Finally got time to put pen to paper. Where on earth did January go ?? And December come to that ?
Following my trip to New Zealand I had the opportunity to meet Tony Keane, our secretary, face to face. It was fantastic to meet him and hope we will do so again before we get much older. I wish I had the cash to get out and meet everyone ! My other experience in New Zealand was meeting Michael Doerner and his team at TechnologyWise. Michael is a long time supporter of the distro, and greeted me like he had known me all his life. I can't thank him and his company enough for such a fabulous reception ! For me it was a great opportunity to meet what I believe are very typical users of the distro and the type of company we should be really working closely with for the future of SME. They are systems integrators and manage a reasonable number of installations. Some points from the meeting that are worth noting : They asked a lot about the the name change. Once I had explained the reasoning behind it they were perfectly happy and accepted it. They would be prepared to push the name with promotional merchandise etc if we supplied them suitable artwork. I explained about our decision to move as quickly as possible to the newer version of CentOS which they agreed was a necessity. I asked them for what they thought was the most important new development that they would like to see and they all said "full LDAP integration", almost as one voice. They felt that with the demise of Windows SBS around the corner there were good opportunities in the market for a product like ours, but LDAP was a must. They asked a lot about current development and future direction and the idea about getting v9 as 'v8 on CentOS 6' and then looking at new features for '9.1' or whatever it will be called. We had a long discussion on the problems with funding. As ex Mitel 'Partners' they would sign up straight away to some form of partner program if we could get something reasonable sorted out. They would be quite happy to charge for installations if they needed too. I asked them what they thought would be a reasonable figure and they said 'anything less than Windows' :-) Unlike many small end users, there would be less price resistance in this type of market. They would be happy to charge a fee per installation from v9 onwards if necessary - it is more difficult to 'back charge' existing installations. I am sure there were more things discussed (Michael may be able to fill in the gaps in my grey cells) but this gives an idea of the things our users are concerned and interested in. It was clearly good for them to meet someone from the distro face to face. We really need to try and do this more often somehow. I am starting a small team to try and push the 'business' development side of things a little to formulate and document some ideas and suggestions for consideration. I have asked Michael if he would join us in this - he and his team are at the 'coal face' in a lot of respects and have a lot of valuable knowledge and experience of what clients really want - and he has said that he will. If there is anyone who feels they may be able to lend a hand with this then please contact me accordingly. The best thing about the meeting was the ENORMOUS "feel good" factor that I walked away with. It made me realise that the hard work that everyone has put in is worth it, and that we are doing the right thing and heading in the right direction. It really was a big boost to me, and should be taken as such by everyone involved - a great team effort. I also recently met a small IT company local to me in the UK. The feedback I got regarding SBS was similar and though they are not currently linux server installers I easily sold them the idea and am going back to meet and discuss with them on my next trip back. They told me they had recently converted a small local firm with I think 6 employees from a peer to peer network to a SBS server. A SME box would have suited their requirements to the ground. The costs were astronomic for a small company (IMHO) and the owner of the IT company actually felt quite sorry for them...... A large part of the upgrade costs were in the software alone. Companies like this would undoubtedly look more favourably on us if they knew they had some of support program. Anyway, all food for thought. Again, if you would like to join in some discussions on the 'business' end of development then please drop me a line. B. Rgds John _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail discussion-unsubscr...@lists.contribs.org Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
