A local contractor quipped that portions of Northern New Jersey had experienced three 100-year floods in the last five years. In a way, investors of a certain age know the feeling. "A client who is 50 years old has been exposed to three major downturns -1987, 2000, 2008 and a minor blip in 2003," says John DeVincent, EVP of marketing for eMoney Advisor. For those older, the previous bad experience, he continues, was "the crash of 1929."

Five years ago, most accounting firm partners would probably have stared blankly if you asked them about server virtualization and virtual machines. But now many are adopting server virtualization as a way of reclaiming space and improving hardware performance, even if they don't always understand the technology "It's been everything we hoped for and more," says CPA David Cieslak, a principal with reselling firm Arxis Technology of Simi Valley, Calif.