In Part 1, I discussed Moore’s law and the benefits of keeping up with technology in the fast paced evolution of computing power.
To keep your company on the bleeding edge, I highly recommend taking advantage of SYSPRO port updates. These are similar to Windows updates – with every new SYSPRO release you can expect port updates more regularly and as the release reaches a level of stability, the port updates drop to an average of one update per month as the product matures with new features and enhancements. These updates can add a great deal of value to your ERP investment. If a portion of the code has been rewritten to increase speed, you’ll notice the difference.
Of course, your ERP won’t work optimally if your hardware is out of date. Adding more resources, for example faster storage, memory and CPU cores, to your system can create real differences in speed. There is, however, a limit to how far you can push older hardware from a point of upgradability and speed so it is always worth checking out the new generation of hardware to maximise your experience.
Don’t forget your SQL Server updates, which add valuable enhancements with every release. With each generation the database management has become much easier with added features and tools that speed up and simplify complex tasks.
Updates take advantage of hardware advances, capitalising on bigger and faster systems or functionality which has been optimised through smarter coding. There has been a massive drive to move to 64bit, to utilise more memory, more CPU cores and to build in faster querying and writing capabilities with multithreading capability. Overall, updating your SQL version provides more opportunities to process more data in a much faster manner.
Why wouldn’t you want to keep up? Think of it this like this; the USB sticks, calculators and even your watch on your arm have more power than the computer that put man on the moon (It had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz). This is direct evidence of the relentless pace of technological development encompassed in Moore’s Law – we just need to take advantage of it with our business.
I also like to encourage enhancement requests, which come around when a customer requests an improvement or addition. We’ll evaluate your request and determine whether or not it’s beneficial to all our customers. Often the request deals with interoperability between SYSPRO and third-party hardware or software – mobile phones for example. Not only do enhancement requests provide customers with benefits, they allow SYSPRO to see what our customers want in the future. As a company, we are both led and drawn by our customers – their feedback helps us keep SYSPRO on the bleeding edge of technology.
