This week I was at the Comptia Breakaway event.  In the booth next to ours, there was a company called OnForce which describes itself as an online marketplace for on-site technology services. In a nutshell, their site allows you to shop for subcontractable (I think that’s a word) engineers who can perform technical services. One of their reps explained to me that they have 11,000 people listed. Each engineer has a profile that includes his/her certifications and specializations. Here’s the best part: after someone uses one of these engineers, they get to rate the work of that person. This means they have a vested interest in doing good work since it will be viewed by future shoppers.

Why is this important for Catalyst resellers? Two reasons: First, if you don’t currently have adequate skills in-house to do implementations in the data networking space (say for instance: Juniper, Extreme..), you can sub out that work with a higher amount of confidence then if you were just searching blindly on the web or in yellow pages. Second, this represents an opportunity for YOU to list your engineers (telephony or data) on the OnForce marketplace. Since it’s important for you to max out billable hours from your engineers, this allows you to fill in the gaps when you don’t have projects for your engineers. We may learn in the near future that utilizing this marketplace allows you to invest in data talent sooner since you would able to keep those resources working while you ramp up your sales pipeline for data infrastructure. I would suspect you may also find that this could bring you into new sales opportunities as well. If you want to learn more, I’d encourage you to visit their website. My understanding is that it is free to join. OnForce generates revenue by charging $11 per transaction plus 10% of the billable services.

Hopefully, this is a means to turn “on” your data implementation skills as well as your billable hours with your own techs.