So many technology consultants these days all seem to have the same list of partners littering their websites, with much of it being equivalent to those pieces of flair that employee’s of Chotchkie’s love to flaunt. Everyone is a partner with Symantec, Cisco, Microsoft, and a large list of other seemingly impressive big name technology companies. What most people don’t know is that to become a partner with most of those companies simply involves just filling out a form of some sort and maybe committing to buy a certain amount of Not-For-Resale units in your first year. Do that and suddenly you are a partner with that vendor.

Many of these companies are choosing their list of vendors so that they too can have the list of big name companies on their website as well. They are afraid that if their list isn’t as big as the next one, they are going to lose out on the sale. Yet, when they select all these companies as their partners and vendors, they always seem to forget that they essentially mean nothing to the other party. Almost all the usual suspects on the list are considered the industry leader or standard, which means they have little reason to innovate, support is usually outsourced and frankly you are just another entry in their CRM system. These companies are large enough that it isn’t their goal to make you, as their partner, happy. The only goal of these corporations is to pad the bottom line of their investors.

The problem that most technology consulting companies have is that they are afraid to rock the boat. The Boat, in this instance, being the tried and true formula that has been keeping the consultants going for the past fifteen years. Over the years, I’ve worked for multiple companies that have all provided the same set of vendors and basic services to their clients. All of which kept running into the same pitfalls and issues as all the others, which was why when I started my own company I took a very different approach at selecting our vendors and partners.

My first rule I put in place was that we will never sell anything we would never use ourselves. I consider this my golden rule of technology consulting. If it is not good enough to run on my network I will never recommend it to my clientele. This is the only irrevocable rule that I have when it comes to suggesting products or vendors. Each vendor that I have chosen to use with our clients has gone through and had their products fully vetted by me, and given me the confidence to put my name and reputation behind.

Two of the vendors that I have partnered with have exceptional stories. Both are perfect examples of not selecting the vendor with the biggest name, but upon merit and the fact that they do truly value your business and want to make you happy. The following two stories show how a company without the big name recognition can earn business through true execution and delivery of their service.

How I met my Enforcer…

The first story involves how I came to work with Calyptix Security. Even as I first started planning moving into business for myself I really wanted a solid UTM Firewall as a core component of our Managed Services offering. The problem I had always found is that most all the companies in this space have horrible outsourced support, can be horribly buggy, and horribly painful the price out for the clients due to the numerous SKU’s most vendors have. Then one day I came across a little blurb in Information Week about a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack in many popular Firewalls by a little company in North Carolina called Calyptix Security. Intrigued as the article mentioned that Calyptix was the maker of a UTM appliance, I headed over to their website and looked around. The more I read while I was there, the more excited I became. Rock-solid OpenBSD base: Check. Single Price Per Model: Check. New innovative ways of protecting your network: Check.

Having been thoroughly impressed enough by their claims and purported feature set, I filled out the web form for someone to contact me about a demo. The next day I received my first communication from Calyptix in the form of a phone call from, my now Account Representative, Ben Sanders. We chatted for a bit and setup a demo for sometime in the next couple days. This was when it really started to get interesting, as the Demo conference call included myself and Ben, as well as the company CEO, Ben Yarbrough, and lead developer, Lawrence Teo. Lawrence actually walked me through the Demo himself, pointing out features here and there, mentioning certain interesting backend and underlying features of the product that got the geek in me going. Concluding the conference call I was impressed enough to call Ben back and say ship me a Evaluation AccessEnforcer 2000. If it’s what it seems to be I’m definitely buying it.

This is usually when a relationship with a vendor can turn from that early honeymoon phase, to simply another dull relationship where you only go through the motions. But this is that story where I pull an EHarmony on you and say I found that one truly compatible person for me, and we couldn’t be happier. The early days when I first got the box where slow, but Dan Weber and Lawrence both patiently answered my questions as I began to get a feel for the box. Then as I began to branch out and experiment was where Calyptix began to shine. Tweaks and new features being written to improve the functionality of the box and to fix minor bugs, sometimes the same day as when they were asked about. No work-around for a problem. Solutions. Even as there must be times, even to this day, I must drive Lawrence nuts with my questions and suggestions, he and his development team continue to exceed my expectations every time.

Calyptix got me in the door with their product. It’s sleek, simple and does what it says it’s going to do. But they turned me from just being someone that would sell their product to a true raving fan, through their people and the support. Calyptix has an amazing product, but the fact that their partners and customers both mean so much to the company is what sets them apart. I’ve gotten the opportunity to meet both of the Ben’s, and frankly, how many people can say they got an opportunity to meet the CEO of one of their vendors. I have a lot of friends and colleges in the technology consulting space, and I’m wondering when they are all going to start telling me to shut up about this Calyptix Security company with this amazing firewall product.

A place to Colo…

Right around the time my company was just starting I knew we were going to be going to need some Collocation facilities to house our Remote Backup and Monitoring System. I knew from the start I wanted something local, so I could have access to my equipment whenever I needed. I started my research, focusing on the Baltimore area and one day came across a company called HostMySite in Newark, Delaware. I pulled up their site, did some rooting around, and decided they’d warrant a chance to earn my future business, as we were still probably many months out from needing a collocation facility. The next day I received a phone call from Scott Butz following up on my inquiry as well as an invitation to come up and checkout their datacenter. Being the geek that I am, I of course accepted and we scheduled a date for me to come in and take a look at the facility.

The day of the appointment was one of those horrid days that any consultant dreads. Nothing goes right, constantly behind, and just hoping that the day will end. I had the tour at HostMySite stuffed between two client meetings, and got stuck in traffic on my way north to both HostMySite and my second meeting. I called Scott to reschedule, but made a passing offer that if he wanted to stop by and say hi on his way home (as he lives in the same town as my client meeting), he was more than welcome too.
During the early part of the meeting Scott stopped in and sat down with us. He soon easily became part of what turned into three separate simultaneous meetings. Scott was a great and true sales person, that came from a technical background and was just fun to talk too. There was no push in his pitch, or any of those other traits that people dread from sales people. He simply listened to the questions my partners had, and answered everything thrown at him truthfully. At some point he had to leave to get home to his family, but he definitely left a lasting impression on both my partners and me. A couple days later I had the joy of visiting the datacenter and geeking out for a good hour seeing all the fun toys they happened to have at their facility.

A couple weeks later we had a need for some basic web services, so after everything I heard when Scott was visiting us and from my tour, I decided to give HostMySite a shot. Ordered a low-end Virtual Private Server, and was off to the races. After working through some initial issues, due to TCP port 53 being blocked at the network level, with their infrastructure team we were off to the races. Little things that they did for me at HostMySite here and there outside the true scope of their responsibility are where I was truly beginning to be impressed.

Following our conversion over to using HostMySite, I started adding clients here and there, each time being impressed by their level of customer service and willingness to help if something wasn’t perfect. So finally, after many months of telling Scott that I was in fact going to get collocation space, it was finally ordered. And again, another great experience with our web services and collocation vendor. The infrastructure technician that was assigned to me during my install visit was great to work with, and was a great help in getting our systems into the assigned space. Some of our collocation neighbors aren’t so neat when it comes to their setups, so he had to help me move some cables, get a longer screwdriver, and hold some parts in place during our install. None of which should really be his responsibility, but he did it all with a smile and cracking jokes all the while.

All my experiences with HostMySite have made it to where they are my location of choice for anything web services or collocation related. My account representative if a great guy, who always makes sure I get taken care of, their support staff is knowledgable, and quite frankly, if someone ever screws up bad enough, I can drive up there and smack them.

In closing…

The point of these two stories I just shared was to show that a company that doesn’t have that huge name recognition of their competitors can create a partner that is much more apt to sign their praises through their solid offerings, great support, and most importantly, the people. These smaller upstarts are more than capable of giving the big guys some black eyes because their people care. Their partners and their customers are the ones that matter to them. By listening more intently to the needs of their client base they are able to deliver a better product that is more in line with what the people actually using it want to see.

These are just two stories of vendors that have proven to me that even without being a household name you can provide a superior product with superior people. Both Calyptix and HostMySite have my business and my recommendation for all who need the services they provide for as long as I continue with a career in technical consulting. This is something that most consultants will probably never say… they will simply continue on with the flow and recommend next leader in a particular market segment when it happens.