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?!

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.