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Alan McDonald was just happy to see the sky on Thursday. The president of Allconnected, a solution provider in Simi Valley, Calif., had been driving around to attend to business when he realized that for the first time in days the haze from the devastating Southern California wildfires had given way to some blue.
It was a welcome sight to McDonald, whod been calling solution providers he knows in the San Diego area, where some of the worst fires were wreaking havoc, to check on their well-being. Folks in general were coping as best they could, though in many cases they were working with skeleton crews.
One provider, he said, had only three of his employees in the office and the rest were among more than 600,000 people who had to evacuate their homes.
Other technology companies were facing the same circumstances. Sony Electronics closed its 2,500-employee Rancho Bernardo campus for at least two days. San Diego-based managed services provider The IT Pros staff was down to bare bones, and 80 percent of its customers had been affected by the fires in some way.