First and foremost, I want to thank you for your business. I spend most of my waking hours (and some non-waking) focused on technology. There's nothing more gratifying, to me, than utilizing technology to help my clients save money, prevent problems, and most importantly -- to bolster their business. We know you have many vendor choices, and I thank you for choosing Applied Integration as your technology partner. Although 2009 has been a rough one for most of us, I am sincerely looking forward to starting 2010 off with a renewed sense of optimism.

As you know, it’s the time of year that companies like ours review support and maintenance pricing and make adjustments for the coming year. However, with the business still being challenging for so many of you, we have adjusted our internal budget so that we can maintain our current pricing for the time being, with NO increase at this time. We’re going to hold the line for now, and review the situation in six months.

One lesson I think we’ve all learned in the last couple years is that we can’t afford to rest on our laurels or just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, hoping we’ll survive. I think each of us must be taking a look at just about everything we do, and making sure it’s the right thing, the right use of our people, and the right way to take care of our customers.

As always, I encourage you to look, with a critical eye, at your current technology situation. In most cases, you can save money while increasing efficiency and better protecting your critical data and systems. If you’d like a no-charge technology analysis, please respond to my email above and we’ll get it scheduled. Often times, it’s not about doing or spending more, it’s about doing things differently and better utilizing some incredible, and low-cost, innovations.

If you’ve opened many support calls with us over the past year, you’ve no doubt been aware of the changes we made to our call tracking system. We started out with a pretty simple system that worked well enough for what it did, but we soon found that we really needed much more than just a simple call tracking system, so late in the year we did our own “go-live” as we migrated to a fully integrated application called Autotask. This new application does all that we need it to for call tracking, but behind the scenes it helps us be more effective by putting everything under one application. We now have one place where we archive everything about your systems, all your hardware components, all your contact information, your Service Contracts, you name it... we now keep it in one place. For the most part, what you’ll see is the call tracking features, but internally, we’re much more efficient with this new technology which helps heighten the service we provide to you.

The most important things you’re seeing are the options you now have for opening support calls, you can visit the web portal and open a ticket there, or you can send an email to helpdesk@appliedintegration.net and the system will open a ticket for you. I have found that some of you missed the initial email from our system that included your login credentials for the web portal, maybe it got into your junkmail folder or you just didn’t realize what it was and deleted it. If you don’t know how to get to the portal, feel free to give me a call or send me an email and I’ll make sure we get you in there. If you have other people in your company that you want to allow access to, just let me know about them and we’ll get them setup right away too.

Again, thank you for your business, and here’s to 2010 and the potential it brings!