Hardware and Network

A basic premise of InfoPoint's is that the Internet is evolving. It is hard to pick up a book or magazine on management theory these days without reading articles on flexibility, change management and so on. The popular book on the global economy, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" by Tom Friedman said that there are two types of economies, fast and slow. In the world of the future the fast economies are well off and the slow are not.

In order for InfoPoint to be fast we maintain our own infrastructure here. We use open source software, software that is built by many people in a collaborative manner. Open source software is constantly improved and updated. It is a full time job just to keep up on the enhancements and improvements of the software. InfoPoint monitors the improvements, installs and tests various software in an ongoing basis and uses the best for our customers. We have databases, computer languages and much more that we have available and keep up.

To do this, we need to have various machines available to us and to have our own network infrastructure. We cannot just put a Web site on some server somewhere with a zillion other Web sites. This is fine if the Web site is small and just text and graphics, but for a modern Web site this does not work.

To best do our development and to make sure our customers get the best and the latest software, we have our own internal network. Our own servers and our own connection to the Internet. We use a combination of Linux, Solaris and Windows systems to host our systems and do our work.