Computer Systems & Networking in Orange County with Marc Winger of Zephyr Networks

Marc: I think I kind of preface this speech by letting you guys know I wasn’t going to do the doom and gloom about security, and viruses, and China hacking in. I kind of want to give you guys a little idea of the focus of our business, and this little pyramid kind of describes the whole thing.
Actually, I kind of want to say, showing up after the time change and everything, I thought there would be a lesser quantity of people here today. So I’m proud of everyone for making it here and, yeah, I want to give you guys a hand.

So the focus of computers from the very beginning was to make you more productive, right? Are they making you more productive or are they becoming like a speed bump in getting things done? Come on, give me some feedback. It’s hard to know anymore because they’re in everything that we do. We can’t do anything without them.But the whole focus was to be at the top of the pyramid, productive. Right? That was the whole idea. The whole problem of it was that first we had to make the computers stable. We had to make the network stable. Then we had to move up to the pyramid and you wanted to make sure everything was backed up because sooner or later electronics break down. They’re not like Volkswagen bugs. Then security became an issue because there’s a lot of people with way too much free time, all over the world, who decided that they would make your life miserable.

But really the whole goal is to make you productive. And making you productive is what we focus on. We want you to be more productive. And if we’re not making you more productive we’re not doing our job. And basically the whole point of our job is to make it so you can do your job.The way that you do that is you start off with your computer and you have your professional line of business application. Everyone of you guys has probably a program that’s really just designed for your business, that you use on a daily basis. What’s gone on now and what the big change is now is these little mobile devices here. And they’re changing everything from our perspective, because you want to be able to take this thing out, if you’re a painter, you want to take this thing out and take a picture of that house you’re doing it on, and having the client work on here and sign off on their contract right on this, and you immediately email that into your supplier, or whatever, and you have all of the answers you need right here.

So you can do it. You have a little thing that does calculations for you right here. And then, you’re not carrying around a laptop with you. You don’t have to print out everything 25 times. And that’s basically why this is changing the game. I’ve spoken with a client of ours who goes out to supermarkets and makes changes in the facing of product to sell candy and things like that, and they’re using all iPads now. It’s all they use. They don’t have anything else.
Every business has what I call a professional services automation program. What we use, as some of you may have seen, already, is a professional services automation program, which is just a Web designed page. And so I just made this up last night. Let’s say I’m doing some work for [Don Sharda]. Well, I can put everything I need to about this problem. It’s a critical priority. It needs to be done. It’s scheduled in here and everything else.

And then, when I’m done with it, I have my handy, handy, invoice built right on here. I give this invoice directly to the client and I hit this little sign button on the top right corner here. And I’ll sign Don’s name for him here. With my handy, handy Zephyr Networks stylus. Don Sharda.By doing this I’ve done a lot of things here. Online we have our terms and conditions right here. And there’s a link to it right here. That’s something that [Mark Holmes] did for me, so they’re basically admitting that we did great work every time. And also they’re also saying that we’re going to go to arbitration, etc., etc. Those are the things that you kind of want to do, and they’re signing it right then and there. It’s saved online. It’s saved on your iPad as well. It works perfectly for legal situations. I can verify that with the legal powers that be here.

There are professional services automation tools for every industry that we have there. I looked it up last night. There’s a painting one, there’s one for plumbing, there’s practice management stuff for attorneys, and they’re all online.

Even for the healthcare world, and we’ve dealt with this a lot, more and more they’re integrating all this stuff into iPads. We have one doctor who goes around and carries an iPad with him. This is a current client of ours, who goes from room to room to room to room, when he’s doing his client visits and does the electronic health record directly on his iPad.
I keep thinking about insurance. I don’t know for sure about insurance. I signed, when I did life insurance, I signed like a gazillion documents. It would be so much easier to take a stylus and go, bam, bam, bam, put it right on the iPad. That’s the whole goal. And I’m not sure if it’s there yet.Your vendors will help you do that. But if you have those documents in a PDF format we can help you do that as well and I don’t have it on [Shawn’s], but you can sign a PDF format and we can help you build PDF’s that you can actually sign and fill out as you go in there. And the other thing that we can do is if you need to add or subtract numbers we can build it right into that PDF so that on your iPad it’s saying, okay, quantity of two cans of white paint and two cans of yellow paint and it adds up and puts a total on the bottom so you don’t even have to do math. Works out really good for everybody.

If you sit down and think about how your business can benefit from being able to be more mobile, I think you’ll find that one of the big advantages of being more mobile is that you don’t have to go home and put the data back into the same document. Like you right it out on a piece of paper and at some point in time you’re typing it into QuickBooks, or whatever it happened to be.

If your time is valuable, which is the most important thing in my mind. I got two kids. I am involved in the Y Princesses, and soccer practice, everything else, and trying to balance that with a business. That’s the most important thing for me is to save time, to make myself more productive.
So if there’s anyway that you can make yourself more productive, this is one way to start. Start thinking about it. Start thinking about how we can help you, and I’m sure there’s a way to do it. We’ve already applied it in four or five different locations and I’m sure it’s going to help for you.
So if there’s any questions, now is a good time. Dennis?

Dennis: When you’re looking at building that work order, invoice, tool, is this something that’s got to be an online environment at the time?

Marc: Not at all. I can’t really show you on this one, but we have it on this one right here. The PDF file, and I’m using Google Docs, which is obviously on of my favorite things to work with. But Google Docs will allow me to save that PDF file locally, on the iPad. So you don’t even have to be connected to the internet. You could be in Timbuktu where there’s no connectivity to anything, and you would just have that PDF on your iPad, and they can sign right on there. Not only can they sign it, you can do all that mathematics built right into it. All the forms filled in about. You can also do that through Dropbox and a number of other tools that make you more productive.

Dennis: So now the next step in that is if you get a new call from a client that says, “Help. Help. All my computers are down.” I have to run right over here and fix it. Now you don’t have the document prepared as you have it this example, is there blank documents that you can do locally that . . .

Marc: You mean start a whole blank document?

Dennis: Yes.

Marc: Of course. You can keep a template on here and have them fill out the template and it stays locally.

Dennis: And then that might . . .

Marc: Google Docs will let you choose off line docs. So you can basically save something so that it stays locally. And if it’s a template, you can just choose ‘Save as’ as a saved document.

With an iPad you’re still going to have a risk of people going out and playing games on the iPad. I mean it’s a risk. You can lock it down to some extent. On the Android you have far more risk of virus, etc., because of the open platform. Then, with the Kindle Fire, which is also very usable in all these kind of things, there’s some risk as well. So you have to judge those risks before you buy.

You can do restrictions on the firewall, inside your office, in your case, at least, to make sure that they don’t get out to websites that you don’t want them to go to. You can turn off Facebook. You can turn off all those kind of things. And they can just focus on the work that they need to do.

A lot of that really comes down to the Internet usage agreement that you do with your clients. And if you see them on Facebook and you say, “Don’t go to Facebook.” Then you can let them go. But there are certain restrictions that you can’t really do on the iPad or the Androids, as far as restricting usage. On a security level I would encourage people to use the iPad. It’s been shown to be more secure. Anything else? All right.

1000 North Bristol Street #17-129
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: 800.884.7559
Fax: 949-544-2901
www.zephyrnetworks.com