Cintas Buys FACS Records Center

Posted on Mar 22, 2011 in Records Management News

Cin­tas Buys FACS Records Cen­ter
By: Zacks Equity Research
March 21, 2011

Cin­tas Cor­po­ra­tion (CTAS — Ana­lyst Report) is expand­ing its doc­u­ment man­age­ment busi­ness in the South­west with the acqui­si­tion of Phoenix-based FACS Records Cen­ter. The acqui­si­tion will help Cin­tas pro­vide busi­nesses across the coun­try with secure, cost-effective and com­pli­ant doc­u­ment man­age­ment solutions.

FACS Records Cen­ter through its off-site records man­age­ment and stor­age facil­ity has been pro­vid­ing off­site doc­u­ment stor­age and retrieval of records man­age­ment since 1983. Through this acqui­si­tion, Cin­tas has broad­ened its pres­ence in Ari­zona. The acqui­si­tion is syn­er­gis­tic with Cin­tas’ doc­u­ment man­age­ment seg­ment, which pro­vides doc­u­ment shred­ding, stor­age and imag­ing solu­tions that main­tain the high­est stan­dards of security.

Cin­tas reported second-quarter fis­cal 2011 results with net earn­ings of 38 cents per share, in line with the Zacks Con­sen­sus Esti­mate but a cent below year-ago results. Cin­tas’ total oper­at­ing rev­enue for the quar­ter was $936.6 mil­lion ver­sus $884.5 mil­lion in the year-ago period, reflect­ing a growth of 6%. Rev­enue was ahead of the Zacks Con­sen­sus Esti­mate of $916 mil­lion. Organic rev­enue growth was 4.2% in the quarter.

Cin­tas’ fis­cal 2011 earn­ings per share guid­ance stands in the range of $1.55 to $1.63 on rev­enues of $3.55 bil­lion to $3.75 bil­lion. The Zacks Con­sen­sus Esti­mate for the cur­rent quar­ter is 36 cents. For fis­cal 2011, the con­sen­sus esti­mate is at $1.57, at the lower end of the company’s pre­scribed range.

Cin­tas is mak­ing a steady recov­ery through con­sis­tent increases in rev­enue. With a sound finan­cial posi­tion and strong cash flow, the com­pany is look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve its long-term prof­itabil­ity. Cin­tas cur­rently retains a Zacks #2 Rank (short-term Buy rating).

Cincin­nati, Ohio-based Cin­tas pro­vides spe­cial­ized ser­vices to busi­nesses of all types through­out North Amer­ica. The com­pany designs, man­u­fac­tures, and imple­ments cor­po­rate iden­tity uni­form pro­grams, and pro­vides entrance mats, restroom sup­plies, pro­mo­tional prod­ucts, and first aid and safety prod­ucts for approx­i­mately 800,000 businesses.

Cin­tas com­petes with G&K Ser­vices Inc. (GKSR — Snap­shot Report) and pri­vately held Alsco, Inc. and ARAMARK Cor­po­ra­tion. Cin­tas oper­ates under two oper­at­ing seg­ments, Rental Uni­forms and Ancil­lary Prod­ucts and Other Ser­vices. The Other Ser­vices seg­ment con­sists of Uni­form Direct Sales, First Aid, Safety and Fire Pro­tec­tion, and Doc­u­ment Management.

http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/49500/Cintas+Buys+FACS+Records+Center

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Infoboom post that means a great deal to the CRC Industry

Posted on Mar 17, 2011 in Records Management News

• Group: Mid­size Busi­ness Leaders

• Sub­ject: New on Info­boom: Inside the Mind of the Smart Consumer

IBM asked 30,624 con­sumers in 13 coun­tries what fac­tors are influ­enc­ing them and found that con­sumer expec­ta­tions are grow­ing in light of the increas­ing amount of infor­ma­tion sup­pli­ers are col­lect­ing about them. “You have to…really know them,” the report says. Read our sum­mary and down­load the entire report. http://bit.ly/LI031611a

Also, watch this video about com­merce and the con­nected cus­tomer. It explains in sim­ple draw­ings and nar­ra­tion how busi­nesses need to serve their cus­tomers’ needs at every turn. http://bit.ly/LI031611b

The Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion (EEOC) expects to save 40% over the next five years by switch­ing its finan­cial man­age­ment appli­ca­tion to a cloud com­put­ing ven­dor. http://bit.ly/LI031611c

Bernard Golden came away from the Cloud­Con­nect con­fer­ence aston­ished by how quickly the cloud is becom­ing per­va­sive in main­stream busi­nesses. http://bit.ly/LI031611d

For­rester Research has some advice on how to help re-center IT design on the busi­ness and pre­vent the growth of silos that seem to nat­u­rally develop in large orga­ni­za­tions. http://bit.ly/LI031611e

IBM is deliv­er­ing two turnkey appli­ances that help orga­ni­za­tions turn the focus from away from tech­nol­ogy and toward what really mat­ters: min­i­miz­ing inter­rup­tions of core busi­ness processes and sim­pli­fy­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of busi­ness strate­gies. http://bit.ly/LI031611f

Marist College’s Roger Nor­ton watched the Wat­son Jeop­ardy! Chal­lenge says we have “wit­nessed a break­through in ana­lyt­ics and the way that Big Data can be extracted, trans­formed and man­aged.” That’s going to be a big oppor­tu­nity for col­lege stu­dents. http://bit.ly/LI031611g

A series of eight short videos pro­duced by IBM shows how the cloud is opti­miz­ing oper­a­tions and mak­ing what was once impos­si­ble afford­able. http://bit.ly/LI031611h

What’s the best cloud com­put­ing plat­form for a startup? http://bit.ly/LI031611i

Which areas of the busi­ness ben­e­fit most from social media? http://bit.ly/LI031611j

How secure is cloud com­put­ing com­pared to on-premise com­put­ing? http://bit.ly/LI031611k

Our weekly Twit­ters is about PhotoFunia.com. Lots of web­sites will let you insert your face into pho­tos of strange and exotic scenes, but this one auto­mat­i­cally iden­ti­fies the face in a photo and inte­grates it with the rest of the image in ways that really make it look like you were there. http://bit.ly/LI031611a

Posted By Paul Gillin

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Committee mulls storage for county records

Posted on Mar 16, 2011 in Records Management News

BY MICHAEL P. BUFFER (STAFF WRITER)
Pub­lished: March 16, 2011

WILKES-BARRE — The Luzerne County Records Improve­ment Com­mit­tee voted Mon­day to adver­tise a request for build­ing or ware­house space to store county records.

The other option under con­sid­er­a­tion is build­ing a new records-storage facil­ity on the site of the vacant juve­nile deten­tion cen­ter in Wilkes-Barre, county engi­neer Joe Gib­bons said. The cost to raze the vacant 22,255-square-foot struc­ture and build a 18,355-square-foot facil­ity for records would be $3.4 mil­lion, accord­ing to a study from Quad 3 Group Inc. of Wilkes-Barre.

Gib­bons said the county may be able to find an exist­ing build­ing or ware­house at less than $3.4 mil­lion. The county paid Quad 3 about $17,000 to study sev­eral options for the county’s records.

The county has been leas­ing space in the Thomas C. Thomas ware­house in Wilkes-Barre for 10 years and has been spend­ing more than $100,000 a year to store records there. The ware­house has a leaky roof and is not climate-controlled, which can dam­age records, and offi­cials have com­plained it is disorganized.

Gib­bons said build­ing a new records build­ing on the site of the vacant juve­nile facil­ity would “kill two birds with one stone” because it would replace a basi­cally use­less struc­ture with a needed facil­ity. The demo­li­tion would cost $325,000, con­struc­tion would cost almost $2.3 mil­lion, and the cost for fur­ni­ture, fix­tures and equip­ment would be $1.1 mil­lion, accord­ing to Quad 3.

The juve­nile build­ing has been vacant since then-president judge Michael T. Cona­han refused to send juve­niles there in 2002, claim­ing it was unsafe. In 2003, for­mer judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., while in charge of the juve­nile court, started send­ing juve­niles to a pri­vate facil­ity in Pittston Township.

Ciavarella and Cona­han have been accused of pock­et­ing $2.8 mil­lion in kick­backs from back­ers of the for-profit deten­tion cen­ter. Cona­han has pleaded guilty, and Ciavarella has appealed a trial verdict.

Read more at http://standardspeaker.com/news/committee-mulls-storage-for-county-records-1.1119219

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Free eBook — [ A Security Practitioner’s Guide to the Cloud ] PDF Version

Posted on Mar 15, 2011 in Records Management News

Free eBook — [ A Secu­rity Practitioner’s Guide to the Cloud ] PDF Ver­sion
Best Practices

Linkedin Groups Mid­size Busi­ness Lead­ers Free eBook — [ A Secu­rity Practitioner’s Guide to the Cloud ] PDF Ver­sion Started by Paul Hayes Free Down­load: http://goo.gl/UkR5f By Paul Hayes

Read More: http://goo.gl/UkR5

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

For those of you in the Mardi Gras-less world … Happy Mardi Gras

Posted on Mar 6, 2011 in Records Management News

For those of you in the Mardi Gras-less world … Happy Mardi Gras

New Orleans is in full swing …

Today there are a dozen parades
Tomor­row is Lundi Gras … Rex meets Zulu at Canal and the River Tues­day is the big day … Mardi Gras aka Car­ni­val (Farewell to Meat)

Denny and I usu­ally Hiber­nate for three days

Here is a lit­tle some­thing to perk you up to get in the Mardi Gras mood … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1fBDVNn1pU
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccu2_MRMF5Y&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEtXT9w9AYU&feature=related

Love

Cary McGov­ern
FileMan

How did Google lose, and find, all those e-mails?

Posted on Mar 2, 2011 in Records Management News

(CNN) — Tens of thou­sands of Google e-mail users got a shock early this week: All of their e-mails and con­tacts dis­ap­peared.
Google said Mon­day night that it was in the process of restor­ing all of these mes­sages, how­ever. “We’re very sorry,” the com­pany said in a blog post.
The burn­ing ques­tion here is, how did Google lose all of these e-mails, and how was the com­pany able to get them all back, if they in fact were lost?
And, under­ly­ing that ques­tion: Should you trust Google? Is the com­pany well-suited to safe­guard all of this sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, which is essen­tial to both busi­ness and per­sonal life? And what guar­an­tees do you have that the com­pany will keep your data safe, given that Gmail is a free ser­vice?
Let’s start with the first ques­tion.
Google says it lost the e-mails because of a glitch in a soft­ware update that it was in the process of installing across its com­puter servers.
If you know much about Google, you prob­a­bly know that the com­pany stores mul­ti­ple copies of every­thing in data cen­ters — huge ware­houses full of com­put­ers — all over the world, in secret loca­tions. So that e-mail you sent your grandma last night may be hid­ing out in Asia, in Europe and on the east and west coasts of the United States.
Google’s blog post addresses this point:
“I know what some of you are think­ing: How could this hap­pen if we have mul­ti­ple copies of your data, in mul­ti­ple data cen­ters? Well, in some rare instances soft­ware bugs can affect sev­eral copies of the data. That’s what hap­pened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours get­ting it back for the peo­ple affected by this issue.“
So it was a soft­ware glitch. Makes sense. But how did the com­pany recover all of this data if the glitch trav­eled so widely so quickly?
Answer: Google still stores e-mail data on tape.
Yes, tape. Like, essen­tially the tech­nol­ogy behind the cas­sette. Google doesn’t spec­ify what kind of tape it’s using exactly, but as Seth Wein­traub notes on a blog on the CNN part­ner site Fortune.com, using tape is a mess.
Wein­traub esti­mates Google would need 200,000 tapes to make a sin­gle backup of every Gmail account. “That is a stack of tapes four kilo­me­ters high to back up Gmail,” he writes. “Ouch.“
The blog Data Cen­ter Knowl­edge, how­ever, says tape is still a wor­thy method of back­ing up data, even if it seems obso­lete to out­siders:
“Even today, tape has two sig­nif­i­cant advan­tages over other media: cost and porta­bil­ity. Unfor­tu­nately, these two advan­tages out­weigh the more sig­nif­i­cant (log­i­cally speak­ing) dis­ad­van­tages of tape media: fragility, replace­ment rate, fail­ure rate, vul­ner­a­bil­ity to theft, and unen­crypted data stor­age.“
Google puts it this way:
“To pro­tect your infor­ma­tion from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re pro­tected from such soft­ware bugs. But restor­ing data from them also takes longer than trans­fer­ring your requests to another data cen­ter, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the e-mail back instead of mil­lisec­onds.“
OK, so that’s it for the logis­tics. But what should you take away from this inci­dent, which, it should be noted, affected only 0.02% of Gmail users? (Google says it has hun­dreds of mil­lions of Gmail users, which means at least 20,000 peo­ple were affected by this out­age).
Many data stor­age experts say com­pa­nies like Google — and com­peti­tors like Microsoft, Yahoo and Drop­box, all of which store data in “the cloud” — are usu­ally bet­ter equipped to take care of data than nor­mal peo­ple like us, who tend to make one backup — at most — of the data on our hard dri­ves.
Google, Yahoo and the oth­ers tend to make mul­ti­ple copies, and they store them all over the world so that if one data cen­ter burns down or floods, there are plenty of copies in far-and-away loca­tions that will be unaf­fected.
By con­trast, if a person’s apart­ment build­ing were seri­ously dam­aged, he or she might lose a lap­top and the hard drive that’s used as backup. Most of us don’t send a copy to India just in case, much less store e-mail on tape.
But there’s no 100% guar­an­tee, really.
Google and the oth­ers have “terms of ser­vice” agree­ments with users that guar­an­tee a cer­tain amount of up-time, usu­ally 99.9%.
“Peo­ple expect email to be as reli­able as their phone’s dial tone, and our goal is to deliver that kind of always-on avail­abil­ity with our appli­ca­tions,” Google’s Matthew Glotzbach wrote in a Jan­u­ary blog post.
Last year, Google says, it met its goal of being up 99.9% of the time:
“In 2010, Gmail was avail­able 99.984% of the time, for both busi­ness and con­sumer users. 99.984% trans­lates to seven min­utes of down­time per month over the last year. That seven-minute aver­age rep­re­sents the accu­mu­la­tion of small delays of a few sec­onds, and most peo­ple expe­ri­enced no issues at all.“
Users still freak out, how­ever, if Gmail or other free online ser­vices go down for even a short period of time. And that’s prob­a­bly why Google and the oth­ers go to such lengths to avoid los­ing user data com­pletely.
It’s dif­fi­cult to com­pare free e-mail sys­tems to each other because data about uptime isn’t always avail­able. Both Microsoft, which owns Hot­mail, and Yahoo declined to tell CNN how often their ser­vices go down, or what per­cent of the time these e-mail sys­tems are up and online.
To keep tabs on how well Google is doing at keep­ing its e-mail ser­vice up and run­ning, you can check the company’s “App Sta­tus Dash­board” site.