If you’re like many engineering managers, IT infrastructure may not be your favorite topic. You think about it when absolutely necessary, but often neglect it or place it behind other capital investments. What's more, there's a good chance your current IT solutions...
When it comes to IT solutions, most mid-market manufacturing companies rely on one of two options. They have a dedicated in-house IT team, or an outsourced IT managed services provider (MSP). But manufacturing companies who care about product development and...
Picture this: all your engineering applications run slow, or worse, continue to shut down. Yet, the IT team reports no alerts within the remote monitoring and management systems despite the problem. What is the root cause and how do you fix it? Remote Monitoring and...
When licensing your Windchill Requirements Validation & Source (RV&S) server, there are a few options for purchase or implementation. Many readers may recognize Windchill RV&S as the latest version of PTC Integrity -- or, if you have worked in...
In recent years, interest in engineering design automation across multiple industries skyrocketed, especially due to the high return on investment (ROI). Relieving your engineers from tedious, error-prone tasks and directing them toward automation presents a fantastic...
How to solve the problem that hides in plain sight Engineers rarely talk about “workflow integration” for items like CAD files or project data management (PDM). They’re too busy doing their jobs! However, that exact mindset presents a major issue. Many engineers think...
We are thrilled to announce that SPK and Associates won the Channel Futures / Channel Partners 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 501 Award for a second consecutive year! This prestigious award is widely viewed as the most comprehensive global survey of Information...
What is a Continuous Integration Pipeline? The purpose of a continuous integration pipeline is to allow teams to constantly integrate and build software updates in order to quicken release cycles, lower costs, and reduce risks. In a simple implementation of a...
Repeatability is an intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it comes down. If you throw it up twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down twenty times. When repeatability doesn’t occur and it’s supposed to, we get anxious. ...
“It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department.” That was the title of an opinion piece recently published in the Wall Street Journal. Provocative? Sure. My answer to this is not “yes,” but many of the author’s points are valid. The Same Old IT Department? No, the IT...
Log4j: What Is It? On December 9, 2021, a critical exploit named "Log4j" was disclosed to the world. This exploit was particularly harrowing due to the fact that the software library which it targeted is so widely utilized. “Log4Shell” (CVE-2021-44228,...
Have you ever sent out an email with a bunch of important questions and received a reply that began with "my answers are in blue". Have you then found yourself combing through your large email searching for those answers only to discover that your email provider...
