[ale] advice needed.

[Joshua Kite]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Christopher Fowler <
cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:

> Joshua Kite wrote:
> >
> >
> > One somewhat legitimate obstacle to selling a Linux-based solution is
> > that smaller organizations may not be able to justify the cost of
> > having a Linux sysadmin when they already have a windows admin.  If
> > that is the challenge with the smaller companies, then the VM solution
> > is compounding the problem and not solving it, because your customer
> > must now have a windows admin who can become familiar with Linux and
> > also VMWare or similar software.
> They don't need Linux sysadmins.   When we created our solution
> I created a proprietary web interface (not webadmin) that allows
> our customers to configure everything necessary.  We give them
> the server and we do NOT give them any passwords to the CLI.
>
> Some of our customers do not have any clue that the RAID1 Dual
> Core server that we give them runs Linux.  They turn it on, it DHCPs,
> and they go to http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/XX to configure it.  Its easier
> to configure than a D-Link router.
>
> I've tried to take the Linux out of Linux because my customers use
> Windoze.  However this method does require a little bit of work.  There
> are many programs in the server that read the config file generated by
> the UI at startup.   Some programming is involved.
>
> Not one of my customers has a UNIX admin.  Not one.  And they all
> run more Linux than they probably know :)
>

I think the holes are getting filled in for me now.  So you generally
provide the software AND the hardware, and that solution is priced for
approximately 1,000 users.  Your marketing organization is looking for a
solution that can be sold at a price point for only 20 users, and that means
you need to provide a software only solution.  Am I understanding the
problem correctly?

I don't know that I have any additional insight, but I always learn from the
challenges of others, and I was confused by the challenge at hand.

Thanks,

Josh
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