Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Archive for the ‘General Thoughts’ Category
Credit Goes Where Credit Is Due
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
(From left to right, Lisa Virtue – Osama Faris – Anson Pereira – Wayne Bartlett)
Yes folks, the title is pretty canned, but I really couldn’t think of anything sharp or witty. So it’ll have to do! This year has been a transition year for FAR; aggressive marketing, brand maturation, stepping outside of our comfort zone to truly understand what we are and why we’re different. One of our key partners, WatchGuard, honoured FAR with a Creative Marketing Award for 2010 at the Seattle Conference. As much as I would love to soak up the honour and bask in it, I’ve got to be true to myself and share the love with the two people who REALLY deserve the glory – Film Director Lisa Virtue from Right Path Pictures, and studio owner Wayne Bartlett from Bartmart Audio. No words could possibly describe the gratitude, so a picture is worth a thousand words. The only one physically missing from the shot is Ononymous, the rap star who wrote the lyrics and performed – but he’s there in spirit (you’ll get what I mean soon enough).
You Got To Give To Get
Monday, August 9th, 2010I really get sick of me. I’ve stopped going to my corporate web site because what’s the first thing that pops up? Me. What I’ve realized is that, nothing makes me happier than you. I love it when I can find something to write about that does NOT involve me, FAR or anything related to either. This is what giving to get is all about.
So as you know from my social feeds, I was at the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit in Dallas a few weeks ago. Great event, interesting ideas, fantastic people. Two of them however, stand above the rest in my books.
Enter Jennifer Bauer-Anaya and Dennis Crupi onto my blog stage. I’ve only spoken to Jennifer a few times over the phone and had a few email blasts back and forth. She’s a PR/marcomm/marketing specialist and has been trying to get me onto a webinar as a subject matter expert to present. The love doesn’t stop there.
Monday evening, Jennifer masterminds dinner and includes some really neat people like Travis Austin from MSPintegrations who I am a “not so secret anymore” admirer of – dude, I forgot to get your autograph), Gennifer Biggs from Business Solutions Magazine (remember to say “hello”!) and last but definitely not least, the coolest person I have met in a very, very long time – Dennis Crupi. Dennis is the Director of Creative Services, for Ingram Micro. I was so glad to meet Dennis – not just because he saved me from having to pay for dinner, but because he did for me in the next 5 hours (we were talking till 1AM) what no amount of money could have done for my business.
So here is what he did for me (for free):
- He confirmed for me that I was not an idiot. You’re probably saying “sure, ya right, not an idiot. Have you read your own blogs, Osama? Are you drunk on your own KoolAid? (more on the KoolAid thing on another blog)”. I’m serious – in 5 hours, I exposed to him FAR in a way that I have never, ever exposed to anyone, except myself, in front of a mirror with the bathroom door double locked and barred (and you thought this blog was NOT about FAR…ya right).
- He validated FAR’s marketing efforts. FAR has been working on a marketing strategy for months and months. It has been a hard road. Like Dennis said, it’s not just about having marketing for the sake of having marketing (or in Dennis’ words, it’s not about “showing up and throwing up” – sorry Dennis, I know you’re going to hate me for attributing that one to you), it’s about making marketing make your business grow. It’s about making marketing produce results. Wow, what a really cool concept, Osama. “Geez, you’re a rocket scientist. How long did it take you to figure that one out?” you say. Longer than you think, is my answer to what I can HEAR you saying to yourself as you read this blog. Yes, this blog has nascent Web 3.0 technologies built into it – I can see you read, hear you say the words in your head as you read, feel your finger on your scroll wheel rolling down to the next sentence, watch in horror as you click the X on the top right to shut my web site off right now out of fear that what you are READING right now is actually true. Being at 46,000 feet while I wrote the majority of this blog must be affecting my small brain. I need to see a doctor.
Two things? Is that all it takes to make you idolize someone? No, most important, what Dennis and Jennifer did last night is reinforce one of the driving forces behind our marketing campaign for 2010 and beyond. I’ve said this statement so many times to myself, my staff and clients. It’s not what you know, it’s what you share.
When I say share, I don’t mean like a “Web 2.0 share”, also called classically as bait-n’-switch. Or as the “cool people” say it, how do we “monetize” the exchange. No, it is what you truly share, without expecting in return. It’s like our “Get the Skinny On” campaign running at Executive Fitness Leaders (the gym next door to our office). For the past several months, once a month we profile one of the clients that go to this premier, private studio-based facility and plaster their profile and picture in the cardio room for a month.
We tell their story. With absolutely nothing expected in return. At no cost to them or to the gym – and there is a cost to FAR (designer time, professional photographer, coordination, writing, editing, etc etc.). Sure, the FAR logo is plastered on the water dispenser. But I could have paid a couple of hundred bucks a month and got that. The key element was the community building nature of the campaign. We wanted to take the time to share other people with other people. Just like Jennifer did connecting me to Dennis. Just like Dennis did re-connecting me back to myself. Dennis, truly – thank you for what you did. I am forever indebted to you. Rock on.
Maturity: Better Late than Never
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010Recently I’ve noticed some things repeating. Business (and the economy more generally) often goes in cycles. FAR is going through a lot of growth. That happened before during the .com rush. Like a lot of other people, I thought the economic upswing was indestructible and I hate to say it, but I made a lot decisions that I paid for dearly.
Reminiscing gave me some pause to think about how I’ve changed as a business person over the years. I’ve changed. I’ve learned. While I’m still an entrepreneur that chases opportunity in pursuit of excellence, here are the top 5 things I’m doing differently today:
- Surrounding myself with happy people. You’d be surprised how important this is. Who would you rather have supporting your network? Someone who was competent, gruff and unhappy or someone who was competent, friendly and happy? The latter. Who wouldn’t? In fact, the only person on staff who is not overflowing with happiness is my Chief Marketing Officer. Free espresso. Free San Pellegrino. Corner office with a huge window. Still, he acts like I pooped in his cereal. What can I say? I did witness Vince smiling once; it was over our new business cards. But seriously, every business also needs serious employees. People who are serious can be happy, too.
- Putting my existing clients ahead of chasing new business. FAR customers definitely appreciate this, and many businesses make the mistake of trying to chase every dollar that floats their way. At FAR, we focus on serving a small number of customers really, really well. We say ‘no’ to business if it compromises moral principle. I prefer to make “heavenue”: heavenly work that produces revenue.
- Festina lente! It’s Latin. Yeah, I went there. It translates to: make haste, slowly. At FAR, we’ve thrown the phrase “as soon as possible” almost completely out of our corporate vocabulary. Today, at FAR we do “what is correct — quickly and cost-effectively”. Mistakes made in haste can be very expensive. So, we focus on being responsive, but in a way that avoids the panic that stems from everything being treated with equal rush priority. When you panic, you make mistakes. That’s why paramedics never run to get to an injured person. When you make basic mistakes, you might as well send your customer a singing telegram about why their money is not well-spent with you.
- The money is in a trust account. What customers are really looking for these days is a trusted advisor for IT. Not a “partner”, an “expert”, or a “computer geek”. Yesterday I was in the elevator at one of my largest customers and one of the employees in the elevator said “do you work here?” I said yes and no. She said: “I see you here all the time meeting the Boss”. Hard to explain to her in 30 seconds that I’m there all the time “meeting with the boss” due to the trusted advisor status FAR has with a multi-million dollar global enterprise.
- I don’t wait for the phone to ring. I’m proactive. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Support is often a thankless job. So, I seek out the compliments. I’m not shy about it. Just yesterday I walked into Vince’s office and said: what do you think of my new guayabera? I didn’t wait for him to answer: I said, yes, yes, it is awesome, isn’t it. I don’t wait for someone to say thank you. I call them and ask them how they’re doing.
The Far Cloud: Giving Clients One Back to Pat
Friday, January 15th, 2010In my last blog, I mentioned “The FAR Cloud” and I talked a bit about what that means to FAR’s customers. In this blog, I’m going to address the concept in greater detail by explaining what FAR does as an IT managed service provider.
What does “IT managed services” mean?
One of the most common questions I’m asked is: what does FAR do? Most people already know that FAR does something IT related, but information technology is an extremely wide field. There are multiple layers and lots of niches. Historically, most IT firms have specialized in one of a handful of things.
Some IT firms focus on “consulting”, which typically means improving desktop and organization productivity. Some IT firms focus on technical support, and some on custom programming. Still others focus on rolling out and maintaining networks and core infrastructure systems. These are just broad categories, with lots of specific niches (for example, some IT companies focus entirely on setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting their clients’ connections to the Internet).
In contrast, IT managed services firms take a different, more end-to-end approach. IT managed services often includes everything from high-level consulting to very brass tacks technical support and monitoring. As my Chief Marketing Officer says, IT managed services firms provide customers with one back to pat. That’s really what FAR does and part of what sets us apart: we provide small and medium-sized businesses with one back to pat for all of their information technology needs, whether it’s a security audit and analysis, a network implementation, business analysis consulting, or a new laptop.
So, what’s the FAR Cloud?
In my last blog, I discussed the value and hype of cloud computing. I’ll be discussing what to host and what to put in The Cloud in a string of articles over the next few weeks. Cloud computing takes the information technology complexity out of the business premises and moves it to the Internet; FAR takes all of the IT complexities off of our clients’ shoulders, regardless of where the information technology actually sits.
As a managed service provider, FAR provides a cloud of its own so to speak. As far as our customers are concerned, whether a server sits in their server room or is virtualized somewhere on the Internet, FAR makes sure that it works as expected, that it is monitored 24/7 and that it is continuously improved. To use the industry jargon, FAR does the operations, the administration, the management, the provisioning and the troubleshooting (the OAMPT for short) for most of our clients’ IT systems, end-to-end.
Some of our clients have internal IT resources, but most do not. I would say that many of FAR’s clients don’t have an IT team, but that’s not true: that’s the service that FAR provides to them. FAR is their IT team. The FAR Cloud simply refers to the carefully planned, executed and monitored package of information technology software, hardware and software that FARs plans, put into place and then monitors in order to help our clients meet their business challenges.
The FAR Cloud includes doing everything from fixing mice and sound cards when they break, to making sure that servers don’t melt, to network rollouts, to unified communications and voice over IP systems, to making sure the network is secure, and more. “One back to pat” means that if our customers have a business process or information technology challenge, we help them to solve it in a way that’s transparent, but also doesn’t require them to master a lot of technical details. That’s the FAR Cloud.
What’s in it for customers? It’s all about values
The value that IT managed services firms provide to customers it that they (should) take all of that complexity off the customer’s plate, create a solution, put it in place, monitor it, make it work and improve it over time. That’s what the FAR Cloud provides to customers: all of the benefits of an enterprise-level IT solution at a reasonable cost with none of the complexity: peace of mind, the best possible value in terms of meeting their business requirements, and the strongest possible footing for continued growth. If you’re working with an IT vendor who’s not providing that to you, FAR definitely can!
But I’m not just going to say it and hope for the best. Over the next several articles, I’m going to be sharing many of FAR’s insights into what to host and what to keep on premise in terms of your business systems. I’m going to be blogging about how to work with your customers more securely, how to keep your costs low for your email systems, how you can get the most value from a VoIP phone system, how to make unified communications an integral part of your business and a lot more. Be sure to watch this space regularly!
Never underestimate the underdog
Sunday, June 21st, 2009This week, a miracle unfolded. In the world game of football (aka soccer for some) something incredible happened and shocked the billions of fans following the 2009 Confederation Cup. Egypt, the African Cup champions (who haven’t qualified for the World Cup in 20+ years) beat the current World Champions Italy 1-0. You could almost hear all the football fans around the world stop breathing simultaneously as the referee blew the final whistle. A miracle had occurred and shocked every football fan that has ever watched the worlds game. Egypt beat Italy.
It doesn’t end there. Long has the Egyptian National Team been criticized ad nauseum about how they absolutely stink at set plays (i.e. penalty, foul kick, corner kick). Egypt scored the only goal of the game on a corner kick. Mohamed Homos, the young player who scored the Shakesperean header in the top left corner of the net as the world-class Italian goalkeeper stood there like his feet were planted in concrete, was playing in his first EVER international game for the National Team.
There are a couple of lessons to be learned from these miraculous events.
Never underestimate the underdog. In business, we sometimes develop tunnel vision and think “hey, we’re the best and no one can beat us in the niche we play in”. The higher you go, the harder you fall. Every day I look in the mirror in the morning and I remind myself of this lesson. I even talk to myself — “Osama, you are going to be humble, but confident, aggressive in your pursuit of excellence, but accepting of your limitations and weaknesses”. No one is perfect. Its the pursuit of the unreachable goal of excellence that makes successful entrepreneurs what they are.
Just because you’re young and inexperienced, it doesn’t mean you can’t do something great. When I was a young, and started my own business, I always used to get the “doubt treatment”. I remember one customer in particular – I was in an interview for a project and the two interviewees were practically rolling on the floor laughing when I confidently told them I could deploy a nationwide network migration for them with zero user downtime in 8 months. I finally challenged them – I told them that I would show them my plan and proof of concept in 2 months and if it didn’t make sense they could cancel my contract. Suffice it to say the nationwide deployment was done under budget, on time and with zero user downtime as promised.
It would be foolish for me to puff out my chest in pride and say that Egypt will win the Confederation Cup. But for a few moments on Thursday, one watched a miracle occur, and hope poured in through my viens as the country of my origin played their hearts out and showed the world to never underestimate the underdog. Go Egypt!
The (Microsoft) Word on the Street
Monday, January 12th, 2009Ok, so call me a father behind the times…I haven’t been exactly enthusiastic about the kids working on the computer. Don’t get me wrong, I have a computer at home for general use purposes (although I must admit it is 6 years old and overdue to be put out to pasture) but I haven’t really been encouraging the kids to use it. Call me old school (and strange to be coming from an IT professional) but my theory is that it is important for kids these days to start by learning how to do things the “manual” way, and as they grow appreciate automation through that learning experience. Take math as a simple example – do they give kids calculators in Grade 1 to do their math homework with? That’s how I was brought up – I don’t rush to my Blackberry to calculate the tip on a $40.00 lunch bill.
Last year, when my eldest was in Grade 3, he came home from school with a book report project. He needed to read a book and then prepare a written report as well a Bristol board presentation with text and pictures to present to the class. The teacher provided a grading matrix which clearly defined how the project would be marked and encouraged parents to assist their children in completing the project. I got called in to assist, and I eagerly jumped in with all fours. Here was a perfect opportunity to do things the “manual” way and teach my son the art of preparing a book report and presentation.
First things first – we both headed out to Staples and bought some Bristol board, coloured paper, glue and a stencil for tracing letters. Supplies in hand, I waited for my son to read the book he wanted to write about and then we sat down together and planned out the content of the book report. He wrote up his rough copy on lined paper while I started to spec out how we were going to present it on the Bristol board. Soon enough, we were tracing letters with the stencils and then colouring them in. Additional text was written on white paper with a colour paper background and then pasted onto the Bristol board. All told, it took us a good 6 hours to trace all the words, colour everything in, and get it all spic and span. Next came practicing the verbal presentation so that he did not need to use notes (eye contact was an important point in the grading matrix). Boy, this was a lot of work!
So off to school he went – everyday I would ask him, “did you get your mark back for your presentation?” “Nope”. I was starting the fret. Finally the grade came through – a B+! I was shocked! B+? I quickly scanned the marking matrix to find where he got a low grade. Lo and behold, the Bristol board presentation was the weakest link. All that effort for naught? I whipped out a piece of paper and wrote a letter to the teacher asking her politely if she could provide more details as it pertains to why the Bristol board failed to make the grade. Her response was, in this day and age, your son should have used a computer to generate the content of the Bristol board….and oh by the way, next time you write a note Mr. Faris, could you please type it? I’m having a hard time reading your cursive handwriting….
Just a few weeks ago, I noticed my son was spending quite a significant time on the computer. Curiosity got the better of me, so I took a peek while he sat in front of the computer. Open on the screen was Microsoft Word, with a centered title, fully justified paragraphs and him plugging away, entering in content. “Who taught you how to use Microsoft Word?” “Nobody”, he responded. So much for doing things the “manual” way – an important lesson for me as a parent and IT professional that technology is ubiquitous, easy to learn and inevitable.
So What's in a Name? Osama, Obama and My Relationship to them Both
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008Ok, let’s start by keeping in mind that what happened on September 11, 2001 was a horrific act of murder of innocent lives. It was a heinous crime against humanity. It was also a crime against the peaceful religion that it was done in the name of. There is not a religion on this earth that condones killing innocent, defenseless people.
So that being said, this story is about a little fellow who lives in Ottawa (err…me….) whose name is Osama. Osama Faris. That’s right, first name Osama, last name Faris.
Life has been “interesting” the past 7 years. My name has caused me no lack of incidents and I thought I would share a few of the more spectacular ones with you: