hey folks! basically what i'd like to do is begin a small start-up business (working from home), that specializes in deploying oss to local buinsesses and organizations. i've been pondering what may be the best direction to go in with this. so i was wondering, if you were going to attempt or are already doing the same sort of thing, what is the best marketing/business approach to get things going?

there's obviously going to be a big concentration on the benefits of oss over windows vista. putting a strong emphasis on urging businesses to open their minds to the possibility of linux over vista during their next upgrade cycle.

marketing aside, a big operational decision will be which distro(s) to advertise. in the past (while working as a full time systems administrator) i've always worked in heterogeneous *nix environment. basically we'd either run centos or rhel on the servers, and fedora or ubuntu on the workstations that ran linux. though, in most cases the workstations always ran windows.

i think when selling the idea of switching from windows to linux to a small organization, it's important to keep things uniform. i dont like the idea of putting ubuntu on the desktops, and rhel on the file server. though to be that would make sense, i think it becomes a harder sell to the unknowing customer because it just makes things sound even more complicated.

ok, with all of that being said. i'm also debating whether or not i should offer 4 different solution options, or just become a one distro shop. i could offer a complete network solution pacakge (pc's, laptops, servers) using ubuntu, sles/sled, rhel, or centos. or i could decide on one and put all of my focus into marketing that one specific distro. both options has its advantages and disadvantages. it's good to keep your options open, but its also good practice as a small start up company to do just one things really really well.

so, if i could pick your brains on this one and you could throw me some advice i would be much obliged.

cheers!

I think that you need to take a close look at the market before you commit, as the small business LAN isn't a great prospect for Linux yet. A lot of businesses rely on one or more vertical applications which have historically been Windows desktop applications, but many vendors are moving towards Windows + IIS + ASP.NET + MS SQL, and some are starting to make use of Sharepoint. In those cases moving away from MS may not even be possible.

An additional issue is the strength of Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server (SBS) product, which provides AD, IIS, ISA, Exchange etc. RHEL with Red Hat Directory Server and one of the proprietary groupware solutions probably wouldn't be competitive in terms of cost and convenience for a single server network, and Ubuntu doesn't have good options for directory services and groupware yet (I don't consider the PHP groupware applications to be equivalent to Exchange).