[consulting] Introduction -> Trellon, LLC

[Michael Haggerty]

With all the individual consultants publishing introductions here, I thought
it would be useful to send out an introduction for my company, Trellon, LLC.
We started into business about a year and a half ago primarily working
mostly with CivicSpace, a distribution of Drupal for non-profits and
political campaigns.

We have found our business primarily in 2 markets. There is a market for
higher-end installations that require extensive configuration, theming, and
custom module development, along with value added services such as data
visualization, flash presentations and bulk emailing. Integration with
external systems is a big part of this as well, and we have built out
several sites that provide integration with Ruby on Rails, .NET applications
and others.

The other market we serve is the smaller, traditional organization who needs
a content management system but has severely restricted IT resources.
Projects like this typically revolve around the need for a Web site and some
user training to become familiar with how Drupal works. We're working to
make this even easier for organizations by offering options with less of an
emphasis on consulting hours and more up-front user training to reduce the
costs to these kinds of organizations.

One of the problems we run into is with staffing projects, and we find that
it's difficult to find people with the broad range of talents required to do
theming, custom development and configuration. It's lead to us really having
to have specialized people for individual tasks, and to have to work with
outside consultants on a regular basis. Another issue we typically encounter
is with exchanging knowledge, there are a lot of things we do that seem like
they would be good enhancements for the Drupal platform but we find we lack
the time to make them generally available as open source modules. We're
getting better at that though, and have a couple of custom modules having to
do with security and ecommerce on the way.

Anyways, looking forward to this list.

Thank you,
Michael Haggerty
Managing Partner
Trellon, LLC
http://www.trellon.com
(p) 301-577-6162
(c) 240-643-6561
(f) 413-691-9114
(aim) haggerty321