Tom Jordan – Page 7 – Thin Client Technology

MailBag Friday (#35)

March 1, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team. This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager Platform users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation. Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager Platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible. [...]

MailBag Friday (#34)

February 15, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Integrating ThinManager Across Multiple Facilities

February 13, 2013July 29, 2016 Tom Jordan

In America today, there are currently more than 14,000 operational chemical manufacturing facilities. Each of them provides their own challenges requiring unique and individually crafted systems to monitor and manage their manufacturing processes. When beginning a project with zero room for error, deploying the proper resources is critical.

Factory Automation Systems, founded in 1992, has been providing system design, deployment, and management services for a global leader in chemical manufacturing for a decade. Specializing in Programmable Logic Computer (PLC) integration, Factory Automation Systems partnered with their customer to grow along with their industry while never losing sight of where they started. [...]

MailBag Friday (#33)

February 1, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Monthly Integrator Spotlight

January 30, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Extreme Conditions Call for Extreme Solutions

Grain elevators are facilities at which grains are received, stored, and then distributed for direct use, process manufacturing, or export. Most facilities, however, are home to other operations such as cleaning, drying, and blending. For the most part, these processes have stayed the same for the last 150 years. Of course, better elevators and facilities have been developed and implemented as time has passed, but the basic engineering has stayed the same. In recent decades though, while those same engineering principles have stayed the same, systems and controls changed and evolved as the expansion of computer technology exploded. [...]

MailBag Friday (#32)

January 25, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Where Does Technological Innovation Come From?

January 23, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Technological innovation comes from many people around the world every single day. Yet, it is rare to know the names of those who spawn the innovations that eventually reach market and change our lives. Most people tend to only read headlines instead of history. If you are one of them, you would think that true technological innovation is generated by a select handful of individuals sitting by themselves in a small garage in California.

There are many examples of a lone innovator scrawling an idea on a napkin or a piece of paper that becomes a billion dollar company, forever altering how we interact with the world. In fact, the current combined net worth of “The Big Four” (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) is somewhere north of $1.1 TRILLION dollars. And they were all started with very little money and a single idea. So how is it that we all know about the humble beginnings of innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg? Because their stories have been told so many times, they are now the stuff of legend. Today, parents tell their children they can do the same thing as a tale of optimism, much the same way our parents used to tell us that we if we studied hard we could become the President of the United States. [...]

Does Virtualization Really Provide ROI?

January 16, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Heading into 2013 the hot topic around the IT water cooler seems firmly focused on the “Virtualization War” being waged between Microsoft and VMware. There are arguments to be made on both sides of the debate and who will come out on top is anyone’s guess at this point. Microsoft has a history of coming to market late with a product, only to devour the entire market with a low price point. While Microsoft looks to finish buying out the current Virtualization Market, VMware has seemingly decided to ignore Virtualization as an “end game” and continues to push past it towards full cloud adoption to compete as a service to rival Microsoft Azure. [...]

MailBag Friday (#31)

January 11, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Looking to the Cloud in 2013

January 9, 2013September 15, 2014 Tom Jordan

Every year as the calendar comes to an end, a new year invariably elicits statements, declarations, and discussions about what kind of year it will be. People proudly proclaim that this is they year they will lose that last ten pounds that has been hanging around, pundits make bold proclamations about the future of the political landscape, and industry professionals predict what the next wave will be to revolutionize their specific area of expertise.

For those of us who develop software, it has become clear that the prediction we need to be aware of is that 2013 will be the “boom or bust” year for all things cloud. Then again, that was also the same prediction we heard heading into 2012. And yet here we are again standing on the precipice of change. No one can deny that the last year saw great advances in the world of cloud computing, specifically the proliferation of the public cloud by companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Previously, cloud computing had been the province of smaller niche software companies and data storage centers. But as that business model showed gains in both popularity of adoption and profitability, the larger companies have finally committed their resources to capitalize on what has become a proven business model. [...]