I’m thrilled to announce that I have created a new company named, “Agramont Services, LLC” which is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia and focused on my many passions.  The focused on the new company is to provide strategic IT consulting services to Enterprises, Hosters, ISV’s, and Microsoft Partners.  Check out the website for the “Business” scoop on the company.

http://www.agramontservices.com/

“Why start Agramont Services?” is a question I’m sure you’re asking.  When I was at Microsoft here in the Washington D.C. area, my role was focused on helping Microsoft’s upper mid-market account and working with local managed partners to get them ready on Microsoft’s latest products.  It was a great role and an awesome team to work with, but I also saw something else in the marketplace and a niche I thought I could fill. Often times there is a Chicken & Egg moment when it comes to Microsoft’s new products, customer awareness, and Microsoft partner readiness.  While Microsoft pushes forward with their new products, Microsoft partners aren’t ready because customers aren’t demanding it.  Since customers aren’t demanding it, because their trusted partners haven’t told them about it.  Ugh.

A key area of focus of mine is to work directly with partners to help drum up customer demand on their behalf and at the same time reducing their risk and costs since they don’t have to pull a billable resource off of the bench to do this.  They just pay Agramont Services (ok…me).

“What about Hosting?” is a question I’m getting a lot.  While I’d like to deliver more of my services with clients in the local Washington D.C. metro area (and possibly the entire U.S. east region), I’ve decided to also focus on the hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS) market.  On the hosting side, the traditional web, database, and email hosting is a commodity.  My focus will be on the emerging technologies such as Cloud computing, Virtualization, Hosted Unified Communications, and SaaS applications.  There are many traditional software vendors that are looking to move their application to a SaaS model (some of whom I’ve already done some work with) and I plan on offering my services to help them make that transition.

My goal is to have a balance between project based services and “Micro-Consulting”/Retainer based services.  There are many customers that have a specific need and they only want your for specific delivers.  That’s fine and I’m happy to do that work.  But there is a growing market (especially with all of the layoffs, budget reductions, etc.) to have consultants available for a variety of services on a fixed-monthly fee (Micro-Consulting).  I’m hoping I can make Micro-Consulting a core component of my business.  I like the thought of having a consistent customer relationship and with a predictable monthly revenue stream.  We’ll see how that goes.

Please visit the website and contact me if you have any projects you’d like to discuss or perhaps you’d like my expertise on-call via my “Micro-Consulting” service.

- Conrad