So, what is wrong with Zimbra?

The past few days have all been about this.

Personally, I like Zimbra. It is a great product NOT because of its AJAX web-based technology superiority.

The product is great because it has features that immediately create value for me (i.e. Relevance).

The way it uses Tags can help me keep track of emails in my Hiring or Sales pipelines, or based on the different projects that I am managing.

The way it integrates the calendar and contacts is just the info I need. E.g. when I hover over a person’s name in email, I need to contact him.

Small things such as this helps Zimbra save me droplets of time that are typically spent in the overheads of wrestling with Microsoft technology.

So what’s wrong? Why would I not buy Zimbra?

The answer is rather simple: I dont consider those droplets of overheads to be significant pains that I want to pay premium to overcome. 

I dont consider my existing email solution, be it Outlook or Gmail, to be broken. It is probably because we already have an extensive collaboration in place already, and because of that I do not think the marginal value added by Zimbra is significant.

For the rest of my team, the marginal value that Zimbra creates is not bigger than the pain in shifting our processes over to Zimbra (which is needed to get that value in the first place).

OR perhaps I cannot see far enough to realize that I will become dependent on Zimbra when I use it. It will be interesting to see if we actually start moving away from our own solution by using Zimbra (which we are using as a trial).

Why should you care?

There are a number of common reasons for product failure, which include:

• No value created - enter most web1.0 and web2.0 projects

• Ahead of its time - perhaps Zimbra is
• Solving a problem which doesnt exist - Similar to the previous two, because value is only created against needs
• Only marginal additions - True success would come from, e.g. rethinking the entire ‘email’ thing completely — something like what Gmail tried with conversations + search.
• High Costs of Adoption - This is the biggest issue with Enterprise products. Let’s make an automated car — which requires us to learn a new scripting language when entering driving directions. Would you use it?
• Short Technology Lifecycle — What if I spend two months learning Zimbra only to see something else replace it?

Dot-Puff Series: Another payment innovation

I’m calling this the Dot-Puff series to keep writing about companies trying to ignite online businesses focused on PK.

This one is iShop, something Mohtashim wrote about recently. Their solution to Pakistan’s net payment challlenge is simple: Choose your PC online; Do a bank-transfer to the account they give; When the money is received they ship the PC.

Ofcourse, this adds a 5-day stretch over which you “order” online. Alas credit card payments. On the other hand, shipping in Pakistan is quick, so you may have to wait the same amount of time as the US to get your online purchase.

The only question left is how much consumers will trust them after sending the payment, but trust levels are getting better day-by-day.

Go puff Go.

More on Zimbra

I will write about the impact that something like Zimbra could have soon.

It is essentially an embodiment of things I recommend for the Web-20 space. Focus on creating value, rather than creating copies.

For the moment, let me just list some features that makes it better than Outlook and Gmail:

• Shared Calendars built-in
• RSS built-in
• “Save searches” - execute a particular search on-demand on your inbox
• Tagging emails — click on “customers” tag to get all customer conversations
• AJAX-based Document and Spreadsheet (like Writely and Google docs)
• Wiki built in
• Widgets (for wikipedia search ; Yahoo maps ; etc)
• Salesforce Integration built-in
• OTA mobile sync (like Blackberry)
• Much more!

Here are the big questions tho:

1- (Please help me on this) Why is Zimbra still not a compelling purchase? (well atleast it is not for me)

2- Why did Google choose to purchase Writely instead of Zimbra (when both were available)?

I’d look forward to your thoughts on this.

I have a question for all CEOs / Decision Makers

It is a small question, so will only take 10 mins of your time.

Take a look at this product called Zimbra. It is a fantastic email product — possibly the best AJAX-based email + collaboration solution I have seen, and an easy replacement for both MS Outlook and Gmail. By my estimates, it could cut down on my own company’s overheads by atleast 10-15%.

Take a look at their demo.

They seem to have everything going for them — a descriptive website ; great video case studies ; a hosted demo.

Here is the question: After looking at their video demos, and exploring their hosted demos, are you compelled to buy the product?

If not, Why? I really need to know. Please tell me in the comments.

P.S. Zimbra is not paying me to ask this. I merely want to see if other people — like myself — thought the demo was great but still did not feel like buying the product. I am merely trying to understand the thought process.

My own thoughts on this on Thursday

Are we training technicians?

I have come across a couple of lecturers on VU which have got me thinking.

Both the lecturers were teaching engineering courses. One started describing a typical IT project team ‘… and when you work, you will find a project manager, a team lead, a system analyst…’

The other was describing system specifications when he said ‘…so the requirements are what your clients’ teams will use to see if the system you created for them is accurate…’

What does both of these have to do with engineering?

In the above, nothing says that teams will necessarily have the hierarchy required — in fact finding a more efficient arrangement may give your engine a bigger advantage. Why are we conditioning students to expect that you will always be creating requirements specs for clients — what happened to product dev?

It is sad when the professors doing this have actually studied and worked in the UK / USA.

Are we really only training technicians that can ‘fill the numbers’ of IT professionals graduating in Pakistan? As in, since when did we decide that students should only learn the bare minimum required for an IT company to find the employees it needs to deliver? Since when did we decide to permanently hinder the intellectual growth a student may wish to experience in his chosen profession?

Shouldn’t we teach them instead of the importance of precision in their approach to engineering a system, irrespective of the team structure, or document processes created?

The innovation that is shaking up the entire Media industry…

Throughout the history of the industrial age, certain types of ideas, or products, or inventions have reshaped the way people thought about the world.

Starting with electricity, to the assembly line, to (later) personal computers, the internet, cell phones, and even today, every time a groundbreaking new technology appears on in the horizon, it has the potential of shaking up industries.

One of the main reasons this innovation is successful is because it is immediately relevant to the people who use it. The invention is thus usually made at the Edge of the industry, where consumer needs are solved by consumer-solutions themselves.

It is fairly methodical — any company that focuses on edge-centric product innovation will have a high chance that their product will be adopted by customers at large.

While this is a very lengthy topic, I will just point to one such innovation occuring today. Specifically, blogs and podcasts.

A nice “layman” summary of the impact Blogs and Podcasts and Youtube is having on traditional means of media is found in this article

In a nutshell, the media industry survives on Attention. Blogs and Podcasts offer an on-demand, user-created source of news, media and information and thus is significantly cutting into the time spent by people into traditional media sources.

Because of rapidly declining revenues, newspapers and TV / Movie publishers have had to scramble to switch their distribution strategies to an all-online distribution model — witness the growth of iTunes Movie Store, Universal’s support of YouTube, Blockbuster introducing online rentals etc.

All in all, most traditional media companies are faced with an immediate need of adopting one or more of the following in their operations

• User-gernerated content
• User-added value on published content (i.e. comments)
• On-demand media sourcing (i.e. RSS to Movies-on-demand)
• User-scheduled programming and content distribution
• Content (e.g. news) covering micro-communities
• “Anywhere” access to content
• User-controlled content filtering and management
• Separation of media source and presentation ; Media aggregation from multiple sources.

In Pakistan, blogs and podcasts are still a ways away from becoming a significant source of information. This cannot happen without a critical mass of internet users, and with a more invovled approach to using the medium to communicate within communities. (I.e. If anyone wants to be a Contributing Author of Green & White, please contact me — I’ll only be happy with more contributors)

However, that still does not mean that the Edge does not exist among Pakistani consumers. Interactive on-demand TV could be very well received in Pakistan — so could media aggregation.

Most certainly, community-driven news services is the need of the day here — whatever happened to Local News coverage?

Geo seems to be willing to take steps in the right direction, with podcasts of news footage and RSS feeds on its website.

PTCL also seems to have something in the pipeline with its flagship IPTV Project we keep hearing about.

Lets see what can become a disruptive innovation that is relevant to Pakistanis amongst this.

The Dot-Boom that never will… and innovations that say otherwise

I meant to write about this a few months ago.

For a few years now everyone from local startups to the government have been trumpeting the hopes of a dot-com revolution starting in Pakistan. Most of the time it is considered a simple cause-effect relationship between lower bandwidth rates and dot-com success.

I always advocate local startups to think global — be the next YouTube or Ebay or Yahoo. There are some operational hiccups in doing that but those can easily be overcome by connecting to a business-support network in the US, such as ex-pats.

But will a dot-com effort creating local solutions see success? In a word: no. In a few words: not with traditional solutions.

In fact, I would likely label what can happen in Pakistan as a Dot-Puff.

Read the rest of the post for reasons.

 

Ad: Website is live

Just a small ad about CDF. The new CDF Website that describes our incubation program went live. There will inevitably be bugs but I hope you will criticize constructively.

Splitting Demand from Supply in IT… and also in IT Consulting firms

I came across this very interesting article by McKinsey on reorganizing IT within enterprises. Their recommendations are interesting because they let the CIO then use very traditional forecasting and demand-supply tools to plan IT investments.

Most interstingly, however, this reminded me of an early consulting engagement where I had made similar recommendations to an IT Consulting firm on improving operations.

While enterprises may choose to consider McKinsey’s approach, the implementation and reorganization of a massive organization will take time. I think that IT Consulting / outsourcing firms could organize themselves more rapidly in a way that gives similar, if not the same, set of benefits to the enterprise.

Splitting Demand from Supply

The model was simple, and in fact some leading consulting firms such as Accenture and IBM already have organizations that are similar. However, it is important to know that the model can apply even to smaller firms ($1-2M annual revenues) with inconsistent demand from individual verticals.

This is particularly relevant to US-focused IT firms in Pakistan whose sales performance is largely disconnected from the performance to the Pakistani Unit.

We can split the core set of production engineers in outsourcing firms into two primary groups.

A Core Tier of professionals will form the permanent demand units within the business. An Execution Tier will become the supply units.

The Core Tier

The Core Tier will consist of indiviudals that are asked to focus entirely on one unique industry vertical. Their chief responsibilities will include:

• Act as relationship manager and primary contact for all implementation projects from customers in that vertical

• Be responsible for understanding the industry well enough to translate what the Customer says to what the Customer needs.
• Identify and source all the supply for the solution. Identify and manage the supply units needed to implement and deliver
• When demand from a vertical is low, participate actively in creating demand and understanding the vertical more deeply. Create frameworks and reusable solutions reduce design and implementation time ; Work with free supply units to create usable software modules that are relevant to the industry’s growing needs ; Understand and participate in industry-specific events enough to improve the turnover from the proposals you write.

The rules governing these positions were almost identical to the McKinsey recommendations (which I Quote).

• Align demand organizations with the business units
• Let demand organizations own business processes
• Give demand organizations a mandate to rationalize demand
• Empower demand organizations to manage suppliers

The Execution Tier

These can be of further two types — one set of people that are focused on a particular product or technology stack (in case business is stable enough to support that), and a smaller tier of “consultants in training” that can be rapidly switched between industries and products in order to fill capacity requirements for projects.

Being Careful

The mistake I keep seeing with IT consulting firms is that their teams are all accumulated around products, but not many people are focused on verticals or pure business analysis.

From some perspectives, this is because a lot of IT firm managers consider ‘business analysis’ as an expensive overhead, especially if their focus needs to be sustained when there is low demand for a vertical.

However, I think an IT Consulting firm with teams that are all focused on products is setting the wrong prescedent for its brand.

The team cannot provide customers industry insight, and cannot ever support the Consulting firm’s leadership in new business development. In fact, the team is likely to create the major mistakes of making “technology first” recommendations in their solutions.

It was those types of “technology first” solutions that caused the big electronics bust from poor supply-management in early 2000s “If you buy SAP, all of your business problems will be solved” went the typical slogan of early 2000s.

Getting it Right

IT Consulting always has been and will be a practice of consultancy. The work must be able to create new value for the customer, open new areas of opporunities, allow the customer to think more strategically. The work must immediately improve the business performance of the firm, and protect business intersts in the long term.

It must be based on the industry, the customer’s unique business position, the customer’s unique processes and teams, and the customer’s unique plans. The technology itself, and whether or not it is configured-to-order or built customized for the customer comes at a much later stage.

Companies who understand this, and build specific vertical specific demand units in their organizations can benefit significantly. They are able to create a highly cohesive Core team of consultants that are all active participants in the business development pipeline.

This is the type of thinking that lets the IT firm be a core team of 4-5 consultants making more than $4M / year, as opposed to a $2M 30-person company that cannot sustain itself during downturns.

This is also the type of thinking that can help reinforce a company’s credibility, which is clear in the case of Techlogix, who have been able to grow rapidly because of delivering very well on commitments, which came from them aligning their teams around types of IT solutions (EAI etc.).

A web 2.0-based business idea that works for Pakistan, and any place that needs it

Note: I was supposed to post this back in early September but just remembered it was lying here. Enjoy.

I was reflecting recently on how flat even the playing field really is for Pakistani entrepreneurs: Can you become a $MM success starting in Islamabad today, as compared to starting in, say, Palo Alto?

I was also thinking about a business that can truly use the internet for its strengths. Not something that is online for the sake of it, but somethign that uses everything good about 2.0 technology to create value for online Pakistanis.

And with that I got an interesting idea.

Since Green & White is all about sharing free advice and ideas, here is the paper-napkin sketch.

Note: Think of this post as having an open-source license : you can use it if you want, but please dont plagiarize — at least let me know.