On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:23 AM, Ken Schaefer<[email protected]> wrote: > I would do this all on the customer's premises ... on their equipment.
A big part of SOHO consulting is that they don't have the equipment needed. They're basically renting it from the consultant. They don't have the budget for dedicated stuff. Most of the time, they don't have an IT budget at all. IT gets leftovers. If a failure or need means operations halt, then they go to Staples and buy the cheapest thing they can find to slap a band-aid over it and continue limping along. They don't have stand-by equipment, or spare equipment. Quite often, what they have is not in good repair. I used to do this kind of consulting. 4.5 years ago, one was a company of maybe 50 people. Their primary server was running Netware 4.x and had a RAID-5 array with one disk missing -- i.e., degraded, no longer fault tolerant. Their tape drive had long since quit. They didn't see the problem, wouldn't spend to upgrade it. That's the typical environment we're dealing with here. > They must have a budget for this (otherwise how are they paying you?) ... Typically out of general or contingency funds. Sometimes not even that -- like others, I've been stiffed by SOHOs before. It's part of that market. And while you might threaten it, you don't actually hire collections for a $200 bill. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
