First up, I’ll start micro with what happened at Nordic ITS this year. It’s our first full year with the new name and look, and this website for that matter. We made the change late in 2024 after the hurricane delayed us a bit. So far, the reception has been good and we’re all proud to be showcasing who we are more accurately. We have also been able to show off our work a bit with a lot more community involvement, supporting organizations like the Watauga Humane Society, OASIS, and Hospitality House. I’m looking forward to increasing that involvement in the coming years as part of our mission in building resilience in our community.

If you have an active contract with us, you might have noticed some changes to our line up this year also. David is settling into his role as sales executive and account manager after completing his first full year. Casey joined us as our new office manager in March, and we really appreciate her ability to quickly master tasks and keep the details accurate. Donald and Ryan have stayed with us throughout the year, with Donald completing his first Watauga Leadership training session and Ryan gaining more mastery in desktop deployments and networking. Our support team is all new compared to 2024. Cori was our first hire in January, with Jill and Chase coming in over the summer. They’ve each brought some unique experience to the team, and we are incredibly proud to have a perfect 5/5 CSAT score with 248 survey responses in H2 of 2025.

Expanding the view a bit, 2025 was the first year that we’ve seen Copilot begin to show us what having an AI assistant can do. David and I added Copilot licenses to our accounts early in the year and have been using it to help us find data through our files, perform security analysis on logs, keep up to date in Outlook, and much more. We have yet to really dive into Agents and what they can do. Honestly, I’m a little wary of having AI do things for me just yet. I have been impressed with the data analysis and having our files in Teams already made it simple to drop in Copilot.

However, AI has also taken a toll on us as of late. Prices for computer memory, both RAM and SSDs, have been skyrocketing for the past couple of months. Our vendors have all put up pricing disclaimers which make forecasting and quoting tricky. Availability has also been a challenge. One big change we decided to make with the Loki 200-series of PCs was to go back to Kingston for RAM and SSDs. This decision was partially cost based, but also availability based. And late this year, Micron announced the death of the Crucial brand we had been using through the past two generations of systems. Maybe I saw some writing on a wall?

The Loki 200-series was also a big deal for us, moving away from Intel’s 14^th generation Core into the new Core Ultra platform. I moved my personal system at home to a Core Ultra 7 265K with an RTX 5080 and was really impressed with the new power efficiency that Intel has achieved. No longer are our CPUs on the brink of overheating during our stress tests like they were with the 13^th and 14^th generation Core CPUs. Intel is back in the game after a couple of big missteps, even if they needed TSMC’s help.

On the topic of hardware, NVIDIA’s graphics cards have become much more available throughout the year. It was really tough right after the launch of the RTX 5000-series, but lately we’re seeing cards back in stock and sometimes under MSRP. It took the better part of a year for the market to settle down, but it finally has.

Even more macro, this year has been very volatile regarding our policies as a country. There has been a lot of uncertainty about how tariffs will affect our industry, especially when the actual percentages have been all over the place this year. As we wrap up 2025, we still don’t have a clear picture of where this will all land, but I don’t expect there to be any major policy changes in 2026. Overall, costs went up and they’ll stay there as far as I can tell.

We also saw the end of Windows 10 in October. While we were scrambling a bit to get the last ones out of our clients’ networks, we were mostly well-prepared and didn’t have too many leftovers. We’ve created some new relationships with some amazing companies and organizations, and we’re excited to help them continue to grow and serve their communities. Overall, while I’ll be glad if we can get a little less excitement in 2026, I’m very proud of our team and what they accomplished in 2025.

-Nate