With all the hype on Apple’s iPods and iPads, Microsoft seems to suffer from this well know Rodney Dangerfield tag line.  Despite record revenue of almost $70b and an EPS increase of 28%, Microsoft shares are still stuck in neutral. What’s important to note is that the “Server and Tools Business” just finished a 5^th consecutive quarter of double digit growth and now stands at a $17.1b.  This is the boring stuff (Server OS/Hyper-V SQL and System Center) but lies at the heart of mission critical corporate IT – and won’t be replaced by the next gadget.

Microsoft has a long and celebrated history of moving technology forward, and business-critical applications are no different. As a Microsoft partner, Stratus Technologies couldn’t be in a better position.

Somewhere up in the great state of Maine, there is a fabulous state park, providing gorgeous scenery, fishing, and hiking opportunities to visitors every year.

Unfortunately, the park doesn’t run itself, and has a number of park personnel keeping campers safe, monitoring the wildlife, and keeping the state’s property safe and protected. The park rangers are lucky- their offices are filled with the scent of pine trees and fresh air. Occasionally, however, one of them needs a break.

The IT VAR supporting the the park went on a two-week vacation this summer to a remote location and was completely incommunicado to his “office” mates. But when he was gone, they had a  system failure.

Lucky for the crew left behind, the IT guy had installed Avance, which prevented the failure and allowed the systems running applications such as communication, safety and weather reporting,  to continue running until the IT guy came back to fix the problem.

State parks, as well as other SMBs, are subjected to  federal laws of compliance, necessitating HA systems. With solutions like Avance, IT personnel everywhere can go on vacation and not worry about coming back to a catastrophe at work or subject to review due to non-compliance.

I’ve been busy the past few weeks away from the office and deep in the thumping heart of Public Safety. APCO, which debuted it’s new brand logo at the conference. APCO is a conference dedicated to the innovation and development of best-in-class public safety communications, unifying people and technology in order to save lives.

I wanted to share some early picks of what the expo looked like mid-transition into the bustling, decked-out  hub most conference-goers see. Here are some picks of our favorite brands and companies as they get ready for the expo. Enjoy!

It is a very exciting time to be in IT. There is a tremendous amount of ingenuity and innovation in the industry, particularly around social media.

Salesforce, for example, is partnering with a number of companies to develop very cool tasks and solutions in the social networking space.

Enterasys, has recently developed a Salesforce Chatter based system-to-hardware communication platform. Using their software, IT professionals can remotely manage systems via Twitter.

The KLM Youtube video “Your Delft blue portraits on a real KLM plane!” is also driven by Salesforce. It allows viewers to share their content, while accessing Marketing Captured Inquiries (if using the Sirius Decisions term) in their system.  KLM is also following twitter to surprise travelers who twit about traveling with KLM.  See the story here.

Financial giant Bank of America built an entire social media operations center, using Salesforce as the underlying infrastructure, to proactively monitor and respond to tweets, Facebook posts, and other social posts.

Salesforce is ahead of the curve in assisting B to C companies not only to actively engage in social media, but also transforming the tools into things less social-like an IT guy rebooting a failed system at the office from the couch in your living room.

What’s next for social media might not, in fact, be social at all.

Recently, I came upon Keith Bates’ Business Cloud 9 post, “Power Outages in the Cloud.”  Bates states, “Power outages such as those experienced by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft in recent months are not only hugely embarrassing for the Cloud giants, but also incredibly disruptive for the affected users.”

He’s right. The gap between 100 percent uptime and what cloud service providers have been delivering of late can kill a client’s business. Any enterprise that accepts responsibility for hosting critical business operations needs to put clients’ needs first and make the sorts of investments you suggest and others, as well. Technology to deliver the highest levels of uptime assurance is readily available. Yet building the cheapest servers possible and relying on automated systems to manage recovery seems to be the cloud business model of choice. It’s a gamble that is reflected in the weak SLAs – and the many SLA exceptions in small print – that cloud service providers offer up. They would do well to differentiate themselves from competitors by the superiority of their commitment to their customers’ well being, instead of their own.