TNC Applied Technology

Service providers and established IT companies are themselves trying to get to grips with how to make a business from Free Software, how best to advise customers who trust them to have the right answers and skills and how best to assist their workforce to develop new skills, sometimes well outside existing comfort zones, or target self-taught skills to be a business asset.

TNC Applied Technology can help. We can provide ideas and examples of services you can take to the market. We can be part of your pre-sales function to assure your customers that you have depth and access to the right skills when it comes to Free and Open Source software. We can provide your technical staff with pointers to develop their skills in an appropriate, business-centric manner.

Is running Free Software different to running proprietary infrastructure?  Yes, in some ways it is.  It requires a different approach in that there are differing choices for support.  It also means that previous requirements, such as onerous licence tracking schemes and so on, are no longer required.  But it does pay to be more thoughtful about how one goes about implementing Free Software and to understand the context in which it is used.

TNC Applied Technology can work with you, either in a workshop style of setting, or in an unstructured support style to give your business a fast track to understanding how to get the best from Free Software, to help Management understand what the “Free” part means (not always free of cost, but always with immense Freedoms to run your business as you see fit) and to help IT departments to incorporate these approaches in their existing service delivery process.

You know you and your business need to take a view on Free and Open Source Software.  TNC Applied technology can help you do that.

Standard small and even medium sized company services can be supplied easily and cheaply using Free and Open Source software.  And because Free Software tends to be pretty efficient, these services do not need powerful or energy-consuming hardware.  One such installation supplying services for small family business runs on a low power server drawing just 20 watts of power.

Basic services are:-

• File sharing (SMB for Windows, Linux and Macs, NFS for Linux/Mac)
• Printer sharing
• Postfix and Dovecot for email
• ClamAV, Spamassassin for inbound anti-virus and spam management
• eGroupware for collaboration
• MySQL or Posgresql for corporate databases
• Apache or Lighttpd with wikis for Intranets
• OpenVPN for secure remote access
• Shorewall for corporate firewalling
• Backup to removable disk
• Nagios for system monitoring
• Systems Management Tools (Mailgraph, reports etc)
• Accounting options (WebERP, GnuCash or TurboCash)

Nagios systems monitoring and systems management may be done remotely.

These services are ideal for startups, remote offices, revamping an older infrastructure, or bringing “cloud” services, such as email provided by an ISP, in-house.