While defining our plan for Atlas’ quest for world domination we decided it was time to bite the bullet and become Microsoft Gold Partners.  We love Microsoft, they form the backbone of our business and we enjoy using (most) of their products.  So we set off…

To become a Gold partner it was first necessary to obtain a Certified partner level, so that’s where we began and this is the story.  You would think that as Microsoft profits heavily and relies strongly on the marketing efforts of the partners involved with the Microsoft partnership programme, it would be in Microsoft’s interests to plaster details of how organisations can partner with them all over the Internet.  Alas this is not the case.  Step one of partnership enrolment involves opening the Pandora’s box of evil that is enrolment in the Microsoft Partner portal.  Like all of Microsoft’s portals this of course requires a valid Hotmail account, no OpenID authentication here I’m afraid.  One other point worthy of note, don’t try to use any browser other than Internet Explorer.

That’s right, fire up Internet Explorer, you’ll need it. And the fun doesn’t end there, even using Internet Explorer the Partner Portal is clunky, poorly laid out, crashes if you wave your cursor angrily at it and relies heavily on pop-up windows for navigation. How very nineties Microsoft.

So we got stuck in to the partner portal, and after staring blankly at the computer screen for an hour, the confusion started to lift and I found myself making sense of the process. According to Microsoft points mean prizes, or in this case, a Microsoft Certified Partnership. The programme is based on an elaborate points system. Performing various tasks, such as obtaining customer referrals, testing our bespoke software to ensure compatibility with Windows 7, and putting our employees through Microsoft’s MCTS exams would each earn us points. A customer referral was 3 points, Windows 7 accreditation was 30 points, and so on. 50 points were required to become a certified partner, and a whopping 120 points required for gold.

That’s easy I thought.  I’ll fire off 10 customer reference requests, test one of our Windows form applications for compatibility with Windows 7, and we’ll have 60 points.  I diligently started to fire off customer referral requests to our client base.  I then started the long process for Windows 7 accreditation, a process so boring, backwards and painfully crap that it’s almost worthy of a separate blog post.  Instead I’ll just leave a link to the Windows 7 qualification “portal” here and leave you to your own conclusions – http://winqual.microsoft.com/.  For good measure I put one of our team through an MCTS exam to bump our points well over the amount required.  I chose our CTO Dean for this task as he has the nickname “passmaster” due to his inability to fail exams.  He kept up with his namesake and passed the exam with ease.  Interestingly though, he spotted a chap enter the exam room, and in 10 minutes nail a Microsoft MCTS exam and make a quick exit.  Now Dean is good but even he took 50 minutes.  The reason he needed 50 minutes was due to the lengthly nature of the exam questions, one question can span the length of an A4 page and this takes time to read and digest properly.  After Dean passed his exam the examiner raised the subject of the man who had superhuman reading skills and pointed out rather nonchalantly that people regularly turn up and ace Microsoft exams in 15 minutes.  The exam hosts clearly know that people are cheating by memorising the answers but frankly they’re not paid enough to care.

Anyway I digress, we were finished!  Two weeks on and over 60 points finally notched up.  However our celebrations swiftly came to an end when we spotted something was amiss.  The Microsoft Partner Portal loudly proclaimed it was time for us to sign a Partner agreement and cross Microsoft’s palm with silver.  Unfortunately every time we clicked the Upgrade Now button an error appeared.  A quick call to Microsoft confirmed that we had unwittingly began the process of acquiring our partnership during a transitional phase  where the requirements for a Microsoft partnership were changing.  Not to worry though we were told, a week later the Upgrade Now button would begin working again and we could use our points to upgrade to the all new silver partnership programme.  Unfortunately this was a lie, after the switchover our points were deleted and replaced with a new completely unrelated system.  The certified partner level was now renamed to silver, and we required:

• Two members of staff with an MCP each (we only had one)
• One member of staff having passed the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment (this was new)
• Three references for each of the Microsoft competencies we wanted to apply for (competencies are sub divisions of the overall silver accreditation and we could reuse what we already had)
• One Windows 7 compatible product

Victory had been snatched from us at the last moment but I was determined to continue given we had already invested so much time and money.  We stuck another one of our elite coding squad through the Microsoft exam (he spotted another person cheating during his exam) and I took the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment.

Finally we could pay Microsoft the fee, which for those of you not in the know is £1,374 + VAT for silver certification, we still don’t know how much gold certification is but presume it is more.  We waited excitedly for an e-mail to be informed what we could expect to receive in return for our money but once again were left to find out for ourselves.  Hell, we didn’t even know where to obtain our Microsoft partner logo from (the answer in case you’re wondering is http://www.partnerlogobuilder.com/).  All the work we had put in had ended with an anti-climax.

Clearly there are a number of problems with the process, not least of which are:

• Without signing into the partner portal using Internet Explorer it’s simply not possible to locate a simple overview of what is required to become a silver partner.  Equally as important, our customers cannot see and understand what we have been through to become partners
• The pricing for the certification is also a well-kept secret
• Customer references that we have requested are not vetted by Microsoft in any way.  We could easily have created 10 e-mail addresses and falsified our references
• The exams Microsoft request their partners take are clearly being undermined by a number of people and of course the organisations that host the exams
• It is incredibly difficult to find out what it is exactly that Microsoft partners receive for their hard work and cash by signing up to the partner programme
• There is little to no support from Microsoft representatives during the process.  Most front line support reps don’t have the knowledge to assist with the most basic of enquiries.  Tweets and e mails to Microsoft are replied to up to a week later.  They also insist on responding to my Hotmail account even when I e-mail them from my work e-mail account
• Following successful completion of the programme and following payment no information is provided on what we can expect to receive as part of the Microsoft programme.  The benefits are ridiculously difficult to locate and understand

More important than all of the above, not a single one of our customers understands the hoops we have jumped through and what it means for them to be working with a Microsoft Silver partner.  There’s really little to no business value added for them as there’s simply no information on the Internet detailing why organisations should work with Microsoft partners over non-partners.  So I’m left wondering has the process been a waste of time, and the answer is a resounding yes.  All we’ve been given is this logo:

And this rather natty plaque

For now we’ll stick with the silver partner until Microsoft proves to us, and our customers, there’s a good enough reason to jump through more hoops and pay them more money for a gold certification.

So we’ve been quiet over the summer but for good reason, our new chairman has been driving us forward hard and as a result we have a number of amazing things to shout about.

Firstly we should tell you the five big goals we now have in place for the next two years, they’re ambitious but we think we can achieve at least two out of  five.  In fact, we have already achieved our first goal of opening office space in London:

1. Open office space in London – done!
2. Rebrand Atlas starting with our logo – done, we have a new website too
3. Hit the £2m per year turnover mark in the next two years – yes we know turnover is vanity but it’s a nice round target to aim for
4. Position ourselves as the Software as a Service (SaaS) development company in the UK, Europe and maybe the world
5. Get Atlas certified with Microsoft - done, see the blog post on our experience here

So we now have offices in London, the exact address you’ll find on our contact page.  Over the last couple of years we have been working on larger projects for bigger customers and we want to locate ourselves so that we’re easily accessible.  We’ll keep our offices in Essex as there’s no real benefit in relocating all of the staff to London.

To coincide with our new business aims it was decided that it is high time for a rebrand.  We’re already working on our new logo and can’t wait to show off the new website when that’s ready around December time.

So what’s with the turnover target I hear you ask?  Well KPIs as I’ve come to know them, or in other words numbers you can review every day/week/month to get a feel for your business, are in my opinion fun and exciting to watch.  The turnover is an obvious target, and I’m also monitoring our turnover in conjunction with our net profit, cost of sales, revenue per customer/industry and a few other internal metrics to ensure that we focus on the most profitable areas of the company.  On a more personal note, large goals such as the £2m turnover mark in two years are also incredibly important for me as CEO to keep me focused on the bigger picture.

Our final target is slightly less tangible but nonetheless still very important.  We genuinely feel that there is a lack of SaaS development taking place in the UK and Europe.  Yes we have a number of SaaS applications but there aren’t any software development companies out there saying  “If you want SaaS application development, come to us”.  So as nobody else has bothered to go for it, we’ve decided we’re going to fill that position.  We want the name Atlas to be synonymous with that of SaaS application development.

Finally, we’re now Microsoft Silver partners.  This Microsoft level of accreditation was formerly known as certified which this week they have scrapped.  Because of this we have to wait until November to retrieve our shiny new logo for our website.  We’re now working towards gold partnership, only 65 partner points to go!!

There I was singing the virtues of my organic methods for growing Atlas and little did I know I had it all wrong.  Sure we have plenty of delighted clients, a great development team and even a few awards to our name but I was drained and with little sign of an exit plan from the long hard slog it was obvious that I’d soon run out of steam.  The timing of the YesAndClub meeting was perfect and fortunately I knew exactly who I wanted to appoint chairman.  The very next day I drafted a short e-mail to Richard Harwood CFA, a hard working businessman based in Jersey who has been a long standing customer, advocate and friend of Atlas.

Three months later and following some serious due diligence Richard is now appointed as our first external shareholder and chairman.  Myself and the team are working harder than we’ve ever worked before but with a difference, we now have our direction and focus back.  Additionally we have implemented more infrastructure changes since Richard’s appointment than we have implemented in the last year.  Examples off the top of my head include:

• The appointment of a new office manager, to reduce my workload and manage Atlas’ HR, payroll, bookkeeping and reception.  My Mum has filled this role, which will be the subject of a blog post in the future
• New automated processes for generating quotes to our customers, ensuring that I am not a bottle neck when we have a large order pipeline
• A bonus scheme, rewarding staff on the basis of their individual performance and also that of the company
• An intelligent set of monthly management figures.  Our previous figures were not transparent enough
• Formal budgets.  Which has put the stop on expenditure just because I’m in a good mood.

You may say that all of this is fairly rudimentary.  I agree.  Our chairman hasn’t told me anything I didn’t already know but I’ve been so busy letting the business run me that I simply didn’t have the time to make such obvious changes.

I owe a big thank you to Robert Loch for introducing to me to his friends and associates via the YesAndClub and an even bigger thank you to our new chairman Richard Harwood.  I’m excited about the future again and look forward to what it has in store for myself and Atlas.

I’m interested in your feedback, what would you change about your business if you could find the time?

Essentially I exposed the University of Essex and their “Business Incubation Centre” as a centre that doesn’t do much in the way of incubation.  If you’d like to know more about my thoughts check out the article

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/echofeatures/businessnews/4573217.Why_is_uni_failing_businesses_/

I hope that the University takes my comments on board in a positive manner and ensures that other SMEs are in a position to take advantage of what should be an excellent local business resource.  Furthermore the school of entrepreneurship and business and the incubation centre need to align their efforts again to ensure that going forward everybody wins.

Following the successful growth of KashFlow Duane Jackson KashFlow’s CEO and founder has sought a buyer for www.streaming-services.co.uk to allow him to focus his efforts on KashFlow.

Streaming-services.co.uk is a unique web based streaming service that offers fixed price monthly bandwidth allocation rather than the number of concurrent users its customers expect to have.  An additional unique offering of the service is that customers never receive an unexpected invoice as they are always warned if they are about to exceed their bandwidth.

Streaming-services.co.uk had a wide range of customers and was perfectly suited for Atlas to take over given the expertise and hosting infrastructure Atlas already has in place.

Simon Swords, manager of Atlas Computer Systems said “Considering our existing infrastructure and the potential market for streaming-services.co.uk we felt it was the right choice to take on the business.  We’ll be looking at ways in which we can enhance the service streaming-services.co.uk provides over the coming months while offering existing customers a high level of support and continued value for money”.

Duane Jackson commented “We’ve worked with Atlas on a number of projects and they were the logical choice to take on the business.  I wish Atlas all the best and hope they continue to grow the company for years to come”.