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Naperville Sun Article: The big generator that could

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Last week, XNet was profiled in the Naperville Sun in the article “The big generator that could: XNet keeps businesses on the grid.” The article focuses on our boutique data center services and how our infrastructure keeps small and medium-sized businesses online in the event of a storm or power outage. In the article, XNet customer Mark Mayle of Equitas Group LLC talks well of his experiences with us over the last seven years. Thanks, Mark!

Read the article on the Naperville Sun web site.

Business Ledger Article: Surviving power outages without going broke

XNet’s Arthur Zards wrote this article that originally appeared in the January 21 TechLink section of The Business Ledger.

Surviving power outages without going broke
By: Arthur Zards

The most common IT disruption for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) is by far a general power outage. From rolling brownouts in the West coast, to springtime Chicago storms; power outages are fairly common and are on the rise due to an ever increasing commercial demand for power, and limited resources to meet the growing demand.

When looking at your business continuity plan for a loss of power (you did do this, right?) You probably found out that there are not too many cost effective options. A typical UPS (usually your only option) will add only minutes of emergency back-up power. Plus, the more computers you stack on the UPS, the less time you have. With how heavily companies rely on technology, a power outage can grind business to an immediate halt. No power means no email, no servers, no website, and equally as important—no Internet access.

Are there any cost effective options for your critical computers? Luckily there’s one, you just may not know about it. The boutique datacenter.

For many non tech-oriented executives, “the datacenter” conjures up thoughts of gigantic warehouses filled with technicians in labs coats busily managing gigantic supercomputers—at a price tag far beyond your budget. This may have been true years ago, but due to the growing need for business continuity for the SMB market, there are now numerous smaller, boutique-style datacenters that cater specifically to the SMB.

What is a boutique datacenter exactly? It is a facility that has all the features of an enterprise datacenter; redundant power with a UPS, back-up generators, industrial-grade cooling (with back-up units), that’s networked across multiple locations with two or more backbone-level Internet connections. Translation: if any one piece fails, you stay connected. These facilities allow you access to your equipment 24×7 while keeping it secure, and best of all, the services are all tailored especially for the SMB.

Boutique datacenters serve small businesses who need to host as little as a single critical email server, where larger facilities require minimum space allotments that dwarf these customers’ needs. Plus they add special services to help the small IT department manage and grow their company network and systems, so their network can keep pace with their growing business. Best of all, they offer friendly, helpful services to non-technical executives who know they need their equipment secure, but might not know exactly how to accomplish it.

If this is you, and you are not too sure how to protect your systems from a power loss, contact a boutique datacenter that caters to your market. You’ll be surprised at the level of IT help they can offer you, at a price that is very attractive.

Bio:
Arthur Zards is President and co-founder of XNet, a Lisle-based boutique data center, the XNet Critical Computing Facility. Since 1992, XNet has been instrumental in growing Internet technologies in the Chicago area, and is now the largest independently owned Internet service provider in the Chicago area.

Event: Silicon Prairie Social 2

Following on the heels of our first event, we’re hosting the second Silicon Prairie Social on Thursday, January 24. Below are the details. Hope to see you there!

Silicon Prairie Social 2
Suburban tech and Internet industry mixer

When:
Thursday, January 24, 2008, 6:30-10:00pm
Where:
Mullen’s Bar & Grill
3080 Warrenville Rd., Lisle, IL 60532 (map)

Silicon Prairie Social is an opportunity to connect in an informal setting with like-minded people in technology; the event is specifically for upwardly mobile tech professionals, tech executives, tech entrepreneurs, technology service providers, Internet professionals, Web 2.0 and startup companies, and the mobile industry. (No professional recruiters, staffing agencies, or active job seekers permitted).

The event is free to attend, free drinks and food will be provided. RSVP is required at http://siliconprairiesocial2.eventbrite.com.

For more information see www.siliconprairiesocial.com or contact info [at] siliconprairiesocial {dot} com.

XNet hosts successful first Silicon Prairie Social

There are a lot of tech businesses in the western suburbs, but no real sense of a tech community. Downtown Chicago has its events and associations, but where are these things along the I-88 corridor? That’s why we hosted Silicon Prairie Social last month at Mullen’s in Lisle.

Building a community doesn’t happen within a single event; the relationships that bring professional growth, business deals, and new opportunities are built up over time. The first Silicon Prairie Social was a step in the right direction, and we couldn’t be happier with the results:

• Over 200 attendees – many of them successful entrepreneurs, executives, and high-level technology professionals
• Great feedback on the quality of networking, thanks in part to the innovative “I Need” and “I Know” name badges that encouraged conversations.
• High compliments on the location—I-88 and Naperville Rd. are central to DuPage County, and the location made for an event that was accessible for people who can’t easily make downtown events in the evening.

See some photos of the event here:

To find out when we’re holding the next Silicon Prairie Social, visit the event’s web site and either add the RSS feed to your reader or sign up for the mailing list (right sidebar, below the sponsors).

Do your customers trust you?

While going through the inbox on my desk, where mostly trade pubs and “things to read later” collect, I uncovered this gem of an article from Forbes.com published in late May–the title reads simply “Do your customers trust you?” Even though the article is written towards financial advisers, we can generalize this to all service providers. The most poignant bit is where the author discusses vendor and customer perceptions of the services provided:

The State Street/Wharton survey found that while trust was clearly important to both advisers and their clients, each side had a different take on the building blocks of that trust. Nearly three quarters of both groups cited trust as the most important characteristic of a financial adviser, but the big discrepancies were in performance and cost-per-service. Just 4% of the advisers thought performance was the most important selection criteria, compared with 10% of the clients; only 5% of the advisers voted for cost, versus 12% for clients.

Those differences may have had something to do with the two sides’ perceptions of overall satisfaction. Advisers clearly have a higher opinion of their services than customers do. A whopping 56% of the advisers felt that their clients were “very satisfied,” while only 24% of clients concurred; meanwhile, 6% of advisers felt that clients were “somewhat satisfied,” a far cry from the 28% of clients who felt that way.

Obviously we skew perceptions to favor our position (it’s called Confirmation Bias). We, whatever our role–vendor, client, spouse, friend, student, etc–want to confirm what we believe, or want to believe, about our relationships. What vendor doesn’t want to believe customers love their product or service?

At XNet, though we’ve enjoyed tremendous customer goodwill over our company history, we haven’t been as conscientious as we could be in soliciting customer feedback. So, for all of the XNet customers reading this–do you trust us? Why, or why not? Let us know. And if you aren’t an XNet customer, try asking this of your customer base; if you don’t hear what you want to hear, take it as valuable feedback to help grow your business and an opportunity to deepen client relationships.