The IT Geek Bubble
Though web hosting and IT services for small businesses are maturing, I still find we live in a geek bubble. When I attend industry conferences, I am continually amazed at how many strategy, marketing, and sales people are geeks. There is a geek language that we all know. “You should check out our new bare metal cloud solutions running on SAN storage with SSD drives. They are smokin’ fast when paired with quad quad cores.” Such techno-babble may have a place at an industry conference, but I find it does little good to the small business owner who is simply trying to download a large email attachment. Unfortunately, when you are on the inside of a bubble it is hard to see it. Just ask the Wall Street guys about the housing bubble.
Busting the Bubble
By listening to our clients, I learned that most do not really care about the technology behind their operations. Sure, there are few who are computer nerds and like to hear the details, but most simply want it to work. They want to run their business — and they are not in the business of managing Linux-powered IT services. Our clients, like Beadin’ Path, sell beads and stones for making jewelry or they run give out free coupons or they have fun with flash video games.
The technology is simply a means to an end. Our clients need IT services to help them succeed with their business.
With this in mind, I wanted to break out of the IT bubble. Our web site’s new design is an attempt to do this. I wanted to get out of selling servers, bandwidth and backups. Sure we still have those things, but what I really want to sell is empowerment. I want to help small business owners reap the benefits that Linux and other open source software solutions has to offer.
Linux Empowerment
Linux empowerment is more than just using Linux. Our new goal at rackAID is to make using Linux easier. You tell us what you want to do, and we will help you find a way to do it. Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time developing partnerships with industry leaders. rackAID has partnered with Red Hat, VMWare, SoftLayer, MySQL, and several other service providers. Through this network of partners, we can integrate powerful, open source solutions to meet the needs of your business. With the rapidly growing world of enterprise level open source software, Linux powered IT solutions can bring a lot of value to a small business. We want to help you cut through the hype and find a solution that is a good fit, even if we are not the ones to provide it.
Making IT Easy
Over the next few months, I am continuing to revise our sales and support processes to make IT services easier to use. I am expanding the scope of our services to provide more consulting support upfront so you can be assured the solution we deploy is right for your business. Our old web site took a geek-centric approach. We want to get rid of the geek and focus on business needs. We want our clients to trust us to help them make the right IT decisions. You cannot earn this trust if you are speaking different languages. So, we are trying to get rid of the geek and focus on business objectives.
As part of this process, you will find a sales phone number at the top of our web site. Very few IT management firms in our sector provide you with any phone number, but I decided we should put it right there at the top. This way you can call, we can spend 10-15 minutes to find out if rackAID is a good solution for you. If we are not a good fit, we will let you know so you can move on. If we are a good match, then our support team can take over and make it happen.
All of these changes are designed to do one thing — make it easy to secure the IT service and support you need to run your business. So if we are not making it easy for you, please let me know.
The Key Question
How can we make IT easier?
Let me know.