Business Desktop proposal, Any takers???

[Darryl Moore]

Hello List,

These are hard economic times, and I have found that demand for my
services as an embedded designer have shrunk as businesses postpone many
development projects while they weather the economic storm.

I suspect many businesses are wanting to reduce all their budgets in
this climate, and to that end I think there is a remarkable opportunity
for Linux desktops in the corporate world. Unfortunately, there are few
standard architectures that are fully open and inexpensive enough for
small businesses to consider.

This is too bad, as I think that winning small businesses over to Linux
is where the real opportunity is. They do not yet have a large
investment in MS technology, often have piecemeal deployment of
different Windows OS, undocumented licensing issues, serious virus
threats, and no full time IT personal.

I am trying to design a standardized, documented network which can
easily deployed into small businesses. It will be easy to maintain and
be scalable.

I've done research to see what typical costs are for Microsoft networks,
and have determined what kind of margins the market can therefore support.

Much of the system I have already designed or partially designed,
including HA file servers, LDAP with Kerberos authentication,  VPN
technology, Asterisk, standardised host names with local subnet DNS
updated via DHCP, Puppet used for system wide administration,
standardized directory structures for users and workgroups, and quite a
bit more. I am writing a Network User manual, as well as an
Administrator manual, SLAs, and  forms for documenting the network. In
all there is quite a bit of work putting this all together and testing
it. Working at this almost full time outside of my other work, I am
hoping to have something based on Jaunty ready to offer in about 4 months.

By the end I think I should be able to convince some of by current
customers, who I already maintain servers for, to switch to Linux
Desktops. (Several have already expressed interest) Then I can use them
as references as I try to do a whole lot of cold calling.

My plan is to make a fair income from setting up the network, and then
to set up service agreements with the companies to do network
maintenance from then on. That way they will not have to have any IT
people on staff and they will get a full featured network. I can supply
them with simple tools to add users etc, and the bigger changes they
would call me in for.

One big thing I need to help sell this is one or two other people who
provide the same or similar services that I can refer too. One worry for
companies considering switching away from Microsoft is that the people
they hire to support their network will still exist next week. If I had
a few strategic partners who  could give competitive quotes and be ready
to maintain networks in the future, it would give potential customers
confidence that they are getting a fair price to begin with, and their
network will still be supported tomorrow.

If there is anybody in this group that wants to collaborate on putting
this together, let me know. There are still many scripts to write,
decisions to make, and documentation to create. I'll share what I've
already done, and if you think of a better way, or something I missed,
then we can work on changing the specs.

If there were a few companies that actually supported the exact same
standard, then it would be even easier to sell to potential customers.

Any takers? Reply here or send me a private email.

cheers,
darryl