Channel Pro - February 2009

Making Online Marketplaces Work for You

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR AN INDIVIDUAL OR A CREW to help out on a large IT infrastructure project? Or maybe you would prefer to work as a contractor on someone else’s project? Whether you’re buying help or selling your expertise, there are numerous online services marketplaces to help you find just the right situation.

Nearly 14,000 IT and CE pros throughout the United States and Canada have registered with OnForce.com, for example, says Maria Battaglia, senior vice president of marketing for OnForce Inc. in Lexington, Mass. The site provides a B2B- focused forum that companies—25 to 30 percent of which are major corporations—can use to find registered technicians for rollouts, installations, repairs, site surveys, and other engagements. In today’s economy, says Battaglia, most of these pros “are now booking a large part of their business through OnForce, because they find it a good platform for getting steady work.”

Meanwhile, at job auction site Elance.com, “Web and programming” contract gigs comprise

the largest employment category, according to Brad Porteus, chief marketing officer for Mountain View, Calif.-based Elance Inc. “Elancers” are also in high demand for design and multimedia work, he notes, with Flash, video production, and graphic design being particularly active.

The focus is also on freelance providers at Guru.com, although employers can restrict responses to their postings to companies that are registered on the site. IT-related engagements make up almost 60 percent of the site’s activity, with a high concentration of jobs in programming, software development, and Web site development, according to Kristin Sabol, spokesperson for the Pittsburgh-based company.

Online marketplaces such as these generally offer services to better the odds that both employers and those seeking work get what they’re after. Such services include vetting of professional certifications and backgrounds; transaction management services to ensure that money changes hands in a timely fashion after work is performed; and procedures for employers to provide feedback on the services they receive.

There are also things both employers/buyers and work-seekers/sellers can do to optimize results. First, employers need to be specific about what they want. At OnForce.com, for example, “Buyers pay to route work orders through us,” says Battaglia, “so they must be clear in the job

they are describing and price it right in advance.”

Indeed, job descriptions can be problematic. “A lot of job postings don’t provide enough details,” says Diane Tremblay, a freelancer and frequent user of Guru.com, who heads Multimedia Designs and Development Inc. in Coral Springs, Fla. “When you bid on these jobs, you don’t have enough information to provide a good bid and stick to it, so you wind up having to provide a bid on a preliminary basis.” That, in turn, stretches out the bidding and negotiation processes among the parties involved.

Job seekers, meanwhile, need to focus on building good online reputations, according to Nick Dalton, an Evergreen, Colo.-based specialist in iPhone development. “Elance, like most online marketplaces, is built on a reputation system,” Dalton says, so it pays for service providers to under-promise and over-deliver on projects. “Before you have any positive feedback in the system, you may have to do a few projects at lower rates just to get started. I consciously started with many rather small projects so I could quickly build a portfolio and gain clients that I could reference for future project work.”

Being a specialist rather than a generalist will win you more success on marketplaces like Elance, notes Dalton, who adds: “Becoming the expert will also help in keeping up your rates.”

—MartinSinderman

The Power Backup Opportunity

BUSINESSES NEED THE POWER ON to serve customers and drive profits. But most SMBs are woefully unprepared for power-related downtime. A recent survey commissioned by Emerson Network Power showed that only 39 percent of small businesses have backup power systems, and 61 percent lack backup power supplies.

Having and ensuring emergency power is essential for both productivity and business availability. The ENP survey showed that 42 percent of small firms had to close their doors during outages in 2007. When availability is hampered, customers are likely to seek a competitor.

“Power is vital and outages can threaten the livelihood of any business,” says Michael Maiello,

vice president of Business Network Solutions with APC by Schneider Electric. “Without proper power backup, businesses risk losing customers along with access to valuable data assets, core computing applications, and communications capabilities during outages and power failures.”

In today’s 24/7 economy, organizations simply can’t afford to deal with disruptions on the fly. Maiello stresses the importance of not only offering appropriate power backup solutions, but cooling and management as primary elements of a solid business continuity plan. “The first step is to identify the equipment essential to daily business operations. Then make sure those vital elements are on battery backup,” Maiello says. “Even with access to a generator, [a] business will experience downtime before it kicks on, and battery backup eliminates that potentially disastrous lag time.”

SMBs can easily implement a battery-backed UPS on servers, storage equipment, workstations, switches, routers, networking gear, and VoIP phones. To help your clients further protect their infrastructure and other IT assets, make sure they have appropriate cooling resources to keep computing equipment from overheating during prolonged outages. Finally, power management solutions can optimize productivity.

By providing visibility and control of the power status of any satellite offices and remote business locations, management tools allow even a limited IT staff to quickly and easily respond to outages, shed noncritical loads, and keep your clients’ operations humming during power failures.