CompuSchmooze Podcast #14: Interview with Bruce Kramer of OneCall PC Help

CompuSchmooze Podcast

Bruce Kramer of OneCall PC Help

Bruce Kramer, owner of OneCall PC Help in Mt. Laurel, NJ is our guest on the CompuSchmooze^TM podcast this week.

Download the podcast file here (33mb stereo MP3 file, [34:53]length).

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Here’s the text of the related “CompuSchmooze^TM” column as it appears in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey in March:

CompuSchmooze March (2nd column) 2006 – One Call PC Help
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2006 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

If there’s one piece of advice Bruce Kramer wants to get across to his clients and prospective clients, it probably would be this: “Respect the data.”

Kramer, a partner in One Call PC Help in Mt. Laurel, says while many companies make data backups, they often don’t realize that there are different kinds of backup required. A company that makes backup data tapes every night and leaves the backup near the computer has protected itself against failure of the computer itself, but a fire or flood in the office where the computer is housed could ruin the backup tape, he points out.

Kramer is a regular participant in activities of the Jewish Business Network of Southern New Jersey, which is hosted by the Jewish Community Foundation.
He started One Call PC Help after spending years as a consulting engineer at large telecommunications companies. He first became interested in computers while attending Cherry Hill High School East in the 1970s, when the school got access to a time-sharing computer account through a friendly parent who worked at GE. In the late 1970s, Kramer built Altair personal computers from kits and worked with Radio Shack’s TRS-80 personal computer. He graduated Drexel University with one of its first computer engineering degree concentrations in the mid 1980s.

Bruce worked for a number of years in field sales and consulting for companies selling computer programming software, but he tired of the constant travel required, and after the industry nosedived after 9/11, he realized there was an opportunity to provide his corporate-style skills in the fragmented market for computer service for small businesses.

People serving that market were not applying professional, corporate disciplines to the work they were doing, he explained. “People should be centered around preserving the data,” Kramer said. “The data and people’s information is really much more important and much more valuable than the particular pieces of equipment that it’s running on. If you go into a large corporate environment, like Merrill Lynch, they have a whole corporate IT department that backs up their data, but little mom-and-pop shops often don’t do that.”

One Call PC Help works with clients to ensure that their systems and practices protect valuable company data, so that computer failures don’t disrupt the running of the business.

“If your notebook computer gets stolen tomorrow, what do you need to do to get yourself back in business?” asks Kramer. “How much is it worth to not have to go back and recreate five or six years of data?”

It’s sometime difficult to convince clients to buy data protection services, because there’s no immediate payback from the insurance-like investment, Kramer notes.

Kramer warns computer users to be careful about the software they download from the Internet, which can bog down computer performance through the installation of spyware and malware (software that takes control of computer processes away from the computer owner.)

Even if such software is useful, it may not be well-designed and may introduce problems into the smooth operation of a computer, Kramer says.
“You need to make sure you are using a trusted resource,” Kramer suggests, such as software by Microsoft or other reliable major manufacturers.

One Call PC Help has four employees working across New Jersey, with a few larger customers in New York. Kramer makes on-site visits to the far-flung customers, but also has their computer systems configured so that they can perform routine system maintenance remotely. The company can be reached at 856-222-9000.

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