BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

I was lucky enough last Thursday to be invited to a round table discussion with Scott Dodds, General Manager of Small to Medium Business and Partner Division at Microsoft, held at West Bromwich Albion Football Club (but we won’t hold that against them!).

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the challenges affecting Partners supplying the Small Business sector in the West Midlands. We’re actually in the East Midlands but our support cover does spill over into the West Mids as well.

Although the meeting was only an hour and a half lots of ground was covered including what partners believe Microsoft should be doing to help us raise awareness of MS products including the possibility of local case studies, videos and other marketing collateral that Partners can share.

With regard to building on the infrastructure stack most SBSC Partners provide it looks like the obvious way forward to drive more revenue and provide a better ROI for the customer is Sharepoint development. According to an MS survey the average consultancy time sold to a Sharepoint customer is 20-30 days - you have to shift an awful lot of tin to earn the same margins that that generates!

Interestingly Sharepoint is seeing a 250% growth year on year and is Microsoft’s fasting growing product to 1 million dollars ever. Now where did I put my copy of Sharepoint development for dummies…

From the The WSSG Community Lead Blog :

“The SBS Community Survey is floundering with very few responses.”

So if you haven’t already, get on over there and fill out that survey! How can we expect to be taken seriously if we don’t provide timely and concise feedback?

SBS WW Community Survey 2008

Now it isn’t every day I agree with what Vlad says, in fact there are occasions when I would say we were polar opposites, but I have to say he’s hit the nail on the head with this post, an extract of which is below:

“Everyone keeps on looking for a shortcut. There must be some process that you’re not in on. All the people that are growing and prospering must have some trick that they haven’t let you in in. Maybe I should just peer up with others who have as little clue as I do or maybe I should keep on revising my plan every two months?

There is no secret. There is no shortcut. There is no peer solution for lazy. There is no magic blog post to cure cluelessness. There is no lifestyle buffer between business ownership and unemployment.”

Go read the full post here.

We’ve all seen the unscrupulous partners that put unlicensed software into clients, but a recent contract win for us highlighted another way some less than honest partners generate income.

Having carried out a full software audit it turned out they were in fact correctly licensed. This came as no surprise to the customer who commented:

“I would be surprised if we weren’t correctly licensed as we have renewed the Microsoft licences every year with the previous support company.”

We assumed they meant they had software assurance and were perhaps renewing that or some such - but no. In fact the previous partner had been charging them for “renewing” the actual licences every 12 months! This was generating them some £7-8,000.00 turnover every year!