22 Mar 09 Being a successful Asterisk Consultant (Part 2)

Last time, I’ve contemplated upon the various aspects of being an Asterisk consultant, mainly judging these from the Asterisk/Open Source point-of-view. Today, I’d like to contemplate upon a different approach of being a consultant, mainly, the various aspects that are usually not associated with Asterisk consultancy, however, can increase your overall perception by your prospective customer.

Be Targeted, Don’t be Limited

Most Asterisk consultant tend to restrict themselves to the Asterisk arena, at best, they will expand their knowledge into the realms of SIP and networks – but never beyond that point. It is true that telephony makes for over 80% of the Asterisk consultancy world, however, Asterisk isn’t limited to telephony only. More than 40% of the people using Asterisk are utilizing it for something completely different. Ranging from simple IVR to complex Micro Payment systems, Asterisk is there. Surely you can consult about Asterisk, but imagine the benefit your customer will gain if you are able to advise about other issues as well?

You are most probably saying: “I’m an Asterisk expert, I can’t be a **** expert as well!’ – you’re not being asked be one. You are being asked to expand your horizons beyond the Asterisk realm, being asked to be able to answer preliminary questions about various subjects. Over the course of my work I’ve been asked about subjects as: Google Adwords, Business Models, possible business partners, applicability of solutions and many more. Surely, there are people more qualified than myself to answer each of these, however, being able to answer my customer in a short time yielded something interesting, my customer became more at ease consulting with me about other matters as well – sometimes surpassing the realms of VoIP and Networking. When I was unable to answer I always replied with: “I’m not an expert about this, but I can check it out”. If I had an answer I would reply: “Per the information that I have, the answer is ………., however, I do suggest talking to someone more skillful than I on these matters”. This approach yielded an interesting response from my customers, mainly, their appreciation at me being able to supply a form of preliminary answer for a question – while on the other hand admitting at the same time that I’m not the best at this field.

Subjects that are fairly close to Asterisk include: GPL compliance, programmatic approach, platform design, billing considerations, scalability and redundancy and more. Again, always target your knowledge to Asterisk and VoIP, but don’t be limited to these.

Advocate for GPL compliance

As a consultant, you’ll be asked to perform various projects – some of these will most probably clash with the GPL spirit. If you encounter such a request, turn down this project immediately. There is no use or advancement by doing a project that violates the GPL code of conduct. No matter if you’re violating GPL v1, v2, v3 or any other of the Open Source license variants, at the end of the day, it will creep up behind you and bite you in the behind.

An Asterisk consultant who doesn’t advocate for GPL compliance is an outbound liar and a con-man. Consulting for the Asterisk market is prmoting the usage of GPL and Open Source software. Performing projects that violate both put you into the position of being perceived as a consultant without any code of conduct and no personal believes. You will be perceived as only being interested in money, thus, you will attract the type of customers you don’t want to attract.

Business Partners

The business partners you choose tell much about yourself. Sometimes, the big partners, which you really want to put their logo on your website as a partner is the wrong partner for you. Since the Q4 2008, my company had been approach by multiple companies wishing to become partners with my company – many have been declined. They were declined due to a simple reason – they were the wrong partners, even if they were companies generating over 25M$ of income per year. Does it make me sound stuck up and elitist, maybe, but there is no use partnering with a company that may clash with your own business model. Just like customers, partners tend to attract one another. Team up with the wrong partners, you’ll start attracting the wrong partners all over.

Tags: Asterisk, Consultant, digium, GreenfieldTech, JaJah, Partners, yahoo

23 Nov 08 Hi-Tech fallouts unite!

The current economical situation of the world had gotten me thinking about various things. I would say that while most people think about “how to survive the economical desert” we are currently passing – my thoughts are going to another place – I see an opportunity.

About 6 months ago a team of 58 engineers joined forces in Israel to create the itribu.com service, a “pay-it-forward” type service. The amazing thing about itribu is the fact that it was completely built within a period of less than 72 hours!

Is that logical? creating a full service in less than 72 hours? is that actually doable? even extreme programming techniques and scrum/agile don’t offer this kind of development turn around. Actually, coming to think of it, I’ve created web based services in the past on my own which took less time to develop. I’ve developed a web based telephone conferencing system in less than 2 days, on my own, so – developing a full grown service with 58 engineers in 72 hours – sounds logical.

You are probably wondering: “What is he talking about? how does itribu relate to the current economic situation? where is the opportunity?” – the answer is simple, you’re simply too stuck thinking in normal development and financial paradigms – that you are blind to the obvious. Over the course of the past month, over 2000 engineers were let go from their jobs in Israel. These are highly qualified, highly original individuals ranging the full spectrum of the hi-tech industry. Imagine that a company that had let go 10 engineers, and imagine that these engineers had decided to start a web based service. Now, imagine that these 10 engineers get into a single place for a full weekend. Can they build a service in a single weekend? the answer is a definite YES!

If creating a service is so simple, how come people are not doing it – the answer is usually simple: EGO and PRIDE. When I talked about this idea to a couple of friends of mine they both replied a simple thing: “Hmmm… Ok, sounds cool, but, what is our take in the company? how much money are we going to make from it?” – and then I actually realized: the world had completely forgotten what the term start-up means. In 1996, when the ICQ team started working on their product, they had no idea they would end up selling ICQ to AOL for 400,000,000 USD. When Sergey and Larry started Google they basically had nothing in their pockets, they almost closed Google due to a poor business model in the beginning – that’s the idea behind a start-up, you have an idea and you go for it. We had become so obsessed with business models, revenues, making money, ego, status, driving a big car – all he things that had become synonyms to Hi-Tech success, but had completely forgotten that it takes time to get there. VC’s start giving money to any company that looked like a Web 2.0 application, when actually, there was nothing behind the idea. In my view, any team of 10-15 engineers can surely spend anything between 2 to 4 weekend building a service, continue on to running it – the VC’s will shortly follow once your service becomes a craze – trust me (I’ve seen it happen more than once).

Digium started from a loan Mark got from his folks for 5000$, and grew into a multi-million dollar company. In 2006 Digium received an investment of roughly 13M$ from Matrix Partners, but that’s long after Digium was already racking up about 14M$ sales per year. JaJah started off from funds of their founders, slowly growing in number of users, shortly to follow by investments from Intel Capital and Sequoia – in other words, obsess about creating the service first – the money will soon follow after wards. Starting to argue about who gets what and how much is stupid, after all, if you don’t build it – its value is still 0!

Tags: Asterisk, digium, economy, Intel, JaJah, VC, Venture Capital

05 Nov 08 Poking around for Free Telephony

Ever since the introduction of JaJah to the world, the world of free telephony services had been booming with various solutions and services. While each service concentrated on a different market niche, none of the services really is free of charge (at least not in full). For example, JaJah requires you to register and purchase additional air-time, RebTel operates under a similar approach, so does TruPhone and others alike.

Over the past 10 months, I’ve been working closely with a company called Parrot-Media, who operate the PokeTalk.com website.

PokeTalk is a free international calls service, allowing users to make international calls FREE of charge. The service allows a user to make up to 50 free calls per month, of up to 10 calls per calls (that’s 500 of FREE minutes per month). Judging from normal ACD traffic around the world, a normal call duration is around 5-6 minutes, thus, the service is a great solution for making phone calls for FREE.

According to the PokeTalk economic model, the calls are being funded by the advertisement on the website. So, while you watch the ads on the website, the advertisers are paying for your call – it’s as simple as that.

As you may have guessed, the service utilizes the Asterisk Open Source PBX (after all, this is what I do). In addition, it utilizes a highly advanced, high-speed, highly-reliable Asterisk based dialer framework – enabling the system to initialize up to 140 calls per second, and sustain a total of 1200 concurrent phones calls across the entire platform. All in all, a fairly big and robust platform for a new service.

To enjoy the service, simple point your browser to http://www.poketalk.com, regsiter, and start making calls to your loved ones.

Tags: Advertisement, Adwords, Free Calls, Google, JaJah, Parrot-Media, PokeTalk, RebTel, TruPhone