Managed Services

What’s broken about “break/fix”?

For most small businesses, technology represents a significant investment. Business owners recognize the central role that technology plays in their companies, but often lack confidence that they’ll actually receive the benefits promised – having been burned by a poorly implemented system or an unreliable IT support company that can’t seem to ever “fix” the issue [...]

X-BAR turns 7

This summer marks our 7th year of business!
We started way back in 2002 when there wasn’t even a ‘we’ in sight, subletting a desk from an interior design firm at the Northwest Work Lofts. The design company would close just nine months later, which provided a gentle nudge towards establishing our first office across the [...]

IT support as a practice and not a fire drill

Late in 2006 we started laying the groundwork for a complete overhaul of our IT support practice. We had long grown tired of the reactive “break/fix” model that has dominated our industry and which has provided little in the way of long-term value for our clients. Rather than constantly battling IT-related fires, we began looking [...]

Uninstalling HyBlue across a network

We’re in the process of migrating away from HyBlue to a new managed services platform. While we’re really excited about the new platform and how it’ll improve our ability to manage our clients’ infrastructure, we’ve been having trouble mustering much enthusiasm around the office for manually uninstalling the HyBlue agent.
So I spent a few minutes [...]