By Kami Nguyen

Town Crier Editorial Intern

After 15 years of working at a Macintosh consulting firm, Ken Easterby was determined to change the negative view of Macs in the business world.

“Apple was having a hard time selling its product and system,” said Easterby, president of SysteMac, a company located in Mountain View. “The media was lashing out because Apple hasn’t found any way to make it less expensive.”

A few months ago, Easterby did find a way to make it less expensive for businesses that use Macs in the workplace. The boxIT, an image-making system, has served clients in Canada and the United States, including Corgentech Inc., in Palo Alto.

The product has been in use for three or four months and is now being introduced to the public.

The function of the boxIT, Easterby said, is to create an image of a computer, including already installed programs and applications, to transfer that image to another computer in less time than the full installation process would take.

“If you had an assistant who wants to have the exact same computer (programs or applications), instead of putting in CDs and floppy disks, which will take hours, they can use boxIT and do it in under an hour,” he said.

The boxIT is programmed to make an image of a computer by copying its complete functions and existing programs, and storing it on an external hard drive called a Fire Wire.

This information can then be transferred to one or 100 computers in about 15 minutes, Easterby said.

The boxIT is not only a good way for businesses to save money, it is also a good backup system if a computer were to crash, he said.

The cost for the boxIT varies from company to company, depending on how much work needs to be done.

Easterby said companies have said they have cut their spending money in half.

The system also allows companies that don’t have Mac professionals assisting them, or have more of a PC-based knowledge, to configure and work with Macs without too much assistance.

If a company were to run into a software problem, instead of looking for the problem the company could just reinstall the computer’s hard drive. Although documents can also be stored and retrieved on the boxIT, they change so rapidly that most companies might not choose to do so.

For companies looking to use the boxIT, the first step is for consultants to make an on-site visit to the company to do a systems analysis and to document the system and the serial number of the programs to create an image.

The need for such a money-saving tool came in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. “After Sept. 11, the economy took a nose dive,” Easterby said. “Businesses didn’t want to spend a lot of money.”

For more information, call SysteMacs at 968-0549 or logon to www.systemacs.com.