The usual way to start this topic will be “for any organization at some point of time they will have to decide how to deal with growing demands from existing clients and the need to expand and acquire new clients”  Anyways, we are also facing it. I thought of writing down what we decided about it.

Its so happening that we are putting all our might after fine tuning an e-commerce portal we are working on but now we are facing page load time issue, and on a dead-end on the SEM platform we are developing for a client due to technical glitches from the APIs of the 2 search engines competing for second position & the third project from our first client – angel – need more resources. At the same time our cloud IaaS team is starting to work on couple of exciting assignments. To make things worse we are on an aggressive marketing mode which is bringing in new enquirers every-other day which needs a lot of attention.

What we do ?

Before things getting into such a situation, we had a discussion. We wanted to win new projects & increase revenue stream, hire new people & achieve the dream of becoming a 100 member team providing the best in the class solutions by 2011. But, wait. I thought about the angel who got hooked with us more than an year ago and waited for us to increase capacity, the other client who sang happy birthday for me from other side of planet earth over a cranky phone connection we had then, and various other things happening around us.

During the discussion I had  2 examples in mind which is given below.

We have a place where they sell chicken dishes which resembles  Arabian dishes. The outlet is in a prime spot on the highway, there is enough parking space, its near a college with may be 2000 students etc. I used to go there occasionally as they used to open till mid night when I finally find myself thinking about dinner. Besides all the good things like a prime location and all other favorable conditions, they never had customers. The quality of the food was bad, the customer service and focus was not existing. I still keep going as I had no choice and the last I went was few months back when they kept me waiting for nearly ten minutes just to collect the bill.

I can’t really write about the second case, but its something like this. The provider is a monopoly and nearly everyone uses them. But whenever people need proactive service, they choose a new generation alternative. So people keep two service providers and the old provider is slowly loosing business and it will be loose its business in few years and the restaurant in case one will be closed in few months.

I sounded bit affirmative than usual in the discussion and finally decided that we will not be spending even a second of attention on new clients unless the existing requirements are met. The existing clients have not only made us what we are now but they trust their future with us. We are 100% confident that we will deliver our best & come out of this. Let this post act as a record.

I send a mail to the angel to hear his opinion on resource allocation & ended it as follows:

You are an angel for us & angels/existing-clients gets the best attention than new clients !

everything else will follow.

For ages I wanted to have blog where I can discuss about my work, technology, crowd sourcing, social networking and many other things. I have a blog, living the dreams where I post photos and random musings on various topics and write ups in Malayalam which is my mother tongue.

Now since I am doing only those things I wanted to do – yea, no more XML embedded Java, no more disappointments hearing the feature you worked your a*s off got scrapped, fixing GUI labels of an NMS  product even though everyone knows I hate GUIs and my skills can be put to better use, no more switching between desktops and laptop running OSes which I can’t bear, no more fooling around century old technologies – I thought this is high time to have a technical blog or a English only blog.

I have been monitoring technical blogs some are pretty useful and others are ‘generated’ based on which popular keywords have enough search volume but not much relevant content. The biggest incident of recent times was the mysterious death of the great pop star Michael Jackson. I came to know about the news 2 days after the incident as I was busy with a project release and I was equally shocked like the rest of the world but never got time to watch TV – Oh, I don’t own a TV and haven’t seen TV in last 9 months or so – search in Google, search in Bing and see how the results vary etc. I have never seen him or I have never taken a photo of him. But as of today I have the most interesting Micheal Jackson photo as per Flickr and third most popular Michael Jackson photo as per Technorati.

The trend of recent times is crowdsourcing or make the crowd work free for you make profits out of it. The latest example could be Chrome OS where the big G will probably make use of Firefox and Google Gears to perform everything that was traditionally performed by complicated GUI APIs. The man hours that was spend for developing Firefox is now helping giant corporations ! (yes, its high time for the FOSS community to unite !)  User generated content and social networking is the manthra for the day. Even the prOn industry is getting hit by the social networking sites. Among many things I will try to write about is crowd sourcing and marketing using the same. Oh, yea I am not bad at it because I have world’s most popular Micheal Jackson Photos at the moment – even though I have never seen or shot him !

I will be writing about Cloud computing, network security, EMS, UNIX, Free Software, crowdsourcing, social networking, Performance Engineering of applications, sparksupport.com and much more but for the time being its about online marketing and –

world’s most interesting Micheal Jackson photo:

Tagged as Micheal Jackson
Tagged as Micheal Jackson

Flickr.com says:

flickr - most interesting photo tagged with micheal jackson
flickr – most interesting photo tagged with micheal jackson

Technorati says:

Top images tagged michael jackson
Top images tagged michael jackson

In short,  what if I had a sellable commodity in place of those images ? In today’s knowledge centric world, one who has ideas and one who can implement them wins.

disclaimer: the photos used in this post has nothing to do with Michael Jackson. They are used as a way to analyze the interenet search trends and how to cash them.