Setting up a Successful Consulting Business with ForePaaS

Setting up a Successful Consulting Business with ForePaaS

What are the advantages of partnering with ForePaaS and working with the ForePaaS Platform. How partnering with ForePaaS results in faster time to market, and greater margins. The top 4 mistakes consulting firms can avoid with ForePaaS.

Many business consulting companies like to partner with ForePaaS, to provide leading-edge business solutions, without worrying about the underneath cloud infrastructure, data fabric, scalability, security, and software maintenance. Let’s look at some of the pitfalls consulting firms can avoid by partnering with ForePaaS.

 

Don’t get bogged down with the technical aspects of your projects

 

Unless your firm is a large consulting services provider with multiple specialized departments, it is difficult to claim that you can provide all the services a client needs, from business consulting to data science and cloud infrastructure.

 

As a business consulting company, we cannot tell a client that we are good at everything. We can’t tell them that we provide not only great business and data science consulting but also cloud infrastructure design that is scalable and fully secure. It’s simply hard to be good at everything, and our clients know it.

 

With ForePaaS, consultants can concentrate on providing their core business consulting services excellence and use the ForePaaS Platform to manage all the technical aspects of the project: From setting up the data fabric, creating and testing the models, and managing the cloud infrastructure – without worrying about software maintenance and upkeep.

 

Avoid turning business consulting projects into long IT projects

 

Projects built on AWS, Azure, OVH, or other popular cloud providers can quickly turn into massive IT projects. You can easily spend the first 3 months working with your client’s IT department to choose and validate the software components and tools you’ll need. Once the project is ready for production, you’ll need to schedule time with IT to operationalize it. You’ll often find that IT has other priorities, further delaying the project.

 

With the ForePaaS Platform, consulting projects don’t turn into long IT projects. The ForePaaS Platforms enables consulting companies to concentrate on resolving their clients’ business problems without worrying about the cloud infrastructure underneath.

 

Move away from the un-repeatable consulting engagement paradigm

 

Building the data and cloud infrastructures for a consulting project can take a lot of time and resources: Data from different data sources need to be organized and combined. The database needs to be designed and set up. The cloud infrastructure needs to be built, secured, and correctly provisioned.

 

The components chosen for the data and cloud infrastructures are never exactly the same from one project to the next. For every new project, you need to deal with a new cloud infrastructure, new tools, integration, scalability, and security issues.

 

The ForePaaS Platform allows consulting companies to use the same cloud-native platform for all their analytics and machine learning projects, and benefit from an automated data pipeline and cloud infrastructure set up and maintenance.  This results in faster time to market, and greater margins.

 

Don’t transform your consulting business into a software maintenance business

 

Providing software maintenance over time is not the core excellence of a business and process consulting firm and it is not a profitable proposition. It’s a sort of a race against time. As older software releases become unsupported over time, you need to keep up with the new releases. The new releases often don’t work out-of-the-box with the other components. Every time a new release is installed, it needs to be re-integrated, and the whole solution needs to be re-tested.

 

To provide these services, consulting firms can add software maintenance and support to their contracts. But clients don’t really want to pay for software support and maintenance insurance. They prefer to ask for another proposal if things need to be fixed or upgraded.

 

Fixing software issues requires consulting engineers. But the engineers that built the initial solution have moved on to the next project and are 100% billable. Scheduling time for them to repair an older project is difficult at best … or at worst.

 

Consulting companies can’t use the same hourly rate for a maintenance call, as they did for the initial project, resulting in lower margins. If the client didn’t sign a maintenance agreement, another proposal needs to be written and approved. This takes time, and involves a lot of administration overhead, for a simple maintenance job. Neither the consulting firm nor the client really wins in the end.

 

These issues are true with commercial tools and are amplified with open-source software. Open-source can be attractive at the onset because it’s free. But you get very little or no support from the open-source editors. Providing maintenance, security, managing, upgrades, and installing security patches becomes costly.

 

Let the ForePaaS Platform manage all the technical aspects

 

The ForePaaS unified end-to-end platform allows consulting firms to concentrate on their core business consulting services, without worrying about software setup, maintenance, and support.

 

ForePaaS enabled us to provide consulting services without being a software provider.

 

The ForePaaS Platform is cloud-native and ready for production. It abstracts the cloud infrastructure, the database, the data pipeline, and the data science plumbing so you can concentrate on the business value instead of the technical value. It works over the whole project life cycle and remains scalable and secure as the project increases in size and complexity.

 

Maintenance and support are included in the ForePaaS Platform license agreements. This makes it easy for consulting firms to distinguish between the business and the software. Furthermore, ForePaaS spreads out its maintenance costs across its clients, keeping the average cost per client very low. ForePaaS keeps a flexible business model. Consulting firms can either directly offer their clients the software licenses and support or allow them to directly deal with ForePaaS.

 

For more articles on cloud infrastructure, data, analytics, machine learning, and data science, follow Paul Sinaï on Towards Data Science.

 

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The image used in this post is a royalty free image from Unsplash.