How to Network Effectively

A couple years ago I attended a seminar on effective networking given by Lillian Bjorseth of DuoForce Enterprises. It was a great talk and I took the following notes. I stumbled across them recently and they were great rules to refocus my networking efforts. The notes are broken out as rules to follow before, during and after the event.
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Networking is more about giving than getting. Sales is harvesting, networking is planting seeds. Do not go to networking events to sell, go to plant seeds

Before The Event

CREATE A PLAN OF ATTACK

I. WHO YOU ARE

• Know what you do
• Know what you do differently
• How to be memorable
• They will not refer you if they do not understand what you do
• How to people benefit from what you do?

II. TARGET MARKET

• Where is your target market what are their organizations and events?
• Get ROI out of your organizations, don't join everything, time is money
• Go to places where people can introduce you to your target market

III. IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT

• Dress

Brown is not a power color
Navy blue – authority, trust, knowledgeable
Black – powerful (sometimes too powerful)
Sky blue – tranquilizing
Jacket makes you 1/3 more powerful

• Posture – confidence

When talking with someone standing boxed off (belly to belly) prohibits others from joining. Open stance (angled) is more welcoming, depending on the situation you may want to do both
Stand up out of respect when someone approaches you to say hello/introduce themselves,
Don’t stand over people that are sitting, sit down with them
Handshake – hand on top – controlling, hand on bottom – submissive, sandwich too personal, limp fingers = wussbag. Go web to web, keep hand firm.
Name tag – always where on right side so people can see your name when they shake your hand

IV. VERBAL BUSINESS CARD (front end of your elevator pitch)

• 1 or 2 sentence laden with benefits, memorable, contains your name, what you do, active verbs (help, share, work with).
  
• Do not include company name, geographic location, adjectives, adverbs or the HOW.
  
• You want the verbal business card to elicit the question of “How”.

During The Event

• 10 minute rule to work a room (you can determine if you want a relationship with someone in no longer than 10 minutes) Ask “Why” questions “ Why did you join this organization, why did you choose this event, .
• Always ask for a business card before giving them yours (polite)
  
• Look at the business card when they give it to you.
• Ask four questions to determine if they are worth a relationship (have these prepared in advance). Listen for the answers!!! Prepare your ask-for questions in advance to focus your interactions. Listens for the answers because you know best what you want to hear back.
• Try to find commonality (sometimes business card will give you this)
• How to end the conversation: Don’t look around for others.
• If you want a follow up: “I really enjoyed talking, can I email you that report I was telling you about”
• If you don’t want a follow up: “I invited a guest and I want to see if they’ve arrived”

After The Event

• Do what you say (i.e. send them what you promised),
• Set the standard for the relationship!

Saas and Open Source alternatives to Commercial Solutions

Solstice and our clients have had success with the following alternatives to Commercial Off the Shelf Solutions. Let me know if you need any guidance on how to transition to these lower cost solutions.

Category	Proprietary Market Leader	OSS	SaaS
Office Productivity	MS Office	OpenOffice	Google Docs
Customer Relationship Management	Siebel	SugarCRM	37Signals HighRise
Human Resources Management	PeopleSoft CRM	OrangeHRM	Zoho People
Content Management	Interwoven Teamsite	Drupal, Joomla	TBD. . .
Portal	IBM Websphere Portal, MS Sharepoint,	Liferay, .NETNuke	Google Apps
Collaboration	MS Exchange, Lotus Notes Domino	Zimbra	Google Apps
Social Networking	TBD (MS, IBM, Oracle)	Elgg	Ning.com (free), KickApps (sub),

Pros and Cons of Open Source vs. SaaS vs. Commercial Software

The following table outlines some pros and cons of open source vs. Saas and COTS solutions. Leave a comment on anything I might be leaving out or not considering.

		Commercial Off the Shelf Products	OSS Products	SaaS Products
	Speed to market	New features are packaged and released based on corporate release schedules	Feature Driven Development – new features are often made available as soon as they are built and certified	Immediate. No initial installation. Features are often slipstreamed in as they are developed
	Customization	Typically limited and due to proprietary nature of systems, makes upgrades difficult.	Best option for customization with products embracing open standards. OSS was founded on customization.	Worst option for customization, although depending on the platform, may offer some options.
	Interoperability	May or may not embrace open standards	Typically based on open standards, easier to share info between systems	It depends, but most successful SaaS projects are open enough to allow for plugin development (i.e. GreaseMonkey)
	Support	Depends on vendor and support plan	Community driven, the more active the community, the better the support. Many established OSS projects also have paid support options	Typically the best, since if one person is having the problem, everyone is having the problem.
	Vendor Lock In	Vendors are financially encouraged to promote platform lock in	Flexibility eliminates lock in	SaaS vendors are also financially encouraged to promote platform lock in, although exports are more standard.
	Security	Vulnerabilities typically take longer to assess, fix and deploy.	Studies show OSS tends to be more secure than proprietary. Patches often delivered in hours vs. days or months	Security tends to be the best for viable services providers.
	Total Cost of Ownership	TCO often involves software licensing, upgrade, support and larger hardware costs	Studies show 90% lower TCO for open source solutions	For SMM’s, TCO tends to be lowest for SaaS since you only pay for what you use (i.e. per user licensing) with no support or hardware required.
	Staff Retention	Skillsets are often constrained by the products you have purchased	Open source attracts innovative people and builds “street cred”. They feel part of something bigger.	End users love it, developers/administrators dislike due to black-box/outsourcing nature

Private vs. Public Cloud

Google came out with a blog post recently touting their public cloud vision. VMware responded with a blog touting why the private cloud concept was better. Who's right? Both of them. VMWare's private cloud vision will help companies maximize their existing infrastructure investment, while Google (and Amazon) is focused on building a platform for the future. The comment I left on the VMWare blog is an attempt to marry these two visions into a near term and long term strategy. Here's what I wrote:

This is a great post and brings some sanity back to Google's claims, but there are some points missing:

First I have to agree, for companies that have already made a capital investment in infrastructure, using VMWare to create a private, internal cloud is the way to go to maximize flexibility, elasticity and utilization. But there is one thing the public cloud providers have that ultimately will win the race, multi-tenancy. The public cloud providers have the ability to house multiple companies/accounts on the same hardware to maximize utilization. This ultimately will lend to higher utilization and a lower cost/CPU cycle. It's very difficult for a company to achieve the same levels of utilization/efficiency independently, particularly if IT is not their core business.

There are privacy and security issues that accompany multi-tenancy but ultimately they will be worked out. There are bright minds working on them and at the end of the day, it just makes sense. This is why power plants exist and every building/house doesn't run it's own generator anymore.

On the point of flexibility, Google is a bit behind but Amazon's EC2 supports a myriad of platforms, including Windows, Solaris and Linux. To remain competitive, Google will need to as well.

In the near term, private and hybrid clouds will take hold. But on the 5-10 year horizon, it's seems that the promise of the public cloud's economies of scale will ultimately triumph (for all but the most private applications).

Whether you choose to invest in a private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure depends on your company's infrastructure capital investment to date, SLA and privacy needs.

1) My suggestion for large enterprises with an internally hosted data center, is to build your private cloud, but look for opportunities to start porting non-mission critical VMs (i.e. test environments, departmental apps) to the public cloud. Over time, as the public cloud matures, more and more of your private cloud's assets can be moved, so you can stop investing capital dollars in soon-to-be-outdated hardware.

2) For those who are outsourcing their data center to a 3rd party, you have incredible leverage to challenge their current pricing models, and if they don't play ball, you have motivation to start moving items to the public cloud more quickly.

3) For SMBs, startups and companies experiencing rapid growth, the public cloud is where you should focus your investment/move your assets. Get on the platform of the future now, so you don't have to pay to move to it later.

If you have any questions on how to do any of these things, drop me an email and lets talk.

-J

How To Evaluate Open Source Solutions

I've been evangelizing a lot about Open Source software recently. But is all open source software good? No!

The pros of OSS are plentiful, but the cons are just as numerous. With often a myriad of competing OSS projects, many not professionally supported, little certainty around future releases, rapid updates requiring constant upkeep and buggy early versions, how can one justifiably take the risk? How do we mitigate these cons and filter the wheat from the chaff?

The following assessment criteria should start the evaluation of any open source product/platform:

• Investigate the licensing/legal situation of the software.
• Evaluate whether the software is standards compliant.
• Contact references to confirm product viability.
• Find products with a supporting or stable developer.
• Find products that use an open/industry standard implementation language.
• Reference third-party reviews of the software.
• Reference books published about the software (the more the better)
• Reference industry analysts, such as Gartner, Forrester or IDC.

In general, a mature open source platform will meet the following criteria:

1. Project extensions are available.
2. The project has reached a 1 year maturity mark.
3. Security patches, bug fixes, and new features/enhancements are delivered separately.
4. The core development team has rigid criteria for participation.
5. The software has reasonable automated unit and functional tests with code coverage in the 30-80% range.
6. The software easily integrates with external services
7. The component’s bug database is kept up-to-date with revision numbers for each product enhancement.
8. The solution has been ported across multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac).
9. The community is organized into groups, each responsible for separate tasks (the maintainer, the documentation group, the development group, the evangelism group).
10. The project’s license is acknowledged by the Open Source Initiative (http://opensource.org).
11. Large-scale adoption, including both public and well-known large-scale organizational deployments
12. Separation of documentation: User documentation, Installation documentation, Admin documentation, and Development documentation

And remember to always weigh target usage of the application (mission-critical, departmental or beta) against the OSS product's readiness.

Many of these points were reiterated by our recent discovery of http://www.openbrr.org. Now that's an example of an open source project that lost it's legs, but what was was left behind was some great info. Thanks to that community!

Please let me know some other criteria we should be considering in the comments below. I'll consolidate feedback and send it on to openbrr.org.

-J