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2025

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Rethink Your Business Continuity Strategy

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Amadeo Giannini, the founder of Bank of America, rescued all funds from his bank after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He used that to lend to customers few days after the disaster. Other banks were in smoldering ruins and unable to operate. Having a plan to get all the funds out, shortly after an earthquake, was a good continuity strategy.

 

Currently, GM is halting production in some plants. Ford is running out of paint. The electronics industry is under siege with lack of critical components that sustain us in this age of Apple and Facebook. And there are potential risks for many small firms to collapse. Why? The earthquakes in Japan disrupted supply chains and challenged the just-in-time (JIT) management model that has gained popularity.

 

Over the years, firms have become more cost-conscious owing to the fierce and global nature of competition. Many adopted a lean strategy. They order the materials only when needed; they consider holding stocks of parts an unnecessary redundancy. But events in Japan in the last few weeks have exposed the hidden costs of JIT. A company stands a risk of losing market leadership and corporate reputation. Organizations largely sit atop a three-legged chair of people, processes, and tools. When supply chain is disrupted, all three are affected, especially in the case of Japan, which produces high-tech niche products for which there are limited sourcing alternatives. Firms can model supply chain disruptions,but when Black Swans happen, the system usually breaks down. In his HBR post, Harold L. Sirkin provided ways companies can mitigate these issues.

 

Let me take a different look: IT infrastructure. As businesses transition into the digital ecosystem, preparing for events like earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear disasters become very important. How prepared a company is will determine if it can restart operations, as Giannini did, shortly after a disaster. That we work in one city and our data is stored in another makes this more challenging since the risk may not be obvious. For cloud-based organizations, what happened in Japan could elicit more questions on how prepared their hosted platforms are. Whether it is a terrorist attack on a server farm or a natural disaster, planning is what will help to develop that continuity. You must work out an IT continuity strategy to protect your business. Here are two important steps:

 

Offsite Backup: For organizations that depend on data to function, developing a flexible offsite backup strategy is important. And it must be far away from your locality. Keeping the backup in your vicinity does not make much difference; it could be affected by the same disaster that disrupted you. A backup strategy is not complete without an offsite strategy.

 

Investigate Cloud Partners: If you run your business in a cloud, you could become vulnerable if the cloud partner cannot recover from a major disaster. That the data is not resident in your facility must not give you an illusion of safety. You must find out how prepared they are to resume business after unusual events. This is important because, in Japan today, one of the problems is lack of power. Most firms are ready, but they do not have electricity to operate. It is possible that after a disaster, your organization could be ready for business, but your cloud partner is not.

 

Japan has taught the world JIT and right now its is revealing JIT’s risks to the world. It makes sense to identify, examine, and ameliorate your business continuity’s weakest link.

 

original published in HBR

VIA Technologies Showcases Its new QuadCore Chip

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Taiwan based VIA Technologies has announced the introduction of its new energy-efficient multi-core architecture that has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of only 27.5 watts and running at 1.2+ GHz. The VIA QuadCore processor is said to be 21% more energy efficient than the nearest competitor. VIA QuadCore processors combine four ‘Isaiah’ cores on two dies which enables multi-tasking and multimedia performance.

 

Years back when VIA released their first Nano based processor, which is essentially a 9th generation x86 processor with many advanced features which make it quite similar in ways to the Intel Core 2 architecture.  This super-scalar processor was very mean and lean, but initially came out in a single core solution.  What made this processor quite interesting was that the design was simplified to a great degree, but it still performed at a very high level.  It is said that to nearly 50% of a processor’s transistor budget is dedicated to squeezing out that last 10% of performance.
Well, the Centaur design team behind Nano decided to forego that last bit of performance and just created an architecture which would still have next generation features, but will improve power consumption and die size while sacrificing some of the potential performance when compared to larger, more power hungry processors from the competition.

 

One could argue that VIA jumped on the low power bandwagon before it was really cool.  Way back in the late 90s VIA snatched up processor firms Cyrix and Centaur, and started to merge those design teams to create low powered x86 CPUs.  Over the next several years VIA was still flying high on the chipset side, but due to circumstances started to retreat from that business.  On the Intel side it was primarily due to the legal issues that stemmed from the front side bus license that VIA had, and how it apparently did not apply to the Pentium 4.

 

On the AMD side it was more about the increased competition from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD, plus the lack of revenue from that smaller CPU market.  Other areas have kept VIA afloat through the years, such as audio codecs, very popular Firewire controllers, and the latest USB 3.0 components that are starting to show up.

 

Considering all that, VIA thought its best way to survive was to get into the CPU business and explore a niche in the x86 market that had been widely ignored except for a handful of products from guys like Nat Semi (who had originally bought up Cyrix).  In the late 90s and early 2000s there just was not much of a call for low power x86 products, and furthermore the industry was still at a point where even mundane productivity software would max out the top end x86 processors at the time.

 

This was a time where 1GHz was still not common, and all processors were single core.  Fast forward to 2011 and we have four and six core processors running in excess of 3 GHz.  There’s also seen a dramatic shift in the x86 realm to specialized, lower power processors. It seems its gotten to a point where the combination of raw speed and pervasive, multi-core designs have become “good enough” for the majority of desktop applications out there.
Certainly there are plenty of workstation class software products such as image manipulation, scientific models and simulations that require more than two cores and faster speeds, but for most users wishing to surf the internet, watch a few videos, and exchange emails, we are certainly at the level of “good enough” for a wide variety of low power/low cost processors.

 

The Nano has done well, even though VIA only has a small fraction of the x86 market currently.  Apparently it has sold quite well in Asia where cost and low heat production are key in many markets.  The combination of a Nano processor combined with the current VIA chipsets has kept VIA somewhat profitable and stable as a company.  The purchase of S3 graphics to design their latest GPU cores has also proven to be a good combination, as the VN1000 was able to match the feature set and performance of other integrated solutions from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.

The Investors Have Made 109% Profit Within 8Hours – Will Linkedin Sustain This?

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Yesterday, Linkedin got linked into the league of public companies. It was an unbelievable experience for them as the stock that started at about $45 valuation ended up closing at $94.25. Yes, that is American dollar and not Zimbabwean one. Which ended up yielding better investment than silver eagles, gold or commodities trading. So, those that had this stock on Wednesday night and going into trade on Thursday at $45 just made 109% profit.

 

Can you see why America is such a great place. In short, at a time, it was $122.70.

 

Contrast that with Nigerian technology companies like Omatek and Charm. Those ones are pretty junk stocks with no innovation to drive revenue and get investors excited. Charm is trading at N0.50? Too bad!

The Book Keeps Winning – Makes It To Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index

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Our Founder received an email from one of his book publishers about selection of this award winning book in the planned  Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index. This is a huge deal as only the most important books are chosen. This is part of the email, from the book publisher, which he made available to us. Congrats Prof.

 

Dear Dr. Ekekwe,

 

I hope this e-mail finds you well. I am contacting you today with the good news that your book, Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy, was recently selected for inclusion in Thomson Reuters’ new Book Citation Index, Humanities and Social Sciences Edition and Science Edition. Your publication was among the first titles to be reviewed and selected. Currently Thomson is working on building the Book Citation Index and has not yet made it available, however, Thomson has shared that they anticipate releasing the index late this year. When the Book Citation Index is released your book will be among those indexed. Congratulations to you and to the authors who worked on your book for this exciting accomplishment!

 

Best,
Caitlin

 

You can read part of the statement from Thomson Reuters when this project was unveiled

 

With Book Citation Index, we are rounding out our citation coverage of core research literature […] We know that [books] are extremely important in the social sciences and the humanities. But they are also important in the sciences. Social scientists use them heavily and cite them heavily. We want to make sure that we best serve that community by complementing the other two forms of publications—serials and proceedings—in the book arena as well. That’s our primary goal.’

 

http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=b904ea6e3930233a2979c71df&id=19496148bb

Bocinoc – Innovative Electrical Services And Products One Client At A Time

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Bocinoc is providing leading electrical services – one client at a time. Services include

 

Electrical Services

We provide high quality electrical services as our trademark in every project we are involved in, utility industries and the Government at Large.

Bravary Inverters and Batteries

We market and install high quality inverters and batteries. Bravary – inverters; our popular product will storm the Nigerian market before the end of the year.

Heavy Duty Transformers

We also market and install all kind of heavy duty transformaers. Our clients span across the country and has always been satisfied in all field demands.

Solar Energy Design and Installation

As part of our effort to support the provision of alternative power supply in the country, we market and install solar panels, different kind to suite your energy needs.

 

This is a company born out of innovation and they are just doing it:

 

Bocinoc teams specialize in various kind of electrical products and services! Renewable energy, Supplies, Installation ans support services in all electrical product outfit.

 

And they strive to provide high quality technical services as our trademark in every project we are involved in, utility industries and the Government at Large.  Corporate and respected individuals.  They are working to make impact in every corner and be reckoned with in the present day society, because we have what it takes to partner with our clients by adding value in fulfilling their objective base on our performance, dedication and attention.

 

To contact this company for your inverter supply, visit their site contact page.