I'm currently working on 2 projects - one Drupal e-commerce site for a small Europeon company and one small Pentaho assignment for a small company that wants some reporting to support a software product they developed. I'm happy to help advance these guys efforts and in turn, I get real requirements to work with to advance the platforms I am promoting - Pentaho and Drupal.

I will continue to take on these assignments while I work a full time job for an energy company. They help me keep my technical skills sharp as well as to keep my mind off of my full time work.

I see these two open source projects, Pentaho and Drupal, together as a perfect offering for a small monlighting software services company. Without advertising, I've gotten three gigs so far with one or the other. The leads have come from LinkedIn (2) and RentaCoder (1). For little money, they give an organization a lot of power. First, Drupal offers a content management system where people can discuss their business or community issues in an organized structured environment that Google does very well at spidering for search purposes. Second, these discussions can lead to series analysis that leads to ideas for building competitive advantage.

Drupal offers all the tools needed for the soft analysis - discussions, to do lists, posting of documents like project plans. Pentaho offers all the tools needed for the hard analysis - crunching numbers, searching for patterns, displaying charts and graphs.

They are easy to cross sell. For the organization just doing soft analysis, you sell them on what they can do to really justify their business cases with hard analysis. For the company who already does hard analysis, you sell them on community tools to increase the pool of analysts and stakeholders.

I'm very excited about continuing to get small projects that let me keep up with the Drupal and Pentaho open source projects as they are becoming more and more mature. One day, doing this type of work on the side will offer a decent amount of supplemental income. Also, I'm bringing other people in. Two of my friends, my nephew, even my wife. We're all learning bits and pieces together. I also brought in my daughter and someone from her school for an idea I had for a recycling site (click here for a peek). I'm building a small team or community of analysts where we can earn some supplemental income helping others to advance their small, entrepreneurial company visions.