Chris Sparshott » new zealand

The IBM cloud lands in New Zealand

Chris Sparshott — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:07:07 +0000

Its official (finally). IBM New Zealand has made public their plans to build a data centre in Auckland to meet the needs of current and future clients. This has got to be a great opportunity not only for IBM but for organisations looking for secure managed services e.g. cloud solutions, PaaS, SaaS etc.

I am excited because it allows New Zealand Government to invest in IBM SaaS solutions but keeping their data in New Zealand and under New Zealand juristriction. No risks of a foreign government walking into a data centre stealing your data without your knowledge. New Zealand is the best place in the world for data centres (on par with Denmark) as we have the lowest level of corruption in the world.

I hope clients from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific region form and orderly queue for this capability which will keep skills locally.

For those wanting to see the official press release go here.

New Wave of Business

Chris Sparshott — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:30:08 +0000

Here is an interview with Chris Brogan about social media. I lot of interesting points;

You should spend 2 hours answering tweet, blog comments and email, this will actually decrease your email and improve your customer relationships.

The cost of a full page advertisement in the herald is the same as employing a community manager for a year.

12 minutes and 53 hot seconds with Chris Brogan & James Stewart from James Stewart on Vimeo.

Microsoft Small Business Server alternative

Chris Sparshott — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:35:55 +0000

IBM is providing professional training on a new software offering called Foundations. Foundations is a complete software appliance that provides the essential software a business needs to focus on running the business, not managing computer systems. The system includes:

email (outlook, pop3, imap clients)
calendaring
File Management
Security (Firewall, antivirus, VPN, automatic updates)
Backup and recovery
- Anyone can manage backups
- incremental backups
- No tapes, no wires, no cables
- No maintenance, cleaning, or administration
Document editors

All the above capabilite are included in the price of

NZ$374.58 for the server software component

NZ$243.72 for each individual user

(You will need to purchase a piece of hardware to run the software – xSeries etc but I can help you with specifications and planning)

This workshop is designed to give potential IBM Business Partners and potential customers a hands-on introduction to this small and medium business software with labs and presentations. At the end of the course you will be able to do the following:

Installation & Configuration
Administration
Intelligent Disk Backup
System Recovery
Implement using Best Practices

The training is running across New Zealand on the following dates and times.

17th March – Auckland, location TBC

19th March – Wellington, location TBC

If you are interested in attending please fill in the form.

Lotus Foundations – Help me get this sucker going!

Chris Sparshott — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:40:23 +0000

I have a day job, its called Lotus Technical Sales for IBM New Zealand. as part of that day job I get to play around with a stack of software that people can guy and vast truck load of software that you can’t – primarily research development.

IBM have released a new product this year called Lotus Foundations which I think is pretty cool in that it is a black box solution for Small and Medium businesses (SMBs). Luckily for me 99% of New Zealand has less than 100 employees so I think the product will rock! At the moment we have a 30 day trial license available where you can download the code. The install code includes an ISO so yo ucan get on with installing the base operating system (Linux) and the capabilities of Email (with an outlook client), security services, backup services and Collaboration (IBM’s OpenOffice Symphony).

It is super cheap – approx $1500. If anyone out there is thinking of doing the download and building a vmware I have added a couple of videos that really helped me. I am also building a presentation to help which I will post on slideshare shortly.

Beached Bro and Viral Marketing

Chris Sparshott — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:08:00 +0000

Last night on New Zealand’s TV1 a group of young Australian film makers spoke about their animated film entitled “Beached Whale”. This short film is funny as the actors speak with a Kiwi (New Zealand) accent and basically poke fun at their friends across the Tasmin Sea.

The last few frames of the short film sparked my interest as the film makers have added a small amount of viral marketing which is a URL to a cafepress where the film makers are selling merchandising.

Great film, great marketing!