Marketing Python:Lessons Learned

While Python popularity has grown leaps and bounds in the past, beyond developers who has actually worked in the language, the language need to be sold just to above everyone else to gain some acceptance. The talk will essentially talk of some tips which one should consider before pitching anything Pythonic to the other party depending on the customer profile. Typical profiles discussed would be Government, Enterprise, SMB, and academia, and students.

These are based on real life experiences of the speaker and his team in pitching Python powered solutions to several of the above profiles and also some of the large dip-stick surveys which the presenter has conducted over the past few years. There could be elements of some surprising statistics, in the talk.

The talk is targeted at just about anyone in Python community, but may make more sense if you are a consultant, entrepreneur, wannabe-entrepreneur, CEO, Project Lead, freelancer or an evangelist.

I believe I have described my talk proposal in detail in the above column. Just to add, the relevance of the topic, may also make sense to just about any open source language or FOSS as a concept itself, however most of the content will be strictly Pythonic.

Anyways here are some of the pointers

Marketing Python:

1. Selling Python to an Enterprise CIO
2. Pitfalls to avoid while pitching Python
3. Selling to an SMB CIO/CEO
4. The myth about not having enough Python developers around
5. Selling to Government
6. Selling to an Academic/Student
7. Selling to another Developer
8. Why Python lacks the glamour of Ruby/Java
9. How many Python developers are there in India?
10. Pythonic Entrepreneurial ideas that you may want to bet on
11. What individual developers can do to help Python take off in your office/work place?
12. How to take marketing Python forward?
13. Statistics and Research methodologies to arrive at results in the presentation

S Ramdas is an entrepreneur with nearly 16 years experience in IT industry, Media, Publishing and Marketing. He has been involved in several ventures with mixed degrees of success in past. Presently he is a promoter of media companies NMediawaves and Namaste Publications, and also the founder and CEO of IT consulting company called Netzary Infodynamics, which uses Python extensively. Earlier he was the editor/consulting editor or publisher of publications such as Developer IQ, BioSpectrum, LAN Magazine, Computer Reseller News, Good Governance, The ITIQ among others. He has been trying to build a software services company that uses Python for over four years, and has just very recently met with some moderate success.