Collanos Blog

In earlier blogs like Disruptive Innovation at Work and Gartner Prediction Supports the Collanos Business Model I wrote about our progressive go-to-market strategy entering new markets for collaboration, and our starting point to ride the most recent consumerization wave across enterprise boundaries.

Two inspiring new blog articles and their discussion threads seem to confirm our approach:

• Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, in his blog The Black Wire and the White Wire connects a second ethernet cable to his business laptop kicking off an IT “civil war”.

On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don’t because the corporate network blocks a number of ports, including those used for Skype and Second Life. It’s also pretty slow.

The white cable, meanwhile, is a standard consumer-grade DSL connection to the Internet, with nothing blocked at all. Our local IT staff installed it by popular demand, possibly without checking with headquarters (we love our local IT staff!). It’s fast. I use it all the time.

Consumerization of enterprise IT at work…

• Jason Hiner, Executive Editor at TechRepublic, in “The six consumer technologies that are destroying traditional IT ” explicitely sees p2p Collanos Workplace being adopted even by corporate IT supported by some pressure coming from consumerization.

That doesn’t mean IT should necessarily abandon P2P software altogether. It can often prove extremely useful and efficient. For example, Collanos software can be used for sharing and collaborating on documents between various users in a team or workgroup.

Disrupting the collaboration market outside the enterprise platform and being brought in through enterprise doors via consumerization seems like a promising new business strategy – not only for Collanos.

Often I attend local Bay Area events where the latest and greatest Web 2.0 companies showcase their latest wares. One example is the ever-growing monthly SF New Tech Meetup, which is portrayed as follows on their web site:

Monthly Meetup to discuss and show-and-tell new technology: Web 2.0 to Nanotech, Digital content to video games. Cool new tech. Geeks, inventors, new companies with cool products and ANYONE curious about new tech is welcome.

Notice that the word “cool” is mentioned twice in this single paragraph. To be honest, many of the companies presenting at these events certainly fall under the ‘cool’ category. After all, we ourselves, Collanos Software, presented there earlier this year. However, is ‘cool’ the accurate criteria to be qualified to present at these specific events? Does ‘cool’ necessarily imply that this is also a promising company/application/service?

Wikipedia’s interpretation of ‘cool’ is:

…an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance, style and Zeitgeist. Because of the varied and changing connotations of cool, as well its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning…and is often used as an expression of admiration or approval.

I can sense the admiration of attendees at such events but this still does not guarantee that a presenting cool company is on the road to success.

Last week I was corresponding with Scott, a writer and an active Collanos member who brought up a great point:

Let’s face it-this is an industry that tends to develop cool ideas because they’re technologically possible and then has to convince customers that they need these products.

So many of these ‘cool’ applications have not only been coded by brilliant engineers but also conceived by them. I guess the ‘code it and they will come’ attitude doesn’t always fly.

Scott follows up on his point and how it relates to Collanos:

Teaming is different. This is real-world stuff that helps people pull what they already do into one place, and provides added benefits, like tracking and project management.

Collanos Workplace, our flagship peer-to-peer solution provides immediate and significant value to dispersed teams at minimal (or more accurately, zero) costs. Our typical Collanos user, is someone who needs to collaborate on a team project with members across multiple organizations, does not have the time and resources to set up an enterprise-level IT environment and needs something dead-easy to use so that all team members embrace the application rapidly.

Such users rank ‘Coollanos’ high up on the ‘coolometer’, and there are millions of such potential users across the globe who may not be sitting in the audience of these web 2.0 events but are gradually getting exposed to the great coverage we are getting in the blogosphere (see latest: AWH Weblog, Stu Downes ): and the press (eWeek.com). Cool?!

In the 10th Annual Global Information Security Survey, conducted by InformationWeek and Accenture, some of the conclusions drawn from the data, gathered from over 3,000 US and Chinese organizations, are startling. A large majority of organizations feel just as vulnerable to security attacks as they were the previous year.

Although this survey focuses on large enterprises, here at Collanos our goal is to provide professional users (SMB and other organizations) with a true sense that their systems and data are in good hands and that with minimal resources (hey, Workplace is free!) you can reduce much of the security risks identified in this survey. As you can see in the chart below (drawn from the survey), viruses/worms, spyware/malware, spam, unauthorized employee access are the top four priorities on company’s security agenda.

Using Collanos Workplace all four of these vulnerabilities can be avoided altogether since Collanos workspaces are closed to invitees only. Your team decides who gets invited to these invite-only workspaces. Instead of using same-old-vulnerable-email to collaborate, users communicate in the workspace via Discussions and Chats.

Collanos does not install any spyware/malware on users’ machines (See Privacy Statement). You can create as many workspaces as you wish and invite only the employees that are members of the specific project at hand.

In regards to Customer-data theft (Priority #5) and Mobile device theft (#7), Collanos workspace data can be viewed only via the Collanos application, which is password (login) protected. If a computer is stolen, the thief would have to get access to the password protected application, otherwise, the data is plain gibberish. No team data is stored outside of the team members’ computers. Synchronization and storage is fully encrypted, using standard AES 256, and goes directly between team members’ computers when they can communicate directly in the network. Very often this is not possible because of Firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translation). In that case encrypted data is transferred through a relay peer in the internet outside of the peers firewall. These relay peers only buffer a small number of messages during the information transmission so the data is very fragmented.

The other concerns listed, for the most part, are vulnerabilities related to email, which again are not very relevant to Collanos workspaces.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still several items on our product roadmap that we feel are required to provide our users additional mechanisms to secure their data and systems. One example is extending the functionality of our Permissions matrix, so that teams can assign different levels of access to different employees and data. Collanos continues to focus on delivering an ‘enterprise-class’ reliable and secure solution that non-enterprise users can feel very confident using with one caveat, it will be simple and inexpensive to deploy and administer.

Often we get emails from users asking why we are not steering head on to the enterprise market. For now, Collanos Workplace is all about allowing our users to create ad hoc teams, very likely because they don’t have the resources, time and skills to license a SharePoint, Groove, Groupwise, Notes, etc (or ramp up their entire team on the latest flavor-of-the-day, ‘cool’ hosted collaboration tool, which may be cool but not enough to be adopted by the entire team).

As a result, the SMB market is where we have home advantage. That being said, often we find enterprise users using our application as it still beats the complexity of running some of the afformentioned enterprise solutions. Furthermore, Collanos bridges the gap of being able to collaborate on a team project with organizations external to the brick firewalls of these tight enterprise systems.

Below is a correspondence between our team and a user bringing up some great points about why and how Collanos can fit in the enterprise market:

“Dear Collanos,

…There are a few issues that would need addressing to enable this product for an enterprise, and I am not sure as to whether doing this goes against the ‘decentralised’ model that collanos uses. You would need some of the centralised controls. You would want the ability, for example, to limit certain people from inviting members from outside the organisation. Additionally, from an IT admin point of view I have concerns that I would not know what was floating around the business. In the standard client/server environment we can easily check which files are where, what they contain etc. Having a ‘closed network’ which is what peer-to-peer does, would mean that we would be blind in this respect. The lack of instant messaging logging is also of concern.

The issue of files being deleted / altered, and then users waiting to get them back would also be an issue. Again, in client / server we keep back-ups of all files on the server so it is an easy thing to get them back. I do not know how we would achieve this in a p2p environment. We trailed Groove before Microsoft had bought it and they seemed to address this issues by having servers in the loop - back-up server, relay server etc. I understand that with Groove now you can upload/download content to Sharepoint servers. This whole centralised modelling may be stepping away from the way you envision your product evolving though, although I actually just regard them as a ‘bigger client’ in the loop.

What we were looking for was a simple way for certain teams to work together better. We are currently implementing Lotus Notes as our email system and that obviously has very strong collaboration functionality. However, it does require initial set-up and ongoing maintenance by IT - your type of product is a very quick way to get keep everything in the one place and just ‘work’.

Maybe you could enable your product to sync with a Lotus Domino server like Groove does with Sharepoint? This would certainly help address many of the issues above.
Collanos Member”

Collanos’ response:

“Dear Collanos Member,

Many thanks for the in-depth comments. I understand you points very well. As I mentioned in our first email, we are really targeting a more ad-hoc teamwork environment. Very valuable enterprise needs are as such second priority to what you call to an extent the “simple way for certain teams to work together better”, fast, ad-hoc without administrative hurdles. The price we pay at the moment is that we cannot fulfill typical enterprise needs.

The idea of to be an extension to Lotus reaching beyond the Enterprise came up several times, not only from us. It could make a lot of sense.

We are working on closing some of the enterprise gaps though. Instant messaging will be improved and stored. We are looking at integrating with server peers that will allow back-up and potentially can store a superset of team Workplace data. And to improve Identity Management and the recognition of users is something that we will need to address.

At the moment we are positioned differently and I think that we can create a lot of value for ad-hoc teams working together professionally with Collanos, more professional than using just email to support document-rich inter-company processes.

I am very glad to keep you posted on all our plans and new deliveries. Our goal is clearly through the “consumer” to play more and more a role in the enterprise. Feedback like yours is invaluable for us. If you still see areas where in the context of your business a process can be supported successfully with a collaborative solution like Collanos, we will be glad to learn about it. I think that Collanos also has a role in helping people to improve their work culture to share with their teams and to reuse. From there they can move up into the enterprise-class collaboration league. My experience is that it is most of the time more about cultural barriers than missing technology if collaboration fails.

Many thanks.

Collanos “

Would be very interested in getting your comments on this topic. You can respond directly to this posting or on the related board on our user forum.

Nothing like starting the today with a new great review of our product. Actually, there were two great blog postings by two different users who work for the same company AWH Weblog.

Brent and Jesse submitted their objective (truly unbiased) review of Collanos Workplace, including some cons, which we are always welcoming so that we can further improve our products. What’s more, Jesse even provided a step-by-step installation guide for those of you first installing our peer-to-peer based team workspaces solution. Brent brings up some very valid points:

“Personally I was excited to test this product because I feel workplace communication and collaboration is weak in most companies…finding a product to help the process without adding extra work has been a challenge, until now…”

Collaboration adoption is extremely weak at non-enterprise companies (even enterprise adoption can be argued)…simply since we always default to same old out-of-context email. Organizing your content around team workspaces/projects is the fundamental value Collanos provides. Once you ‘think out of the inbox’, it’s hard to fall back to email when working on future team-based projects.

Brent also highlights a key Collanos differentiator, separating us from the many hosted team collaboration solutions currently out there, comparing the client vs. browser experience:

“…honestly I found the interoperability via a client much better than most online collaboration tools I have used…As well I found the overall interface well thought out and enjoyable to use.”

The reason being that with a rich client you get a rich experience, something you are so familiar with from other client applications such as Windows Explorer/Finder, folder navigation, Instant Messengers, etc. granting you immediate comprehension of the Collanos application with zero training required.

The work-offline advantages of Collanos are a no-brainer for those of us even with 10% network downtime throughout the day. The user interface and experience are just as important to get full team adoption, embracing the least tech-savvy member of the team. Otherwise, it’s back to email…

Areas for improvement, such as better permission management and hosted workspaces are already in the works (as is VoIP integration, calendaring and more) but we always like to hear from our users what is their most burning requirements (See related board on our user forum).

We applause Brent and Jesse’s thorough analysis and review of Collanos Workplace and encourage others to follow suit and share with the entire Collanos community how to make the best of Collanos and let us know where we can improve.

Check out the great free resources the organizer of the Enterprise 2.0 conference has just made available online. You will find great keynote videos, photos, podcasts, speaker slides, and more.

Gartner (NYSE: IT), the largest technology analyst company in the world, predicts Collanos’ type business model will become “the most significant trend affecting information technology during the next ten years.”

The Collanos’ type consumerization business model focuses on providing consumers with a collaboration platform that will allow internet home users, university faculty, small businesses, and inter-enterprise users to benefit from the collaboration tools that only enterprises have been able to provide at an expensive price to their employees.

By differentiating ourselves from other Collaboration vendors who require the use of a server, utilize a resource expensive development model, depend on longer release lifecycles, and have their own agenda that forces the need for further infrastructure investments, we gain a strategic advantage that allows us to deliver to the consumers the collaboration tools they need at prices they can afford.

David Mitchell Smith, Gartner Vice President and Gartner Fellow, predicts that our approach “will affect every enterprise.” Collanos’ approach is much like Wi-Fi’s, smart mobile phone’s, pc’s, voice over IP call’s and conference call’s, instant message’s, and the internet’s approach. Each of these was quickly adopted by consumers who benefited from the use of these technologies in their homes, families, clubs, and organizations. Consumers then took these technologies to work and caused the viral spread that later led to enterprise adoption.

Already in our beta offering, we see Collanos Workplace being not only demanded by ad-hoc teams, but by teams in the enterprise. Enterprise users refuse to constrain themselves to their current email and server based collaboration tools. Collanos, starting with its peer-to-peer Collanos Workplace, will soon provide consumers with a complete set of collaboration tools and like that create greater demand for Collanos in the enterprise.

Collanos prides itself in helping internet teamworkers and leading the evolution of the consumerization of collaboration technologies. We do not believe collaboration tools should only be available for the wealthy enterprise but should be available to everyone both outside and inside of the enterprise.