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I tried to ignore it, but I just can’t any more. It’s time for TMurgent to grow up a little. |
| Today is Kate’s first day on the job. Kate is my daughter, the one with the newly minted Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Her last final was Monday and she starts work today. Some of you have already met Kate, as she has been at some of our Training classes, as well as a number of events I have spoken at. |  |
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She is joining her brother, Patrick, who quietly started last year. Patrick has been a regular fixture at our classes for years, and this spring he started doing some of the teaching as well. Patrick has been the hands-on guy for our little contract sequencing service. This is a unique, hourly based, service where companies can send us applications that they find too hard to sequence, whether because it is a tough app (I’m not supposed to say “badly written”) or they just don’t have the manpower to get properly trained. |
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Kate will join Patrick working on our customized sequencing service. The service has been run more as a “something on the side” kind of thing, but with 50+% of the company manpower dedicated to the service, it is time to face reality and make it a first class professional service. The service we provide is an hourly service. We know that we aren’t getting a huge list of easy apps that we can do on a fixed rate basis, so we do it hourly. We work with the customer to provide constant feedback and recommendations. If you work hard, and long, and smart, enough you can probably generate a solution to make any app work under App-V, but it might not be worth that effort and cost. Each company has a unique pain threshold, they may have different deployment options or might be able to tell the user group they can’t have the app. So we use a constant feedback mechanism with the customer to help them to determine when to pull the plug on an app. We want to be successful, so we actually use a 2-tier pricing policy. If we are successful, the customer pays the full hourly fee. If we jointly decide to pull the plug, we reduce that fee for the time spent. Because we both have some skin in the game it makes the project go much smoother. Having doubled the company size in the last year (Mary Jane being the fourth), we will have to make some changes. TMurgent Technologies is no longer just about Tim. For nine years I have depended upon “word of mouth” for the business, but it is time to grow up a little. It is still a family business, but maybe now a little more business oriented. Of course it is a very busy time for us too! My new book (on Windows Performance) will come out this month, and we are deep into the writing of new courseware and tools for the App-V 5.0 version that will come out… sometime (honestly, Microsoft doesn’t tell us either). We are also taking on a major sequencing project of really, uh “tough”, apps for a major University. Getting new processes to accommodate these changes to the company will be the first order of business. I anticipate that we need to overhaul the website, but that can wait. |
