Can you combine the engineer-centric, we-put-the-dot-in-dot-com kids from the West Coast with the button-down, eye-on-the-bottom-line grownups from the East? Well, maybe opposites attract. IBM’s major strength is the range of things they can offer a customer – everything from business…

Testing conventional disaster recovery mechanisms is kind of like cutting off your hand to find out whether it can be successfully reattached: it’s incredibly painful; if everything works out the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be fine; if the loss is permanent, you are seriously messed up.

To eliminate the horrors of DR and allow you to sleep at night, Continuity Software (one of those companies you haven’t heard of, but should) offers RecoverGuard (one of those products you haven’t heard of, but should).  We’re intrigued by the fact that the new version being announced today, RecoverGuard 4.0, is seemingly unique; no other software vendor has this exact solution. In fact, the company’s toughest competition is the OEM who sells their product.

Here’s their take:

I recently spent some time IMing with a reporter about social networking in the corporate world – how businesses can reap great rewards, what potential landmines to watch for – and then I thought, “Hey… what’s in this for me? Why should she be the only one to fill up some blank space with my keen observations?” So here’s the gist of it…

Social networking is a huge opportunity for companies of all sizes to give customers a view of their company and culture. It’s a long-term marketing strategy that’s also low-cost and very efficient. If companies can get customers to identify with their brand, it becomes the ‘cool’ choice for their target market. The more customers identify with the company/brand, the less price-sensitive they become; they are buying the product for reasons other than strictly price, and they’ll leap hurdles to maintain their brand loyalty. And these committed ‘real world’ customers are the best salespeople a company can have – each one influences his/her entire social circle. People tend to put more faith into a recommendation from a friend or family member than they do in an ad or website from the company.

However, it’s got to be a soft sell. An obvious sales pitch is the wrong approach. Your corporate Facebook can’t be like a Sham Wow commercial. That won’t engage potential customers. At best, they’ll ignore it; at worst, they’ll laugh at it and gleefully heap scorn on your company and brand.

An interesting story in a recent Business Week, with the apt title “Financial Models Must Be Clean and Simple” discusses financial modeling in light of the economic meltdown. Along the way, it presents a good explanation of CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations – read: bundles of toxic mortgages) and how they work. For the uninitiated, it’s a good entry point into understanding what the hell happened and why the turmoil will continue through at least the mid-term future.

What was interesting to me was the discussion about how financial modeling works, and how it failed. The authors correctly point out that modeling is extremely useful in the scientific world – indispensable, in fact. But modeling physical phenomena is very much different from modeling human behavior – which is essentially what financial models are designed to do. In the physical world, there are rules. We may not know the rules or exactly how they work, but they are consistent for the most part. Contrast that to the human world, where results hinge on the actions of governments, financial institutions, and masses of individuals – none of whom react in a strictly rational manner. Or, more precisely, they react in manners that are rational to them, but that rationality is definitely a product of their own world view.

Wall Street firms have long spent their money acquiring the best scientific brains they could find. When I was in graduate school (University of Chicago Graduate School of Business), some of the most highly sought-after candidates were people who had deep math skills in hard sciences (physics, biology, etc.). While I was sweating out grades in the finance classes, these folks were reading magazines and just waiting around for the math to get hard enough to hold their interest. When they found their homes in the financial capitals of the world, their skills were immediately put to use in building models to figure out the behavior of hideously complicated financial instruments under a wide variety of economic conditions. It takes a lot of computing power to do this, but it also takes a lot of brains to figure out and test the data interrelationships and to make the models sing.

Things suck. Investors in your startup are scuttling away faster than cockroaches under a flashlight, you’ve mortgaged everything except the dog, and your fed-up spouse is taking half of what’s left and moving to Reno. You’ve laid off most of…

A whole lot of people (830,000 to be exact) would be forced to find another way to line their birdcages, train their puppies, and wrap their fish if the New York Times takes seriously this observation by Nicholas Carlson of…

A very interesting press release from Sandia Labs last week discussed results from their research into how processor core counts correlate to performance. Briefly, their tests showed that solid performance gains (around 25-50%) are achieved in moving from dual to…

It looks like a long-running rumor is finally being confirmed: Cisco is entering the server market very soon. Our pal Ashlee Vance at the New York Times published a story yesterday, and our other pal, Timothy Prickett Morgan of The…

Robert Moffat, IBM’s Systems & Technology (read: servers and other hardware) chief, laid the smack down on HP’s Mark Hurd in a recent ChannelWeb story. When the first word in an industry news story is “feisty”, your next thought usually isn’t, “Hey, this must be about IBM.” However, Moffat is the epitome of feistiness with quotes like this: “The stuff that Mr. Hurd said was going away kicked his ass…” and going on to discuss mainframe and System p Unix system sales growth. Moffat also owned up to weakness in IBM’s x86 server sales miss, explaining it was execution problems on IBM’s part rather than product problems, market trends, or anything HP did to blunt IBM’s efforts. While we’re not sure what Hurd did or said to prompt Moffat’s fiery riposte, we are certain that this will get HP’s attention and probably a return salvo.

Our pal Timothy Prickett Morgan (TPM) wrote a good story in The Register about how Rackable and Verari have recently added equipment leasing programs. I’m more than a little surprised that it has taken them this long to take this step; it’s not like these companies are still start-ups. If I’m running a company that sells big-ticket IT products, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy my products – cash sales, leases, trade-in deals, barter (including crops, farm animals, furs, etc.) While it doesn’t look like they are opting to add the rather wide range of buying options that I would provide, they do have more than the plain vanilla deals, including mid-lease upgrades and lessors that take an equity stake in the deal. It’ll be interesting to see how well these companies fare over the long term, what with the economic crisis and ever-increasing competition from much larger vendors. It’s much easier to make waves and money when you’re a plucky pioneer who is blazing trails and proving the value of a new product (like blades).