to fill the voids that PC repair has been increasingly leaving. I get a lot of email from budding technicians asking me a question of similar nature. “What should I be moving into? What is the one area of tech you recommend I offer on top of computer repair? What new trends are opening business opportunity for your company Derrick?” While I love taking the time to answer those emails one by one, I figured if enough people are asking, this deserves a little attention. So here we go: an unadulterated look into what segments of IT have been the best moves for my business, and where I see our industry heading into 2014 and beyond. We’re set to experience 85%+ year over year growth as a small IT consulting company, and while some of this is no doubt due to my investment in people power, a lot of this is as a result of strategic shifting of service priorities.

#5: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

If you’re interested in seeing what a real life example of modern VDI looks like, have a look at my recent blog post which provides an in-depth look at a mobile workforce overhaul we did for a local flooring business. VDI is a sector which is getting tons of attention recently, because it melds the benefits of mobile computing along with the performance and compatibility that users expect out of traditional PCs. I’ve personally taken my company in a Microsoft centric direction on VDI for two reasons. One, the capabilities are relatively easy to deploy for clients as they are all caked into Windows Server out of the gate, and two, they are generally cost effective for the long run compared to solutions from VMWare or Citrix. Compared to offerings like Amazon just announced with Amazon Workspaces, or VMWare’s pending offering after acquiring Desktone, leveraging Windows Servers 2012 R2 for VDI needs is pretty seamless once configured right. If you’ve played with Terminal Services in the old Windows Server 2000 or 2003, you will be right at home with a cleaner experience to the finish line. VDI isn’t just a solution to bring full Windows desktops to clients who need mobile access, like we did with Surface tablets recently. I’m already implementing the same VDI technology (specifically, Session-based RDS off Windows Server) for some of our HIPAA customers who need highly secure, encrypted environments for day to day work. Instead of wasting time upgrading and encrypting old workstations, you can get a Windows RDS server going in house and offer everyone a “desktop” they hop into that has all the safeguards necessary. Of course, after a move to RDS, the possibilities continue, with the option of even offering your clients the opportunity to dump their maintenance heavy PCs in exchange for thin or zero clients, like what Dell’s Wyse products offer. I’ll try and pen some more information about VDI in some future posts, but you can get a great launchpad from a recent video series Microsoft put on surrounding VDI on Windows RDS.

#4: Virtualization

This hot keyword has been floating around the industry for years now, and while my remarks on VDI above do have some semblance of virtualization entrenched within, this specific point on this IT trend has to do with taking down physical servers and consolidating them either locally or up in the cloud. Too many technicians I speak with think that virtualization is black and white. Some believe that the only form of virtualization they can use is in-house, or a private cloud approach, where you host your own Microsoft Hyper-V server with guest OSes loaded in. On the contrary, some are also mistaken and think that virtualization can only go in the public cloud, in the form of providers like Windows Azure or Amazon’s AWS. The more politically correct way to think about virtualization in the year 2013 and beyond is in a “hybrid cloud” viewpoint that allows you to mix and match on-premise needs with public cloud needs as necessary. Microsoft Hyper-V has been included free of charge in Windows Server since version 2008. It’s a rock solid, free way to use centralized physical servers as hosts for any number of guest “virtual” servers. The above graphic shows just a few of the use cases in building your client’s backbone on Hyper-V. (Image Source: Microsoft) For some client work, we fully recommend them going with Windows Server and using Hyper-V to virtualize their workload. The Surface workforce conversion I mentioned above has its VDI hosted entirely in-house on a Dell PowerEdge, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V instance. It works darn well. But in-house isn’t for everyone. Servers “in the cloud” are perfectly viable options depending on your needs. I’ve been leveraging Windows Azure like crazy for my own clients, and at this moment, we are building out “servers in the cloud” for two customers that are ditching on-premise boxes entirely. You can check out my formal remarks on what I think about Azure from a review I did earlier this year. Virtualization used to be something relegated to the datacenter, only touched by the upper echelons of server techs. Not anymore! While deploying local instances of Hyper-V requires some elbow grease and insight, virtually anyone can spin up a Windows Azure cloud server and get started in under a half hour with nothing more than a web browser and a credit card.

#3: SaaS-Hosted Cloud Email

This has got to be one of the first big footholds my company got into regarding the cloud a few years back, when the “cloud” was just a budding buzzword at the time. It has paid off considerably, as Office 365 and Google Apps consulting is still a large sliver of excellent work for us every month. When I say SaaS-hosted email, I’m specifically referring to providers like Office 365 and Google Apps, which don’t merely rely on traditional servers being placed up into the cloud to host email. That form of email hosting, namely hosted Exchange, is old hat and not something I recommend anymore for a variety of reasons you can read about. True cloud email like Office 365 leverages geo-redundancy for data access, 99.9% uptime guarantees, and security standards that meet the most stringent needs of HIPAA and federal government usage, to name just a few. Google has similar advantages for its Google Apps (paid, not free) service. Let’s face it: when it comes to email hosting, there is usually few options for doing it cheaper in-house these days, especially for 50 seat and under organizations that don’t have the money for capital IT expenses. I wrote extensively about this recently in an article comparing the hidden costs of cloud vs on-premise deployment, and email hosting was an easy example of how the cloud makes much better sense. Moving your own clients to a solid SaaS solution for email like Office 365 will not be a shoe in for getting your consulting services cut out of the picture. In fact, in my experience, its proven to be exactly the opposite. The money we cleared up from server maintenance and fixing email issues was generally reinvested in IT training, other upgrades, or even as the baseline for getting my company into an MSP style agreement for month to month support needs. That’s the way you should be winning new business these days. Providing a value proposition to your clients so they can use you in newfound ways to grow their business, not merely to keep the old dinosaur equipment closet humming. This approach has worked wonders for us so far, leading to exceptional year over year growth.

#2) Video/Web Conferencing & VoIP

I’ve never learned an ounce of how to manage or maintain a traditional phone PBX, but my IT background allowed me to swiftly learn the basics of VoIP service in a matter of a few months. We’ve been using RingCentral for most of our VoIP needs with customers, and are now branching into 8×8 as well for those under HIPAA regulation in the States. Both of these providers get rid of the notion that you need on-premise hardware for a phone system. Not anymore! Cloud-hosted VoIP, as these players call it, is modern phone service hosted right from the cloud delivered over a standard internet connection. If you’ve heard of Vonage for the home, this is exactly the same thing, but stable and secure with business features. For lack of a better name, think of it as VaaS (voice as a service). This is a hot market as many of our clients with old school PBX units are having their systems die and are making decisions on replacements, or are just sick and tired of the expenses with legacy units. From closet hardware, to old desk phones that break, down to PRI voice lines needed and expensive maintenance from qualified people – all this breaks down to high monthly bills for service that can be as much as 20-50% cheaper through the alternative of cloud hosted VoIP. On the conferencing side, the swift move of many of our customers over to Office 365 has allowed us to start preaching the benefits that Microsoft Lync provides out of the box. My own company is transitioning to Office 365 right now and we have begun using Lync pre-migration for pretty much all communication between internal staff at FireLogic both on the go and in the field. Text messaging is great – until you are in the field with no service and only have access to wifi or even worse, just a computer. Lync works on any smartphone, any computer, most tablets, and even in the web browser via Outlook Web Access. Our techs are all loaded up with Lync now and we can IM (and even voice or video chat if needed) while knee deep in projects onsite and get answers much more quickly than email or phone calls can provide. It’s an adjustment, but it works well if adopted across a company and breaks down communication barriers of yesteryear. Lync can also replace any reliance you may have on services like GoToMeeting or Webex for conferencing. We used to use GoToMeeting with a mixture of Google Hangouts (which is very finicky we have learned) but dropped both in place of Lync. It’s not only cheaper than the competing services, but it has numerous advantages like 250 person limits on meetings, native meeting recording, and conversation history that gets saved right into your Office 365 mailbox off the desktop client. The coup de grâce for unified messaging, and something I’m eagerly awaiting, is Microsoft’s official unraveling of cloud-hosted Lync voice which will tie together your desk phone service along with the Lync IM/video/conferencing service into one single solution. We’re offering RingCentral and 8×8 right now to fill the voice gap for phones, but will likely start offering Microsoft’s unified communications approach hosted in the cloud to customers. Microsoft has said this is “coming soon” without pinning a date on its release. No matter what direction you decide to offer, VoIP and unified messaging is HOT right now and only growing. Get into the market now and establish yourself as a local authority for your customers before you they reach out to other players.

#1: Healthcare IT (HIPAA)

With the continued march of Obamacare in the United States, and a general deepening of shift towards IT in the healthcare arena, there is little question that the needs for healthcare entities small and large are growing. From EMR (electronic medical record) systems, to VoIP phone service, down to encrypted email and disaster recovery. This is one of the hottest areas of IT right now, and its growth has only begun as far as I can tell. In the USA, we have a large regulatory monster known as HIPAA (and to some extent, HITECH) that is breathing down the backs of all organizations known as “covered entities” that deal with PHI, or patient health data. I covered a much deeper understanding of HIPAA and its surrounding myths in another article, but HIPAA as a whole has a few basic tenets which any IT shop needs to understand to get started. First, HIPAA is not a certification of any sort that can be stamped on an organization that proves compliance. It’s not that easy, which is why we partner with a company called HIPAA Secure Now to help us wrangle through the legalities and rules involved. The entire premise around what HIPAA provides is a framework for keeping data confidential, secure, and accessible in the case of IT disaster, to name a few of the most important facets. For example, one of the biggest violations in compliance happening today is through the use of unencrypted email systems either in the cloud or on-premise. Office 365 IS fully compliant with HIPAA and they WILL sign a BAA (business associate agreement) with your customer outlining how they meet regulatory standards and abide by all ground rules needed. Merely having an on-premise Exchange server in your office that has hard drive encryption, perhaps through BitLocker, is not compliant in any way. The reason being is that you have to ensure that data both at rest and in transit is fully encrypted end to end. So while you may be ensuring that data on the Exchange server is encrypted while sitting there, you have no guarantees that the end user accessing the information on received emails is authenticated to be viewing the message. In fact, MOST email systems that don’t have encryption in use can be viewed in plain text with even the most basic packet sniffers these days. The service is no different than traditional phone lines in this regard (in-line taps have been cheap and plentiful for a long while now). Tying in the functionality of an encryption service like Exchange Hosted Encryption fully seals all of the email data both at rest and also down the wire until the proper, authenticated party can enter their respective password. Such a setup is considered HIPAA compliant and would meet the due diligence requirements set forth in this legislation. But email is just one facet of the larger picture of what healthcare IT entails. VoIP systems need to offer compliance since most of them store voicemails or potential PHI data in the cloud (8×8 meets these needs for my US-based HIPAA clients). Workstations, if accessing PHI in the form of Office documents, should have their hard drives encrypted with something like BitLocker in case of theft. And the list goes on. A trusted third party like HIPAA Secure Now can outline all the aspects that need attention in the form of a risk assessment with your customer(s). People processes factor just as much into healthcare regulations, which means that things like passwords should NOT be shared, and administrative access should be controlled and doled out to parties that need such privilege on an as needed basis only. Simple passwords that never expire are also a no-go with these new rules, which means that staff will need to be trained in how to ensure they aren’t writing passwords down and inadvertently leaking access to critical systems. The deadlines for HIPAA compliance continue to come and go, so at this point, working towards becoming compliant is your only option. If you have customers in the healthcare arena, you should be educating yourself on the steps necessary to bring them into full compliance; how you should have business associate agreements (BAAs) established between your IT company and your healthcare clients; and what tech overhauls they need to invest in. There’s so much out there these days, that computer repair technicians should not be focusing solely on building a growing business upon computer repair alone. And if you’re seeing business die down, it’s likely because you aren’t branching yourself into the proper areas. Open your eyes, feel out the course, and get acquainted with some of these new technology outlets I described – they will be forever shifting the landscape we work in and being left behind is solely a personal choice. Have comments on the above technologies that were mentioned? Got ideas for new markets that your own business has found success in? Let us know in the comments areas below!