The VienerX Newsletter

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As 2025 comes to a close, one of the most meaningful aspects of the year has been how closely we have worked with our customers to support their growth and day-to-day success. The progress we made this year was not accidental. It came from listening carefully, staying focused, and continuing to evolve alongside the organizations we serve.

A major milestone in 2025 was the rebranding of our company under the VienerX, or Vx, name and logo. That change reflected the momentum we have built and gave a clear identity to the work we have been delivering since 1991. We also formally named our core service model Enterprise Technology Management, or ETM, a term that finally captures how we help organizations operate, scale, and succeed through technology. Alongside this, we re-launched our newsletter and expanded the reach of the VienerX brand, helping us better share our thinking, our values, and our commitment to the businesses we support.

Looking ahead, the New Year brings a renewed focus on growth across the country, including expanding partnerships and client opportunities on the West Coast. The 2026 season also marks our 36th year in business, a milestone made possible only through the trust of our customers and the dedication of our employees. We could not do this without you. Thank you for your continued support, and welcome to the New Year.

Wayne Viener - VienerX

On the latest episode of Above C-Level, Wayne sits down with Technology Source Chief Revenue Officer Rob Olson to discuss the latest news from the channel, how Rob got his start in the industry, and the fusion of the MSP and the Technology Advisor. It’s an insightful conversation that you don’t want to miss.

By: Wayne Viener

Through the later part of 1999, I spent enough time closing segments on television with the phrase, “This is Wayne Viener for Fox 5,” that it became a regular part of my life.

At the time, I was the founder of Viener Consulting, running a growing technology firm and working closely with customers who were deeply concerned about the approaching turn of the millennium. Alongside that role, I had developed what amounted to a side gig. I had become “the Y2K guy” for FOX 5 DC.

I regularly appeared on the 10 o’clock news with Morris Jones and later on the morning show with Lark McCarthy, explaining what Y2K actually was, what the real risks were, and what people should realistically expect. What began as a technical explanation quickly became something more serious.

Not only did I have our customers to worry about, I now had to look at the Y2K problem with a truly global eye. A lot of people were hanging on the words coming out of my mouth. That responsibility carried weight. Y2K was not theoretical, and it was not localized. It was a real global systems issue.

That context mattered because December 31, 1999 was not just another New Year’s Eve. It was the biggest New Year’s Eve anyone alive at the time had ever experienced. A once in a millennium rollover. There was joy and celebration everywhere. Beneath it all was a very real sense of trepidation.

The issue itself was simple, but the implications were massive.

For decades, software systems across nearly every industry stored dates using two digit year fields. “99” instead of “1999.” It saved space, saved money, and made perfect sense when much of that code was written. The assumption, reasonable at the time, was that the software would not still be running in the year 2000.

As that assumption collapsed, the risk became clear. When the clock rolled from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, systems might not roll forward. They might reset backward to 1900.

That single flaw could cascade across financial systems calculating interest, payroll systems tracking tenure, inventory and scheduling systems, billing platforms, compliance systems, security logs, and industrial controls. This was not a personal computer problem. It was a global infrastructure problem.

Even if an organization believed its systems were not affected, that belief was not enough.

They had to prove it.

Organizations were forced to audit decades of internal code, third party applications, vendor platforms, embedded systems, and infrastructure. Regulators, customers, partners, insurers, and boards demanded assurances. The burden of proof alone drove enormous cost, urgency, and pressure.

Inside the technology world, the scramble was real. Billions of dollars were spent globally. Consultants were hired overnight. Entire teams worked toward a deadline that could not move. There was no opportunity to patch later. Midnight was coming.

Then it arrived.

January 1, 2000 came and went, and almost nothing happened.

The lights stayed on. Banks opened. Planes flew. Systems ran. Almost immediately, Y2K became a punchline. Too many, it looked like proof that the whole thing had been wildly overblown.

That is the part history gets wrong.

Nothing happened because an extraordinary amount of work had already happened. Y2K was not a hoax, and it was not luck. It was one of the largest coordinated technology remediation efforts ever undertaken, executed successfully under a hard, immovable deadline. When risk is managed well, the outcome looks boring. Boring outcomes are often misunderstood as overreaction.

That lesson still applies today, especially in cybersecurity.

If nothing bad has happened to your systems, it does not mean there was never any danger. More often, it means someone was working quietly in the background, patching, monitoring, hardening, testing, and watching every single day. At VienerX, that is exactly how we operate. Our job is not to react to disasters. Our job is to make sure you never experience one. No disaster is not an absence of danger. It is the outcome of preparation, vigilance, and doing the hard work before midnight arrives.