The Sikh Geek

You wouldn’t mind the salaries that Premiership Footballers get if they all did this.

Well, I read this article and made me think that Ramon Ray, must be dealing with a different company called Dell than me! Dell competes with everyone, everything and itself! If it moves, Dell competes with it! I like the way Ray is trying to convince us that Dell really wants to work in partnership with us. Dell’s strategy is about as coherent as an un-coherent thingy - driven solely by revenue at the expense of all else! Working in Partnership?! Someone tell them that’s what companies like Microsoft, IBM and HP do. No wonder Dell has been overtaken by HP for PC shipments. It’s panic, panic, panic, if ever I saw it.

My old friends at Minority Supplier Development UK, held another successful ’Meet the Buyer’ event at Walker’s Stadium and was reported in the Leicester Mercury. You’ll see from the story that some major corporates are involved including IBM, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, Enterprise-rent-a-Car and more.

I set up the IT for MSD UK which uses 1and1’s hosted Exchange Services and Mayank, the Manager of MSD UK, uses his Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone to synchronise his information. They’ve also got a hosted Sharepoint Services site, although this hasn’t yet been utilised really.

Scott Dodds is presenting the keynote at the Small Business Symposium next week. He’s recently taken over from Natalie Ayres as the General Manager of the Small, Medium Enterprises & Partners Goup. Apparently he’s had some chats with Steve Ballmer recently regarding the direction of this area of Microsoft’s Business in the UK. So, this is our chance to get some quality Q&A with the main man. Your chance to ask him about the Action Pack licensing issues! Not really, only joking! I’d hate to be the Microsoft person who’s going to field those questions…!!

There was a great turnout for our joint meeting of MITPRO and NxtGenUG entitled ‘Vista from the Inside’, with about 25 people attending. The event was hosted at iCentrum, Aston Science Park in Birmingham. Matt McSpirit and James Senior did a great job of showing the features of Vista/Office 2007 and some of the new applications on the horizon. James has blogged about the WPF/E that he showed us as to how XAML could be rendered in Browsers. There was a quick preview of the new Yahoo Messenger using WPF, which looked really cool! Apparently MSN Messenger had no plans to use WPF but James has been in touch with them to get it sorted! Check out Tim’s blog, he’s got a load of good stuff on .NET 3.0 Technologies.

There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t a report on India’s inexorable rise in IT and Software Services. Should Small Business IT Consultants be worried? I think the answer is “be afraid, be very afraid”! While this BBC News Report talks about the biggies like Tata, Infosys and Wipro, there are a ton of smaller companies looking for business in the UK. I’ve probably lost count of the number of companies that have contacted me out of the blue. The fact of the matter is that less people are going into technical subjects here, while India is turning them out by the bucketful and even they can’t cope with the demand for these people. No one can say for definite what’s going to happen, but the trend is clear. India is now the third largest investor in the UK, but surprisingly few SMEs in the UK are taking opportunities in India. In Leicester there’s been set up an Indian Trade Bureau to help businesses in Leicester to trade with India and to attract inward investment.

I saw this post from Eileen Brown and thought it was just great what these User Groups had done. I think the best stuff comes from the grass roots level. Our Small Business Symposium, starting next week at TVP, is half Microsoft and half Partners. There seems to be a growing trend to have more partner led events! Looks like from the post that there is a need for a Vista User Group! Tempted, but I think there’s enough on my plate!

The FSB is looking at using Google Video as a site for online media rather than its own servers. Their first example is a number of case studies of small businesses and some of the issues they are facing. The first case study in the video is an IT Services company and the difficulty they had employing a suitably skilled software engineer.

If you haven’t signed up for the Microsoft Small Business Symposium and you are a Microsoft Small Business Specialist then you really need to get to one of the events. At the TVP event, I will be on the “Community Panel” and at the Manchester event, I will be on the “Working with your local Small Business Infrastructure”, but don’t let that put you off from coming! In the afternoon we’re going to hear directly from fellow Small Business Specialists and get a chance to debate the issues that are of interest or concern to us all.

Susanne has organised a pre-TVP evening networking event, so get along to that. As far as I’m aware she’s done this all by herself, so a big thanks to her!

Personally, I’m really looking forward to this because this is THE BEST community I’ve been involved in and the people I’ve met are, plain and simple, fantastic to work with! I’ve learnt so much from fellow colleagues. Hopefully, I’ll be able to relay some of my experiences and the Midlands Group experiences and why we think we are on the verge of something really special!!

Microsoft are rolling out the big guns, so we’re all definitely being taken very seriously. If these events get packed out, then I’m convinced a lot more people in Microsoft will be sitting up and taking notice. One thing to acknowledge, is that this has come about with the efforts of the Microsoft UK Small Business Team. I know we complain and moan at them but they’ve gone around Microsoft and convinced people that this Community is REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT!

iCentrum based at Aston Science Park, Birmingham has a fantastic facility with a lab equipped with £0.5 million worth of servers and other infrastrucure technology. They have everything from single processor to quad processor servers, SANs and Virtualisation technology. As a member iQubed gets 35 hours free access of the facilities and services, with anything over that being charged at competitive commercial rates. The drive to join has been a project I’ve been working on to assist a customer who is looking to scale their hosted software application. This is certainly something that I’ll be focusing more on as many companies don’t have access to test/performance facilities.

I met with Dominic Gill, the Business Development Manager, and he told me how he was working for Microsoft as well. He’s working on a project which encompasses things like digital inclusion, local economic policy in ICT and building networks with SMEs. We’re going to be talking more about how MITPRO can be a part of this process.

So, if you have a need to test an application, measure its performance, set up test scenarios or evaluate a new application then get in touch. A couple of colleagues are working with me who have skills in .NET, SQLServer and Java, so we’re putting our software skills together with the infrastructure stuff!

Today was a good day!