January is a quiet time for business in New Zealand, we usually take our summer holidays after Christmas so business doesn’t really start to hum again until February. I’m taking advantage of the quiet time to update some skills and do some business planning.
The Vision
One of the first tasks was to define a vision, Demitasse’s vision is:
Providing Training and Consultancy to enable Customers IT infrastructure.
Demitasse being me, that’s what I’m going to keep on doing this year.
The Plan
What I’m going to do:
- Keep teaching VMware’s latest courses.
- They release really useful software and I enjoy teaching about their products.
- I plan adding the VMware View course and the VI Design course to my repertoire when they come to the region.
- Start teaching courses about competing and complimentary products, there can’t be only one.
- I’m planning to get Citrix CCI to go with my VMware and Microsoft teaching qualifications. XenServer and XenDesktop are very interesting products, while Hyper-V comes from the 500 pound Gorilla that has won a lot of battles by being good enough for a lot of organisations.
- Do more consulting work.
- There is a great synergy between talking to students about how they can and do use products and helping organisations use the same products better
- Turn downtime into billable time.
- There is a lot of downtime inherent in teaching away from home and time between teaching gigs which could be more productive. The current thought is documentation completion, but I’m interested in anything that doesn’t require me be onsite or doing things at a particular time.
How you can help:
- Keep coming to the training and sharing your experiences.
- The best courses for me and for students are the ones where students talk about what they are doing with the products and generally bring their experience to the course.
- Talk to me about consulting.
- I’m available for short consulting engagements and focused on giving clients the tools to work better with what they have, not become dependent upon me. A typical engagement is only two to four days long and can have a big impact on how clients use their Virtual Infrastructure.
- They release really useful software and I enjoy teaching about their products.
- I plan adding the VMware View course and the VI Design course to my repertoire when they come to the region.
- I’m planning to get Citrix CCI to go with my VMware and Microsoft teaching qualifications. XenServer and XenDesktop are very interesting products, while Hyper-V comes from the 500 pound Gorilla that has won a lot of battles by being good enough for a lot of organisations.
- There is a great synergy between talking to students about how they can and do use products and helping organisations use the same products better
- There is a lot of downtime inherent in teaching away from home and time between teaching gigs which could be more productive. The current thought is documentation completion, but I’m interested in anything that doesn’t require me be onsite or doing things at a particular time.
- The best courses for me and for students are the ones where students talk about what they are doing with the products and generally bring their experience to the course.
- I’m available for short consulting engagements and focused on giving clients the tools to work better with what they have, not become dependent upon me. A typical engagement is only two to four days long and can have a big impact on how clients use their Virtual Infrastructure.
This year is likely to be financially tough for lots of people, but Virtualisation is a technology that helps businesses in tough times. VMware are due to release vSphere (the next version of their core product, previously known as Virtual Infrastructure) at the end of this quarter so there should be lots of skills and infrastructure upgrades.
It should be another interesting year.
© 2009, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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Alastair. Always great to start the year of with some good strategic thinking. What am I doing and why? Keep up the great work and keep us informed of progress.
Rodos