Since back in the Linuxcare days (say 1999 or so), I’ve been a service delivery guy. Prior to that I was an infrastructure kinda guy and did major projects for relocations, deployments, upgrades for the GAP. The work was exciting and I learned how to deal with massive numbers of business partners all with needs that often included the wretched blue screen of death on NT 4 boxes. Prior to NT 4 we did OS/2 Warp and it just rolled on. People would have 15 applications running at one time on systems with only 48mb of memory and P166 processors. Try that magic on NT or XP. Nope, ain’t gonna work.
Then I moved to Linuxcare. I was the second real employee after the three founders only because of how the alphabet works. Linuxcare has been blogged, discussed and cussed, slashdotted, and Ogara’ed a few times. But there is a reality and a fantasy that even former employees never get. I won’t go into all that reality and fantasy. I was then selected by the founders to setup a hardware lab that would work with enterprise hardware clients that wanted their systems to run Linux. Clients were IBM, Dell, HP. I built the business unit from nothing to something and then again to nothing. In a sublime twist of fate, I built the lab from a simple table to a real lab and then back to nothing when Linuxcare began changing its focus. After that I did professional services technical account management for enterprise clients. I had a few interesting deals that closed in some quarters. In one quarter, my projects accounted for 50% of the total revenue of professional services. I traveled a lot, was in Austin for Dell and IBM, went to lots of meetings. I met with a variety of folks and some became friends later and even work colleagues. But the real effort and focus was on services. Consulting services is not development engineering and its not product development. Its that most sublime of consulting where each effort may yield appreciable benefits and clients often see those folks as the first ones arriving. The services TAM often is responsible for more than just business and costing and initial technology assessment. I often turned into a technical project manager.
Linuxcare was interesting and different. Partly truth and partly fiction. If you only read the rags, you get this vision of a company bounded by scandal and other issues. I saw all this go down. I saw the people numbers go up to almost 300 folks and then when I left down to 50. Someone I worked with once called it a “roller coaster ride”. Yes. Twas that. But the one of the things I learned in “proserv” was the value of the client orientation. I ended up being the technical manager for Dell on a multi-year support, services, and education/training gig which taught me quite a bit about how OEMs work and what makes Dell so different.
Now I’m beyond and I still see the articles and Slashdotting. Everyone wants to have a way to remove the baggage and move on. I’m part of the moving on since I work at Levanta which was Linuxcare. I went back or went there. Its not really going back. A author once said “you can never go back”. I don’t view this as going back; but it is a direction I take. Services are still important because I view our customers as the most important thing we have. Customer relationships are to be treasured and valued. The motto of Services since I own it is to be of service to customers and deliver a thing of value. I spent 6 days a week most weeks working with company stakeholders on those goals.
Remember when you read the stories about Linuxcare that what it was once was not the way it was started out. I remember when there were only 7 to 10 folks in all of Linuxcare. We were like children then. Young, working at home, looking with wonder at actually having an office. Then we got the first office in SF. It was like coming home but the room was all old and dirty and we all had a single room. Time always travels on and the dot.boom days were different. I’ve moved past them and I value the Linuxcare days for a lot of reasons. There was a lot of good and bad that came of it. But I still have friends from those days and we actually meet at the LInuxworld Expo in SF to have a labs reunion. Things always transcend their times.
