At this past TeamQuest Technology Summit in Tucson, AZ, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Robert Erhardt, Chief Technology Officer for the San Diego Zoo. Robert was one of the keynote speakers and delivered a fascinating presentation on the business of zoos. If there was ever a poster child for best practices, Robert is that person.

We spoke for over an hour about the zoo and its challenges around the world. I only remember one comment that was specific to a particular technology – weather resistant information kiosks.

The rest of the time we talked about the BUSINESS challenges the zoo faced. We discussed the considerable number of animals for which they care that can no longer be found in the wild and the steps they are taking to increase the numbers to be able to reintroduce them to their former habitat. It was a discussion in business terms, not technology. He spoke of business solutions where IT played a role, but again at a high level – such as a data repository of animal care information where zoos, veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators around the world can learn from each other on the caring for endangered and exotic species.

Robert really impressed me. We are bombarded with media promoting the integration of business and IT but we usually see little of it in our day-to-day lives. Robert is already there and more. Robert has a passion for the animals his organization protects and is an integral part of the business that is needed to sustain the ongoing work. He knows the business as well or better than the people he serves and uses that knowledge to develop innovative solutions, both high and low tech. From a best practice perspective, who can ask for any more than that?

If you share Robert’s passion for animals, please consider going to http://www.sandiegozoo.org/ and make a donation to support their cause. TeamQuest has.

Ron

Hello, my name is Jerred Ruble and I am one of the founders of TeamQuest Corporation and serve as the President and CEO of the Corporation. I thought it would be a good time to start a blog.

First things first. You will not read postings that discuss the greatness of TeamQuest software. We can do that in a news release and on our website. I’ll leave the glitz, glam and promotions to the marketing department.

The purpose of the TeamQuest blog is to share with you what is going on within TeamQuest, the issues IT operations professionals experience, and our thoughts where the industry is headed. We may even challenge the thoughts of an industry analyst or two.

All of our employees will be encouraged to post to the blog, making it a company-wide tool for keeping in touch with you. Every employee who posts to this blog is here to listen. This is a conversation among peers.

Last month we met with several customers at our technology summit in Tucson, Arizona, and I expect to share some of the takeaways from that event.

Here’s a link to the event – http://www.teamquest.com/news-events/events/technology-summit/. Some of the topics you should read from TTS include:

• Performance management and capacity planning for virtualized environments
• The challenges of aligning IT with business
• How virtual environments are represented with IT resources
• Understanding CPU measurements for multi-threaded processors
• Analyzing business data with the user agent

Be sure to check back often.