I read with interest that open-source messaging vendor Open-Xchange is building a "meta-address book" service that brings together your contacts from various social networking sites into "one continuous stream of updating contacts." While promising, I don't think it goes far enough.
It's nice to have a centralized address book. It's even better to analyze the connections between contacts and deliver services based on that data, as I recently argued.
One area in which this information would be hugely valuable is in connecting enterprises through their respective employees. Think about it: most companies spend far more money on sales and marketing than they do on product development. Why? Because customers pay the bills, obviously, and customers are hard to come by.
7-Degrees has an interesting solution called PeopleMaps that that crawls the Web for employment data on the contacts you have in Salesforce.com, and then presents an optimal (visual) contact chain to help enterprises figure out how they're connected to prospective partners or customers.
(Credit:
7-Degrees)
This is a useful way to map and monetize the "social graphs" of one's employees, but this, too, falls short of the full potential of a true "Web 2.0 address book," to use Tim O'Reilly's idea.
Open-Xchange is usefully connecting contacts into a meta address book, but I long for the day that someone connects those contacts through a meta address book, one that not only knows how well I know a contact, but also what sorts of things we like to do together and makes suggestions based on past history ("You and XXXX are in Boston at the same time - would you like me to arrange a lunch at Henrietta's Table again through OpenTable?).
This is when the address book becomes interesting, and when it becomes hugely monetizable by the enterprise.
For now, however, the enterprise largely treats its employees as drones with no lives (and, hence, no contacts) outside its payroll system. But if enterprises will look for ways to employees to improve their job performance by opening up their address books...we'll have discovered the next big thing in sales and marketing.
And someone will have created a billion-dollar business for themselves. Why not you?
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Open-source email company Open-Xchange has raised a $9 million Series B round in a difficult financing environment, bringing its total funding to $17.8 million.
With this fresh infusion of cash Open-Xchange is expected to mount a more serious challenge to Microsoft's ubiquitous Exchange product. Open-Xchange claims 8.4 million paid mailboxes worldwide.
The real question for the company will be how to expand into enterprises. Most open-source software companies tend to infiltrate enterprises at the departmental level, proliferating from an initially small beachhead. Email, however, doesn't really work this way. Unlike an ECM or CRM system, it's tough to go off the company's Exchange or Domino grid to dally with Open-Xchange. It's a bit of an all-or-nothing approach.
This may work with SMB customers and in certain market segments (Education?), but it's a tough slog in large enterprises which may very well despise Exchange or Domino...but struggle to abandon either. It would be fascinating to hear how the company plans to use its cash to tackle the enterprise.
It will also be interesting to see how it fares against Zimbra. There was a possibility of Zimbra getting buried in the Yahoo! mess, but the opposite seems to have happened. Zimbra's business has accelerated within Yahoo!, making life a bit more difficult for Open-Xchange.
Open-Xchange has announced the Domino20X tool to enable easy migration from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open-source messaging and collaboration program, Open-Xchange. With all due respect to IBM, Lotus/Domino is (or was - I haven't had to use it since 2001) a (very) heavy messaging system that feels very Big Company and 1980s. Maybe it has become better since I last used it. For anyone other than a 100,000-person enterprise, however, migration may well be on the cards:
Open-Xchange and Pavone have developed a tool, Domino20X, to make it easier for administrators to convert from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open source Open-Xchange groupware server. The tool, which has been developed as part of a technical collaboration between the two companies, extracts user data, e-mails, contacts, calendar entries and tasks from Domino servers (from version 7) and feeds it into Open-Xchange Server 5.
This is a good move for an open-source company. Make migration simple or, at least, simpler, as enterprise software is rarely simple. Kudos to the Open-Xchange team.
I go away for the weekend to Lake Powell and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and I come back to some highly intriguing news from Open-Xchange: the release of the company's Express Edition. First there was the standard server product, then the hosting solution, and now Express.
Express is cool on a number of different levels. First, unlike proprietary e-mail systems, Open-Xchange doesn't foist on the IT administrator a range of hidden costs. You get the full-fledged e-mail and collaboration server without paying a nickel extra for the operating system, directory service, etc. You pay for the product, and nothing more. (This seems like it should be the norm, but it's not.)
This is especially good to know given the market at which Express Edition is targeted: the small to medium-size business. SMBs don't have huge pockets filled with cash to buy ancillary software, hire an expensive administrator, etc. They just want it to work, and Open-Xchange's Express Edition seems to fill this need particularly well. (I'm downloading it to try it out, and will let you know if it lives up to its billing.)
Second, and extremely interesting to me, Express Edition runs on Ubuntu. Why does this matter? Well, for one thing it shows Ubuntu's stablity and performance. But on an even more interesting note, take a look at Open-Xchange's management team, and in particular its CTO, Jürgen Geck. You might remember that he was the CTO at Suse....Or check out Open-Xchange's co-founder and EVP of engineering, Martin Kauss. Yep, he was a Suse guy before, too. The list goes on....
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