Flantec exists to assist small & medium size businesses to operate with many of the technological benefits of a large enterprise, but without the costly overhead and infrastructure.

For the last several years, Flantec has been working with many industries to deploy Apple Macintosh computers into areas where only PC's have traditionally been used.

The primary motivation for replacing a PC with a Mac is reliability.

Apple Macintosh computers are built on top of a rock-solid reliable FreeBSD platform. An added benefit is that Macs are not susceptible to virus and malware infection like a PC is.

Businesses often do not consider a Mac because the initial price tag is almost always higher. However, that can be a short-sighted decision when considering the total cost of ownership. A single viral infection, or failure to boot due to a corrupt registry file, can easily result in hundreds of dollars of troubleshooting & repairs, not to mention the additional business cost of computer downtime.

Under the hood, Macs use the same hardware components as PC's, including Intel CPU's. This allows for software such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels to run Windows software on the Mac. There is no longer a software barrier between Mac & PC.

FreeBSD is a Unix-based alternate server platform to Microsoft’s Windows Server software. FreeBSD has many features that are superior to Windows, including rock-solid server stability, increased security and resistance to most viruses. However, probably the most attractive feature of FreeBSD is its price; FreeBSD is FREE.

Conversely, Microsoft’s software licenses are expensive. Very expensive. An small office with a dozen or more employees can easily generate thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Many of Flantec’s clients utilize FreeBSD servers to host files, databases, websites & email services.

While Windows Servers cannot be replaced with FreeBSD in all instances, there are just as many cases in which it can be transparently integrated into an office network.

More & more Flantec clients have adopted smart-phone mobility solutions. These include

iPhone & iPad
Android
Blackberry
Windows Mobile

Regardless of whether the email server is in-house or is at 3rd party hosted-solution, each mobile phone platform can be configured to retrieve office email & remain in sync with the office. In addition to email, the phone’s synchronization can be extended to include contacts, calendar, notes & additional items. In many cases, the phone replaces the necessity of carrying a laptop without sacrificing response time or productivity.

Virtualization makes it possible to divide up the hardware in a single computer chassis into multiple logical units, creating virtual machines. Each virtual machine operates independently, and makes better use of the server hardware by allocating specific resources to individual server responsibilities.

Virtualization also allows for disparate systems to co-exist peacefully under the hood. This can be a perfect opportunity to marry FreeBSD servers systems to the existing Microsoft Windows environment to create networks that actually work as designed; Low-maintenance, high-reliabilty, high-redundancy servers coupled without the necessity of a full-time network administrator to oversee.

There are many additional benefits to using virtual servers including:

Redundancy roles
Division of server responsibilities
Isolation of secure resources
Individual maintenance downtimes