[#MXE-681707]: Shibboleth consulting services

[Eric Goodman]

FWIW, I'm generally anti-cold calling, but presuming the vendor actually has relevant expertise I'm not terribly against this one message in concept. 

The vendor contacted the poster offline rather than on list, the response was targeted rather specifically to expertise relevant to the question asked here, and it was phrased as "look here if you want more info" rather than "when can I call with you with my sales engineers?" I can't evaluate (and am not interested in) whether the company's experience is actually relevant and CAS-integration specific, but if so it doesn't seem an unreasonable contact for the vendor to make. 

The only part that gives me a little pause is that the message apparently came through a case management tool, which makes it look a little automated/impersonal, but overall, presuming no pressure-y followup tactics, this is about the least invasive and most usefully targeted way I see for a vendor to do a cold-contact. 

Vendors do need to understand that many tech people will bristle at being directly contacted (I frequently do myself), but I find this case less overall objectionable than, say, the vendors that pull my name from conference attendees or public job sites and cold calling me because "Identity Management" is in my job title or track interests.

--- Eric 


-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at shibboleth.net [mailto:users-bounces at shibboleth.net] On Behalf Of Paul B. Henson
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 12:04 PM
To: Shib Users
Subject: RE: [#MXE-681707]: Shibboleth consulting services

> From: Nate Klingenstein
> Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 5:50 PM
>
> Lurking and spamming participants on an open source mailing list is, 
> in my opinion, both good business and really bad karma.  I like to 
> think karma wins sometimes.

Definitely bad karma, although I wouldn't necessarily agree always good business. I know I for one would be less inclined to work with or trust a business which had a reputation akin to an ambulance chaser :).

Some people lack the technical resources for a fully in-house implementation, or have insufficient time, so I think there's definitely a role for consulting companies in the open source biosphere, but if I wanted to avail of such, I'd be more likely to go with a company like Unicon whose representatives participate as helpful members of the community and push all of their work back upstream, gathering good karma along the way ;).

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