The Savvy CIO

Deez provides high performing auto racing parts and specialized racing fuels. Recently, the company was looking to take their online marketing and e-commerce presence to a higher performing level.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

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We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
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Animal Emergency Treatment Center’s Animal Hospital is now open on the corner of Belmont and Pulaski. It’s the first and only 24/7 animal hospital in the city. AETC has operated an outstanding Animal Hospital in Greyslake for many years. Congratulations to Dr. Matt Tompkins and his team.

Highland has provided technology services to AETC for six years, including tech support, hosting and Zimbra. We designed and installed the entire IT infrastructure for AETC Chicago, and will support the systems and users at both locations.

Here’s a spot on the new hospital on WGN.

Ever wonder what the “cloud” part of cloud computing looks like?

It can be easy to think of the cloud as some vague place “out there” where things are taken care of. After all, it is called the cloud. In reality, the cloud is comprised mostly of companies—like ours—that provide web-based services out of data centers.

Want to see the cool, techie insides of the cloud? View this tour from Equinix. (Warning: Video is a bit goofy at times, all part of the geeky cool factor.)

Image from www.equinix.com/locations/tours/

We would have liked to show you our own pictures of the center, but a “no camera” policy is a part of the security standards, along with biometric access and 24×7 security guards.

Why are we excited about data centers?

Earlier this month we expanded our hosted services to a second state-of-the-art Tier 3 data center.

Why two data centers?

As our hosted services continue to grow, we needed more space for servers, more power, etc. By growing into a second data center, we’re able to provide separate geographic locations for servers and backups to our clients who host business critical applications and desire this level of disaster recovery.

What’s a Tier 3 center?

Data centers are rated from Tier 1 (the closet in your office) to Tier 4 (can stay online during a major disaster and last 3 days without power). Tier 3 centers provide extremely high levels of security, power, speed, redundancy and disaster preparedness. Read about data center tiers and what they mean.

Our commitment to world class data center hosting for our clients helps set us apart. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about our hosted and cloud computing services.