Pearl Technology

09/11/2026

Helping Provide AV Clients with Sound Solutions

As an AV Install Technician at Pearl Technology, James (Jay) Martinson works with clients to install audiovisual devices, such as speakers and displays, throughout Central Illinois. In his role, Jay provides custom AV solution tailored for individual clients. He installs and services the technology and prides himself on being a “jack-of-all trades.”

Get to know Jay better in our new "People of Pearl Technology" post.

As an AV Install Technician at Pearl Technology, James (Jay) Martinson works with clients to install audiovisual devices, such as speakers and displays, throughout Central Illinois. In his role, Jay provides custom AV solutions tailored for individual clients. He installs and services the technology...

09/11/2026

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May.

In August, Google bought its Teams chats for $10 million.

Chats were the small part.

The bankruptcy court approved the sale of:
- 100+ million emails
- Hundreds of millions of Teams messages
- 30 million lines of code
- HR and strategy records
- About 20 years of transaction data

Personal info was scrubbed first. Google says the rest "can be helpful in improving our products and AI models."

Nobody at Spirit wrote a Teams message in 2019 thinking it was training data.

It was the same stuff your team sends.

The bid that went sideways.

The pricing argument.

The HR complaint.

In a bankruptcy, all of it is an asset. And the estate's job is to sell assets.

Two things this points at:
1. Your retention policy decides how much of that archive exists at all. (A 7-year email rule is also a 7-year pile.)
2. Your vendor contracts decide who can sell your data if the vendor folds. Most SaaS agreements have a clause for this. Almost nobody reads it.

P.S. Worth 20 minutes with whoever signs your software renewals. They'll say they read it. Ask them where the data clause is.

09/10/2026

“We don’t want a data center here.”

Fair. 71% of Americans agree with you.

Gallup asked in March. 71% opposed, 27% in favor.

The reasons had little to do with AI. Only 14% cited it.

The top ones:
- Water use
- Energy consumption
- Higher utility bills

A gigawatt campus changes a county's power math.

The people paying the electric bill next door didn't sign the lease.

Those are real costs, and they deserve a real conversation.

Disclosure before the next part: we run two data centers in central Illinois. We have a stake here.

What people are voting on is new gigawatts. OpenAI and Nvidia announced an 8 GW campus in Ohio last week.

What a 300-person company in Bloomington needs is 4 racks and a drive time under an hour.

Those facilities already exist.

They've been running for years, on power the grid already planned for.

Two different questions. Both can have a good answer.

P.S. For scale: the Ohio campus is 8 gigawatts. Ours have parking.

09/08/2026

What's the report at your company that takes 2 days and everyone dreads?

Uber had one. It runs in 10 minutes now.

The interesting part is how small the team was.

Uber used up its AI coding budget by spring. Big company, big team, still ran out.

So the CTO tried pods.

30 engineers, embedded in finance, legal, and HR.

One engineer plus one person who actually does the job.

Two-week sprint.

Sixteen pods in two months.

A financial pacing report: 2 days to 10 minutes.

Capital allocation across 150 cities: 15 hours to 30 minutes.

His explanation: "You can't automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation. You have to understand how the work actually gets done."

You don't have 30 engineers.

You have one person who's good with the tools (sometimes in IT, often not).

And someone who's run that report every Friday for 9 years.

That's the pod.

Most companies already have the domain expert. They skip the pairing.

P.S. If you answered the first question in under 3 seconds, you already know where to start.

09/07/2026

Team Night at the Ball Park

The nachos did not make it to the seventh inning.

09/04/2026

Safety first! But… first, coffee.

09/03/2026

We’re proud to announce that Pearl Technology has received another prestigious award! We have been recognized as a leader among the nation’s fast-growing IT providers by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, on the 2026 CRN Fast Growth 150 list.

This annual list highlights the top-performing and fastest-growing technology solution providers, including integrators, managed service providers, value-added resellers, and IT consultants in North America. We’re proud to be named to this national list!

09/02/2026

A 32GB kit of DDR5 memory was about $120 last August.

This month it's $392.

That's the number under the Nvidia story from last week.

Its biggest customers were told AI servers shipping in early 2027 will cost more than 15% more.

The reason is memory.

DRAM contract prices were projected to climb 58 to 63% in a single quarter this spring.

Nobody reading this is buying a Vera Rubin rack. (If you are, congrats on the budget.)

But the memory driving that increase is the same memory in every server. Including the one on your 2027 refresh list.

It's usually about specs. Next year it's about timing.

You can buy ahead of the increase.

You can pay the 2027 price.

Or you can skip owning the box and rent the rack, which moves the memory bill onto someone else's balance sheet.

We run colocation, so we have a view on that last one. Read it with that in mind.

The hardware line in your 2027 budget deserves a second look before it gets approved.

P.S. The $392 kit is the same one that was $120. Nothing about it got better. It just got popular.

08/31/2026

Listen as Pearl Technology's Dave Johnson discusses cameras and the growth of AI in analyzing/organizing information on The Greg and Dan Show.

Here are some takeaways:

Between 76 & 93% of Americans support police body cameras, making it one of the rare, genuinely bipartisan issues in policing

About 80% of U.S. law enforcement officers wear body cams to document their work

Apparently, we’re in favor of cameras on people but not on poles

Axon, the company that produces the body cams worn by 75% of law enforcement officers, has another product called Fusus

Axon Fusus is a cloud-based real-time crime center (RTCC) platform
• It pulls footage from Axon body cams, drones, license plate readers, gunshot-detection sensors & dispatch data, then displays it on a live map for police dispatchers & officers
• It can also include footage from security cameras in businesses, churches, schools & footage from doorbell & security cameras from private citizens if they opt to share their devices

Say there’s a report of a school shooting & the school shares its security camera footage with Fusus; police have immediate access to that footage, as well as data from the ShotSpotter device, as well as the license plate reader cameras & drones deployed to look for the suspect
• Fusus doesn’t do facial recognition, but if it’s using a feature called Sentry, it can use AI to detect human shapes & the presence of weapons
• This means Fusus could actually spot the potential school shooter before he enters the school & send an alert directly to the police

Fusus is now used by more than 250 U.S. cities & counties

What’s my personal stance on Flock, Fusus & other similar technology?
• I’m for using technology to protect people
• I’m for protecting people from the misuse of that technology
• I’m against throwing the baby out with the bath water

Greg and Dan talk with Dave Johnson of Pearl Technology about Flock Safety cameras, what they are, how they work, and the law enforcement agencies and communities using them to help identify vehicles and assist with investigations. He also discusses Axon’s Fusus platform and explains the growing r...

08/28/2026

The van made a stop at the Peoria Zoo.

If you've got kids in this town, you've done the loop. The giraffes, the monkeys, the slow walk back to the car when someone melts down by the gift shop. It's been part of growing up here for a long time.

Not much tech to fix at the zoo. We just like being around the places central Illinois actually cares about. The network stuff is the job. This part is the fun.

Good morning to be out. What's the first animal your family sprints to when you walk in?