There is still time to save your business money before the New Year with the Section 179 hardware/software tax break! If your business is looking to expand its IT department, there is a great tax incentive to make those hardware and software purchases within the next 4 weeks.

On or before December 31st, 2012, businesses can take advantage of these tax breaks:

• If a company purchases, leases, or finances new or used equipment totaling less than $139,000 they are eligible to write off their entire qualifying purchase!
• If your equipment totals more than $139,000, you will receive a significant deduction that can be taken all at once versus depreciated over a certain amount of years.
• The maximum that can be spent on equipment before the deduction begins to reduce is $560,000. If this amount is reached, a bonus depreciation of 50% can be used for new equipment only.

Print off your Section 179 IRS form today at www.section179.org and call a consultant at IT Resource to take advantage of this great year-end tax break savings!

Source: www.section179.org

This summer, Carolyn Martin from the IT Resource Sales Team went to Davenport University to attend a West Michigan Cisco Users Group meeting. As a Cisco Sales Expert, her hope was to increase her knowledge on some of the technology solutions today and how they can benefit our company. The topic of that particular meeting was Cisco UCS (Unified Computing and Servers).

The main idea behind Cisco UCS is to have a central location where users can access their ‘Desktop’ from anywhere. Instead of having a local computer users log into when they’re at work, they will log onto their account from any computer and have access to all of their files, settings, and saved work no matter where they are. This is incredibly useful for employees traveling or users who work from home. Since the workforce is moving toward mobile computing, it would make sense to move with it!

Here are some of the benefits to Cisco UCS
• Centralized Management for IT
• Any Device can connect – Android, iOS Devices, Apple Computers, Windows PC’s, Linux PC’s, etc…
• Secure Universal Access
• Constant Experience delivered to users
• Smaller and less hardware (Blade Servers)

The big names in VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) right now are VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. Cisco’s UCS supports all of these hypervisors on their hardware and each work in different ways depending on the hypervisor. IT Resource has many Cisco devices and some of our engineers are well versed in Cisco certifications. The technology world is moving in the virtual direction and Cisco UCS is leading the way!

If you are interested in learning more about the West Michigan Cisco Users Group, this month is the perfect time to attend as IT Resource will be the featured sponsor at their August event, which takes place on the 29th at 5:30, at Davenport University, 6191 Kraft in Caledonia. For more information visit WMCUG, or contact Carolyn.

A few of our members here at IT Resource have been quite busy training over the past couple of weeks. A while back, network engineer Steve Nowak ventured off to Detroit to attend a week long training event to work on his Cisco Data Center Field Engineer certification. Just recently, network engineer Jim Baughman also returned from a week long training event in Detroit for a Cisco Data Center Sales Engineering certification. And to top it all off, sales team members Carrie Borchers and Carolyn Martin completed the Cisco Data Center Sales Account Manager training.

So what does this mean for IT Resource and our clients? Well, it means that now we can sell Cisco Data Center Unified Computing hardware as well as support it. Cisco has a great line of products and now that IT Resource can support it, we can pass that great hardware along to our clients. We have a few of Cisco’s products sitting in our Data Center now and they have proven to work well and stand up to our rigorous usage. If anyone has any questions regarding Cisco Data Center Unified Computing and possibly purchasing some of their equipment, contact Carrie or Carolyn and they would be happy to fill you in on any information they can provide!

Our hard work has finally paid off! We recently earned an Advanced Unified Computing Technology specialization from Cisco, a worldwide leader in networking. Achieving this specialization allows us to design, sell and implement Cisco Data Center solutions, which includes Cisco blade centers and some Nexus product lines. Offering this service will enhance our clients’ abilities to fully utilize Cisco solutions throughout the entire data center – from networking and security to servers and virtualization solutions.

Gary Lutz, co-owner of IT Resource, is excited about the new certification and what it will bring to enterprise level businesses, as well as education and government agencies. “We are not new to medium and large-scale data center design and implementations, having designed several casino, public sector and enterprise data centers. But, with the addition of Cisco’s Unified Computing Technology certifications, we now have all the major technology areas covered, including Security, Networking, Voice, Storage, Servers and Virtualization, and can offer these end-to-end solutions to our clients.”

To acquire the specialization, we were required to complete additional training and pass several certification exams in the areas of Unified Computing and Data Center solutions by system engineers, field engineers and sales teams.

Just one more way we can provide awesome products and services to our customers!

As newcomers to the world of blogging, we are thrilled to have an outlet to show the world what we’re all about as a company, and how we operate. As the chief blog writer, I'll be using this resource as a chance to explain to everyone on the World Wide Web what a great company IT Resource is, and how we help our community, customers, vendors, and friends. As an example, IT Resource recently sponsored and participated in the Del Shannon Car Show here in Coopersville, MI. We donated our time and financial energy by passing out raffle tickets, coordinating sponsors, picking our ITR trophy winner at the end of the show, and coordinating various behind-the-scenes activities to ensure the show went off without a hitch.

That's just one example of how our employees work to give back to the communities in which we live and work.

So, I personally welcome you to the first entry of the IT Resource blog and plan to provide you with exciting news & information and the occasional unbelievable IT story. Yes, its true, some pretty interesting and exciting things can happen at an IT Consulting company - like when one of our Chicago customers’ Cisco VOIP system got struck by lightning the day before the 4th of July holiday weekend - that was an interesting day, to say the least. If you've ever wondered what a VOIP system looks like after getting struck by lightning, check it out...

No fear for the lightning stricken customer - we had them up and running again the same day. Have any of you ever experienced a lightning strike or other natural disaster at work? Do tell...