There seems to be a recent spur in interest in telecommunications (specifically internet) infastructure within Australia. The first thing that comes to mind is Labor’s FTTN (Fiber to the Node) proposal, along with the OPEL (Optus/Elders) WiMax network, but a recent change that slipped under the radar is the $84m that was spent on internet filtering for Australian users.

The irony of the situation is that the software was cracked within 30 minutes of its release[1], which raises concerns as to the effectiveness of the filter for protecting Australian children from undesirable internet content.

Dear Senator Coonan,

I am writing this letter to express my distaste at your superfluous waste of taxpayer money, specifically regarding the $84m of my tax payer dollars you spent implementing a pornography filtering system for Australian internet users.Whilst I an understand the need to protect children from threats on the internet, I, along with the majority of the Australian telecommunications industry, believe that responsible internet usage is the role of the parent/guardian, not the role of the government.

There are a number of easily accessible, free, commercial filtering applications available in the marketplace today, all of which are suitable for rudimentary filtering of questionable content. (Given that it took a sixteen year old a mere thirty minutes to bypass the filtering mechanism, I would hazard a guess to say that those $84m bought you a “rudimentary” system, at best.)

It is the government’s job to protect its citizens from dangers such as drug use and alcohol abuse, but in this democratic society, it is not the job of the government to influence lifestyle choices of Australian citizens. It is the responsibility of the parent/guardian to influence the choices that their children make, it is not the role of the government to enforce their conservative attitude towards internet content.

Regards,

Curtis Bayne

In the services industry, (especially in small business), it’s sometimes difficult to identify what your core business is. Whilst it can be beneficial (usually to your bottom line) to branch out into a wide variety of different industries, the management nightmare that arises from the need to troubleshoot and coordinate seemingly autonomous service offerings is nothing to be scoffed at. Bill Swanson’s “25 Unwritten Rules of Management” puts it best with the statement “It’s easier to get into something than it is to get out of it”.

When offering a multitude of services that seemingly deviate from your core business, you need to have a clear definition between product and process. Whilst this may seem obvious, you have to realize that your customer does not care about the amount of time and effort required to offer a service and, despite how much they’re paying you, they want the product provisioned and they want it now. What does this all mean? The answer to this lies specifically in the ability to identify with parts of the scoping and implementation process needs to be exposed to the customer. This is especially apparent in larger projects, where it’s all too easy to expose the customer to unnecessary (and sometimes daunting) convolution that, although obvious to the service provider, is overwhelmingly complex to the customer, who lacks the context/knowledge of the industry to effectively digest or reject superfluous information.

To break this down further, I’ll create a hypothetical to better generalize and exemplify the issue.

Take for example, providing a managed WAN service to a small enterprise. The product that you are offering is a “Managed, Australia-wide network solution that enables them to connect disparent offices together to allow secure, effective communication”. This is your product - easy! The tricky bit is determining the difference between your product and the process that you use to offer it. The wholesale DSL line that you use to offer the managed WAN over is NOT your product - it is part of the process that you use to offer your product. The 2651XM that you use to concatenate Frame Relay PVCs in your POP is NOT your product - it is part of the process.

Whilst information about infrastructure, implementation and the management thereof can be selling points for your service, don’t rely on these things to sell your product. You may run across clients who are “in the know”, so to speak, who will request information pertaining to your infrastructure. If there is no reason to not give it to then, then give it to them - it will instill confidence and ratify their positive interpretation of your brand. For the most part, however, you will be presenting proposals to a board with no background or knowledge of telecommunications. This is where it’s important to abstract details of the process from information about your product.

When presenting to a non-technical board, identify the key aspects of your product that differentiate it from other products within the market or, if you are selling a product that everyone else seems to have, be sure to identify the key advantages that your product brings to the organization. You’ll find that many of your competitors make the mistake of selling on process rather than product, which gives you a clear advantage within the marketplace.

Make sure you scope your potential clients well, Ensure that you know what they’re hoping to achieve by potentially implementing your solution. If you don’t know, and you have no way of finding out, then it’s probably a pretty safe assumption to run with the power three reasons:

1. How can this product save me money2. How can this product improve change workflow to benefit productivity3. How can this product help me reach more customers

Identify the ways in which your product will improve the bottom line of the board that you’re presenting to, rather than how much inter-capital backhaul you have and even if your service offering isn’t as comprehensive as your competitors, you’ll already have an advantage over them.

When starting a small company, you become aquainted with your good friend, the late night. Now for all you nine-till-five folk, the concept of two in the morning and still at work may be a little unfamiliar. Late nights are often the tangible result of “oh crap it’s due tomorrow” syndrome, whose sufferers are either poor at time management or, in the case of all us Neural employees, just have too much work to do.

It’s easy to become disillusioned at the prospect of spending every night sitting in front of your computer working, especially when it’s difficult to see the end in sight. Lack of cashflow, mounting debts and the ever-increasing temptation to trade purely on price often go hand in hand with the inability to forsee the direction and purpose of the company of which you own/manage.

Although it’s all been said before, the best way to maintain focus and direction within a small company is to set goals and meet them. Although they are usually focussed around cashflow and customer subscription, it’s also imporant to set goals for internal business process, such as keeping support calls below a certain threshold, for example. Even if profitability isn’t a short-term achievability, it’s still possible to maintain positive direction and progression by ensuring that both yourself and your employees/directors have clearly defined targets and management objectives for specific time periods.

Motivation and support between members of upper management is one of the most imporant aspects of a successful startup. It’s important to ensure that everyone responsible for the day to day management of the company knows that their contribution is both recognised and appretiated and that, as a result, the progression towards the common goal (whether that be turnover, number of customers, quality of infastructure) is because of their contribution.

Even despite ever increasing workloads, long hours and client melodrama, if the members of your organisation understand that they are appreciated and you acknowlege their contribution and it’s effect on the company’s public image, bottom line and operability, you will end up with a service that is second to none and a team that you know you can rely on.

In one of my previous posts (Process vs. Product), I’ve written about the importance of identifying and working towards offering a single (dare I say “converged”) service and identifying and building on your small business’ core competencies. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s easy for a small business to fall prey to the business equivalent of “feature creep”, that is offering services that are outside the scope of your core competencies, whilst still trying to manage and run your existing services. Whilst the prospect of another customer (especially another well paying customer) is sometimes enough to convince you (as a small business) to offer another service, it’s important to identify the requirements of the client’s needs and the requirements of the service (specifically the upfront requirements, whether they be monetary cost or time) as to avoid offering a product that is actually detrimental to your other core products.

The economies of scale in telecommunications are interesting, especially in Australia. Whilst there’s plenty of room for movement in the lower end of the scale (web hosting companies with single dedicated/co-located web servers) and in the top end of the scale (national ISPs such as Telstra or content delivery companies such as Akamai) it’s difficult for small to medium sized content publishing businesses to leverage size to their advantage. While it’s easy enough for smaller businesses to secure relatively high margins on their services, due predominantly to their lower outgoings (especially providers marketing directly to consumers, as in the case of cPanel hosting etc.), smaller providers attempting to break into the enterprise market are unable to use size to their advantage. Factors such as the price of bandwidth, cabinet lease, licensing for enterprise products etc, all negligible to larger providers, place a significant burden on a smaller provider attempting to offer these services.

Many people argue that it is not the place of a smaller service provider to offer enterprise-grade services to larger organisations, usually touting the age-old mantra that smaller businesses either lack the encompassing competencies to ensure a minimum level or service or lack the suitable cash reserves to be able to adequately scale their services for their customer’s needs. Whilst this may have been true five years ago, the advent of emerging technologies (such as virtualization) and the ever-increasing flexibility of both open and closed source software packages means that smaller organizations are now just as able to offer these services to larger cusomers as their heavyweight competitors. In fact, there seems to be a significant amount of growth in smaller content delivery companies (specifically Limelight, Cachefly etc.), due predominantly to their ability to adapt to a changing software landscape and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to offer their service at a more competitive price than some of the larger, more incumbent companies.

The most important thing for smaller providers offering these services, though, is to keep the metaphorical toffee apple in mind. Despite decreased outgoings spent in labor, coupled with the advent of open source alternatives for products that would have traditionally cost tens of thousands of dollars to license, the most important thing to remember is the quality of service that you offer to your customer. Whilst there’s no doubt that smaller businesses can offer a level of service that is equivalent or better to the quality of service offered by their competitors, this minimum level of service can only be maintained by ensuring that your entire team is competent with the products that you offer. Whilst larger organizations are able to get away with balancing their skill-set between multiple employees, the nature of smaller business is that there is an amalgamation between process and management. As a result, it’s important to ensure that you only offer services that you are able to support in all good faith, whilst maintaining a workload that is manageable by your current employee base. It’s all well and good to sell 20 000 managed exchange mailboxes, turning over a yearly income of $200 000; but that’s worth nothing if your staffing requirements increase beyond a level where you are able to break even with the product that you’re selling.

Again, mind the metaphorical toffee apple - it’s easier to get into something than it is to get out of it.