Date: Fri, 03 Jan 1997 01:53:03 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> Cc: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD into larget corp. environment? Message-ID: <22430.852285183@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 03 Jan 1997 01:28:06 PST." <Pine.BSI.3.94.970103012535.17273A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> I think you need more than a representative--you need a real corporate > entity, a central organization with whom the large corporation can > contract for various services as they need them, whether it's > security problems, equipment that won't work, or whatever. Agreed. At this point, the only thing really stopping us from going for such an arrangement is startup capital. I've realized that the few donations which trickle in (and Annelise was one of the very first to do so - thanks, Annelise!) are about enough to buy the occasional disk drive or contribute to the construction of a mirror site (both of which have been FreeBSD, Inc. purchases) but not much more than that. Before I'd even consider setting up a support organization, I'd have to have enough money to hire a business manager and pay them a decent salary, a small used PBX and enough office space to house the front-line tech support people. The "heavyweights" could consult on an hourly basis from their homes, but you've gotta have somebody who's in a fixed location from 9am-5pm or the whole concept just won't fly. >From my very rough estimates, it would take around $350,000 to hire the first tech support people and the accountant/office manager, rent a small office in a not-too-wealthy part of town, get phone lines and a small PBX installed, run a T1 out from a local ISP and buy a couple of office server systems. And that's being highly frugal at all times; taking on full-time employees is just plain expensive, once you add up all the benefits and 401K plans you're required to make available. Operating costs would probably not drop much below $350K after the first year, either, since you'd need to expand operations beyond the starting point and probably incur lots of expenses you didn't initially count on, either. That means that you'd have to sell around 150 support contracts at $2,500/yr just to keep the doors open without a second round of funding and more like 300 if you wanted to show any kind of operating profit for your initial investor(s), something which they'd probably rather like. :-) So, I guess that leads in turn to two questions: 1. "Brother, can you spare $350K for a support organization?" 2. "Are there 300 companies out there who'd be willing to pay up to $2,500 a year for the privilege of pestering someone when their systems have problems?" Jordan
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?22430.852285183>