Don't be worried about the fact that you're just a computer geek and you don't know squat about marketing. Being a geek is a big advantage in figuring out how to use the web for marketing, and the basics that you need to know about marketing you can learn from this page, maybe reading a book, asking around, and also just by trying some things out and learning from experience. | |
| Mike Crawford "Market Yourself" |
The way things are going, by the time you read this, selling yourself as a consultant on open source systems will probably be a moot point. Gone are the days when we had to pause to explain what Apache was or why Linux should be considered for an enterprise solution. In fact, two year ago I would have told you to leave the part about being "open source" until you have already closed the deal, or even until after the project was delivered and installed. Today, like it or not, open source and especially Linux are brand names with a powerful media draw.
What this means is, just as we saw with "webpage designers", we can expect every stray dog to start touting Linux support in their repertoire. This is not a totally bad thing, and the market will soon sort them out (although I have been waiting on them to sort out the web-designers for over 6 years), but when I say "Marketing Open Source Consulting" I hope to inspire more than offers to configure virtual hosts on an Apache server.
I don't have to tell you the performance stats and other facts and figures which bolster a choice of an open source project over a proprietary competitor. We all know the drill: Control your destiny, amplify your workforce, standards based, just plain better (JPB), &c &c &c. No, making the case for Open Source is not even as simple as when I stopped a large ISP's architecture meeting dead by announcing how, since BIND, Perl and Sendmail were all "Open Source", any argument which says we can't use Open Source because of "company policy" must imply that we cannot use the Internet. No, there is more to it than this.
Every successful new technology has a fixed time-lag that determines the time to market; this gives us time to ponder, and a reason not to burn ourselves pulling on a sunrise. Every new technology also has social and cultural effects, and when we propose open source to solve a business problem, we need to explain these effects; acceptance of all new technologies, from fire to ENIAC, have followed this pattern.
In 1992, Eric and Marshall McLuhan provided a roadmap of these effects[MM]. Their "Laws of Media" offers a convenient checklist for focusing our plan:
New technology retrieves features lost in preceding methods. For open source, this is our sense of free exchange in ideas, a practice which was the norm in the earlier "toggle-switches" computing world, the norm in the ancient days of craft, and was also the norm in the early days of Unix. Open source retrieves the buzz we thrived upon at University (before corporate sponsorships quelled it).
To take over the mantle, new methods enhance what is good about the current methods. C enhanced assembler by being just as terse and nearly as efficient, but adding portability. Object Oriented extended structured programming by forcing the data as the essential component of design. Free software adds similar enhancements to the way things are done, the most obvious being the amplification of our talent through global networking. Open source is more just than consistent with a networked world, it is a manifestation of it; global open network amplification exceeds the performance of proprietary workgroup communities.
In the same way the function call largely replaced the goto, Open source obsolesces barriers to innovation and communications. It removes secrecy, the org chart, the project timeline and, to a large extent, the legal department. The old ways of closed-door development and intellectual property have little meaning in a networked and hyperlinked bazaar. They were myths to begin with. [CTM]
Finally, a reversal occurs when we get too much of a good thing. Too much freedom becomes a constraint, too much collaboration becomes a solo effort. I leave this as an exercise to the reader to uncover elements of open source which will lead to its undoing and herald its successor.
As Mike Crawford noted, we may not have the means to blast glossy full page ads in Computing Canada, the Globe and Mail or even the Linux Journal, but if we understand internetworking, we have something much better. A small business working on a Linux product can become known (through hosting and participating in global projects), meet allies and business partners, and even work together in formal associations to achieve the same operational scale as the large consulting houses.
While I commend them for what they have done to create essential online reference sites for Linux and also what they have all done to directly improve Linux, this is where I believe companies such as SCO, RedHat, Corel, and even LinuxCare have failed to grasp the new economy. They are still stuck in the old-world mindset of acquire and control, the mindset of mergers in a vain attempt to encompass the world with their intranet. Before anyone gets upset, I realize all of these companies have individual members who are deeply involved at the community level, but where I see them failing is that, in attempting to paint themselves as a unified, hierarchically controlled enterprise effort like an Anderson Consulting or an IBM Global Services, they are missing out. I believe this is why not one of them has shown a workable business model for technical support.
There is an alternative, and one I see as comparable to mammals vs dinosaurs. This is the affiliate network of independent operators, bound by their own working standards, mutual support and bound by Internet technologies. Having representatives on five continents is not for putting a local face on a west-coast consultancy — global networks should be used to distribute activity across time zones, across cultures, and across perspectives. Remember, knowledge, like money, increases only through exchange
A true affiliate network of consulting is not a new idea, but it is one that has not quite appeared. The earliest Linux affiliate network was the simple Consultants-HOWTO which was nothing more than a random directory. This was followed, very recently, by each of the new Linux portal/directory sites creating new directories, not unlike the "Builders and Contractors" booklet put out by my local Grey-Bruce Homebuilders Association.
In August of 1999, Tom Adelstein founded Bynari International and began the first steps towards a global network of affiliated consulting companies; at the time of my writing, this network already handle real collaborative work in the Texas-Mexico-SouthAmerican area, and has created channels for contract referrals and equipment/software acquisition in many countries. In Canada, our own branch network of Bynari Canada links consultants and support companies from coast to coast across 5 provinces and in both official languages.
Bynari has a way to go before it can truly say it has "harnessed the bazaar" for global technical support, but it is less than a year old. Compared to the monolithic one-brand/one-company approaches of its more famous competitors, Bynari is the only technical support affiliation aiming for the bazaar; the others are still firmly entrenched in their Cathedrals.
I expect there are other affiliate networks similar to Bynari working on this same (very obvious) idea. I also expect each and every practicing open source consultant has an informal network of colleagues they routinely call when tasks are either too big or out of their area of expertise. Because of their open and fluid rules of association, there is probably also no reason why any or all of these groups could not collaborate
I want to mention affiliate programs because these can be similar to consulting networks, although most often with some restrictions, and very often affiliate programs connect with a consultant in a star topology, like a wheel of swinging seats at a carnival, all revolving around The Product.
Affiliate programs are business-to-business partnerships where the vendor of one service promises enhanced support and/or some degree of profit sharing to its affiliates. A well known example is the Amazon program that pays a 5% commission on books its affiliates sell; whether for books, software, hardware or office supplies, there is no shortage of these deals. These programs should not be dismissed as they do offer a low-cost means to diversify and generate extra revenue by recommending products you would normally recommend anyway, but they are missing the point.
Affiliate Communities? The affiliate program I am watching today is the emerging VALinux Underground program. On the surface, this is similar to those offered by Cobalt and virtually every other hardware vendor: VA will provide detailed technical support on their hardware and will include your products in their own catalogs and directories to fill out their offering; Silicon Graphics did this for years with their IndyZone2 program. The reason I am so interested in this one is because VALinux is not typically clueless about internetworking. I am expecting their affiliate program to become more like their SourceForge and Server51: Rather than a star-topology where all the seats spin out from VA to each isolated consultant, I am expecting an omni-topology of internetworked peers, a swirling relativistic mass where every seat is the best seat in the house. If Larry Augustin is listening: Don't worry, I haven't patented the idea. |
So far I have only been talking about how to handle the contracts which come your way or which may have found you through the grapevine of your colleagues and peers. This is not such a bad scenario, though, as I have found in my two decades that almost all really good contracts arise from just this sort of informal referral network. The only danger is that your network of friends can become saturated with workers, and depending on your geography, it may not be as easy to find paying contracts to feed them all.
Here again, the internetworking side effect of open source is our best ally; if you have used the Internet to train and hone your Linux computing skills, you have probably also picked up enough skills to locate contract opportunities and to respond to those calls. The fact that you are responding with an open source answer is almost irrelevant.
The headhunters and HR departments will all tell you that Internet has taken over the contract and job search market. More than ever before, when people are looking for new hires or outsource companies, they are moving away from the search companies and simply plunking some keywords into their favourite search engine. There has never been a better rationale for finally getting your act together and building a website, and if you have a website, you now need to ensure it is up to snuff with Meta tags and in ensuring the resumes of all your principles are there online.
Most often, potential customers are not going to find you. Sadly they will find those who paid the most payola for top placement on the search engine page or for an ad space on that site, and because of this, they may give up looking. What they will find, though, is another artifact of internetworking: The directories and vertical portal sites, by nature of their critical mass of content, will probably make it into those first-page search results long before you will. The main lesson in using the web for any kind of advertising is to "find yourself", go looking for your sort of service and then try to insinuate yourself into those sites which you do find.
As you look for your specialty niche online, especially if you leave out the open source keywords, you are likely to find many of the new "Request for Proposals" portals. One example is OnVia's Quote Requests. This service which matches requests for services to vendors and service companies based on a few broad categories; precious few actually ask for Linux or Apache, but we have had some success in matching what we do to the business requirements, for example, in applying Linux eqlplus for low-cost, highspeed internet access in remote rural regions.