Interesting Service: Business Summaries

I’ve been using this new interesting service called Business Summaries, and basically what it does is it gives users access to business book summaries in PDF, Powerpoint, PDA, and HTML, and now even in Mindmap, Video and Audio formats. Its specially well suited for folks who need quick doses of ideas and insights from some of the leading business book authors today.

I find the service particulary useful as I am an avowed business book junkie. Just check out my collection here.  I often don’t have the time (nor the resources) to buy all the books I want, and the summaries *in some cases but not always) offer a good substitute.  If there is a book I really want, I use it to get a feel of the content to see if its really worth it. For those books I already own, I use it to very quickly remember the key points of the books specially if I want to share the ideas to my colleagues (here the Powerpoint and Mindmaps are useful).

Their selection of titles is impressive, just some of the summaries available when you sign up include such best sellers such as:

• Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
• Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• Jack-Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch

Inside, books can be searched by Title, Author and Category. When you access a summary, you are presented with links to the PDF, HTML, Powerpoint, PDA, Mindmap, Audio and Video formats as well. The site also offers a daily summary sent via email.

I wish though they would have made the sign up process a little easier (I had to hunt around the website to find out more information about their different packages). Perhaps more thought and work into making the site more usable would be helpful here–as the pages seem to me were designed for maximum search engine friendliness and not human friendliness. While the website is not as slick and feature-rich as the sites from other similar services such as getAbstract and SoundView, it offers a nice balance of features and content for the price. Overall its a good value.

Filed under: Business, Internet , businessummaries.com, review

Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino

Microsoft Exchange is a messaging and collaboration platform that has quickly gained adoption among many corporate organizations, specially those who have standardized on Microsoft Windows Server for their infrastructure. It brings in one package many enterprise features including messaging (using its own proprietary MAPI/RPC protocol or open standard protocols such as POP3/IMAP and SMTP), shared calendaring, resource management, directory services (LDAP/AD) and many others. In later releases, it has added web access, mobile sync (supports Windows mobile, Blackberry, Android devices) clustering, and high availability features making it suitable for large organizations and mission-critical deployments. If deployed and integrated with other products from Microsoft’s suite of server solutions such as Sharepoint (for collaboration, document management and workflow) and OCS (unified communications and collaboration), Exchange can be a formidable platform for any vendor to match.

Lotus Domino on the other hand has been around earlier, and is still used in many organizations who have decided to deploy corporate groupware solutions early on with Lotus Notes. Like Exchange, it is a messaging and collaboration platform but in addition is also an application development platform commonly used for forms-based or workflow applications. In recent releases, IBM has made Domino an extensible platform with document management services, portal services, unified communications and collaboration (with Lotus Sametime), and others.

Both platforms are mature and have enjoyed wide use in many corporate deployments. Lotus Domino has the advantage of being in the market earlier, while Exchange enjoys the advantage of having an excellent and ubiquitous client in Microsoft Outlook and great integration with Microsoft’s market-leading products.

However, customers looking for an alternative from the open source community or commercial open source vendors are in luck as there is now a host of choices. On top of standard messaging and collaboration features, many of them bundle a ton of other features and functionality, such as built-in antispam and antivirus, file or document management, cross-platform support (ie can often run on both Windows and Linux) and many others. In this post, I’ll try to list down the well known enterprise-ready alternatives and rate them based on their features, extensibility and adoption. Let’s get started:

• Citadel. I got to know of Citadel from mailing lists and recommendations of some uses from message boards, forums and social networking sites. I haven’t tried Citadel but from what I was able to gather from their website, it seems Citadel has been around for a long time, making it a mature product in terms of features. It supports messaging (support for POP3/IMAP/SMTP), group calendars and address books, but in addition offers instant messaging, mailing list management, and bulletin board-style forums. It also bundles open source antispam and antivirus solutions SpamAssassin and ClamAV respectively. Notable is its support for the GroupDAV protocol (a subset of WebDAV), which makes it a great choice if you will be using open source clients as well such as Thunderbird, KDE Kontact, Evolution and others. A notable disadvantage is lack of support for syncing calendar and task information in Outlook. Lack of built-in clustering and high availability features may be a  problem for some organizations, although a knowledgeable Linux admin can compensate for this. With its support for GroupDAV and light hardware requirements, Citadel makes a great choice for organizations comfortable with open source or companies who want to extend the life of old server hardware. I would be hard pressed to recommend this for large enterprise deployments however where support, ease of use, and ease of maintenance and management are more important considerations than features.
• Horde Groupware Webmail Edition. Horde is really a web application framework with Horde Groupware as a project showcase of what is possible with the framework. It is actually a mail client, with the mail and identity management pieces being handled by Postfix, Dovecot, Sendmail and OpenLDAP. Horde Groupware is widely used by many web hosting providers as a hosted groupware solution for customers and is bundled by some Linux distribution vendors (such as ClarkConnect) as their collaboration solution. Because of its roots as an application development framework, Horde can easily be extended and is really a collection of different integrated modules. Besides messaging, different modules handle calendaring, task management, mailing list management, antivirus and antispam (via SpamAssassin and ClamAV), along with file management, photo gallery, forums, memos, wikis and many others. Syncing data with Outlook is possible via 3rd party plugins, and it readily supports other open source clients as well such as Thunderbird, Evolution and others. My criticism against Horde is its dated User Interface versus the other choices here with their slick and snappy AJAX-powered front-ends. Another is the complicated and time consuming set up the various components (ie Postfix and others) Horde modules–admins might be better served getting a pre-packaged solution in place. Overall Horde, like Citadel, is a great choice for organizations with experienced Linux admins, who want to extend the life of old server hardware and want a feature-rich and mature solution. I would be hard pressed to recommend this for large enterprise deployments however where support, ease of use, and ease of maintenance and management are more important considerations than features.
• OpenGroupware/InstantOGO. OpenGroupware also has a rich and long past. It was originally a commercial project which was later spun off to open source project was later spun off and called OpenGroupware. Like many here it supports messaging, group calendars and address books, scheduling and task management, support for GroupDAV, CalDAV, and LDAP out of the box, file and document management and many others. Its a pre-packaged solution and is relatively easy to set up and configure. The commercial version offers support for Outlook sync, as well as commercial support. Definitely a mature, feature-rich solution that is in many ways a good choice for midsized to large organizations.
• Open-Xchange. Open-Xchange is a messaging and collaboration server that is OEMed by many service providers because of its rich features, slick webmail client and ease of setup and use. It supports many open standards protocols and supports Outlook sync via a commercial extension. Originally a commercial product that was bundled with Novell’s Linux Messaging product (SuSE Linux Open-Xchange or SLOX), it features messaging, group calendars/addressbook and scheduling, identity management (support for LDAP and AD), document management, portals,  and more. Recent releases highlight its social networking capabilities with the ability to share information with Social Networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. It will also soon feature support for mobile clients via Exchange’s Active Sync technology. The software is available as a community-supported product, a commercially-supported product, a turnkey appliance or as a hosted instance. Definitely a mature, feature-rich solution that is in many ways a good choice for midsized to large organizations.
• Scalix. Scalix is also a relatively new player that from the get-go targetted the entreprise market early on. It was originally developed on top of HP OpenMail, and was licensed from HP. On top of standard messaging and groupware features it supports a lot of enterprise-grade functionality such as LDAP and AD support, high availability, multi-tenant management, support for Outlook sync and mobile devices, and many others. It features a nice, slick webmail client, but supports Outlook and mobile devices, on top of other open source clients such as Evolution, Thunderbird and many others. It was recently bought by Xandros and is now offered as a hosted instance, commercial turn-key product or a community-supported downloadable product. Because of its rich features, it should be considered as a contender in any enterprise deployment.
• Zarafa. Zarafa is a relatively new player that is being marketed as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. That means you can replace your existing Exchange installation with Zarafa and your existing Outlook clients and mobile devices wouldn’t know the difference. It supports Outlook’s MAPI protocol as well as the ActiveSync protocol for mobile devices. It has a slick webmail which mimics the look and feel of Outlook Web Access, and makes available a nice set of APIs so third party developers can integrate and sync data with the platform. Some popular open source applications that can sync data with Zarafa include SugarCRM (CRM) and Alfresco (document management). It is available in community as well as commercial versions, with some of the more advanced features only available in the commercial editions. The nice thing though is that the Outlook sync, unlike many here, is available as well in the community supported (ie FREE) version. Its rich feature set, compatibility with Outlook, ease of use and management ensures that this solution should be on the short list looking for a lower cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
• Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Zimbra’s entry is the most interesting in that they really rethought the architecture and design of a groupware product. Zimbra is positioned as messaging and collaboration 2.0 with its mashup platform (via Zimlets which allow the product to share and sync data with third-party data sources and service providers) and its slick AJAX-powered webmail and offline client. On top of this, they still offer standard messaging and collaboration features, along with many high-end, enterprise-grade features (only available in their commercial product) such as LDAP and AD support, high availability, archiving, support for Outlook sync and mobile devices, and many others. Like Scalix, the company was recently bought by Yahoo and is now offered as a hosted instance, commercial turn-key product or a community-supported downloadable product. Like Zarafa, integration with other open source products exist like SugarCRM, Alfresco, Asterisk (IP-based PBX) and XMPP (instant messaging). Like Open-Xchange and Scalix, definitely should be on the short list for any midsized to large company looking at deploying a collaboration platform. Its extensibility and rich UI make it a good choice for companies looking for a platform to integrate with form-based and workflow applications making it my choice for companies wishing to look for an alternative to Lotus Domino.

Anything I missed? Let me know by posting a comment. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Filed under: Business, Enterprise Software, Open Source , GroupDAV, Groupware, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Outlook, Open Source, reviews

The Google Juggernaut is On Course

Image via CrunchBase

Four years ago, journalist Tim Weber of the BBC asked whether the growing Google juggernaut had firm idea on where it wanted to go. After finding phenomenal success in an advertising-supported business model in search, many had began to wonder how Google could possibly sustain its growth specially in light of the softening online advertising market.

For a while, it seemed that Google was everwhere and nowhere. Google had developed or acquired a collection of products in everything from search, to webmail services, internet telephony and communications, online content aggregation and distribution, analytics, Maps, satellite images, automated alerts, online translations, specialised searches, online video and many others. While many of these services were useful and interesting, they lacked coherence and more importantly lacked a business model.

Recent announcements from the company have made its strategy for growth moving forward very clear. Just recently they have launched their own browser (Chrome), their owen mobile platform (Android), a new distributed communication and collaboration platform and protocol (Wave), online hosted apps (Google Apps), and now–even its own OS.

The company is going beyond search and online advertising company to becoming a platform company.

Where IBM was the dominant platform company at the time when centralized, monolithic computing was the norm, or where Microsoft dominated when computing shifted to the PC and the Client-Server paradigm, so now Google is positioning itself to be at the forefront as the industry again experiences a sea change in the move towards massively distributed, connected and open systems in the “Internet cloud.”

It would be interesting to see if Google becomes successful and displaces Microsoft as the alpha dog of the industry. It certainly is well positioned to do so, and would be interesting to see how the entire industry will change if  this happens.

Filed under: Business, IT, Internet , google, microsoft

Bayan’s Lola Techie Campaign for Sky Broadband and Sky DSL

Lola Techie commercial from Bayan, a Filipino ISO. One of the more effective viral and traditional and new media marketing campaigns I have seen in a while. Great concept and execution.

In the commercial Lola Techie or “Techie Grandma” is having a webcam conversation with an unseen grandson whom she chastises for not sharing more Youtube videos or not replying to her Facebook chats. She has even resorted to “Super Poking” the grandson on Facebook and will soon “dropkick” him on the popular social networking site. You can follow Lola Techie on Facebook, Twitter and many other social networking sites. Kudos to the Bayan marketing team for actively posting and managing her different profiles to create a community online.

Interested in seeing Bayan post the results of this campaign if it is able to actually contribute to generating interest in Bayan’s Sky Broadband and Sky DSL service.

more about “Bayan’s Lola Techie Campaign for Sky …“, posted with vodpod

Filed under: Business, IT, Web 2.0 , bayan, marketing, social networking, viral, youtube

Entrepreneurs can change the world

Be an entrepreneur! Although US-centric, this is an inspirational video just the same. Created by the folks behind http://grasshopper.com.

more about "Entrepreneurs can change the world", posted with vodpod

Filed under: Business , business model, entrepreneurship, youtube

This is What I Want to Be When I Grow Up!

more about “This is What I Want to Be When I Grow…“, posted with vodpod

Filed under: Business, Enterprise Software, IT

Yahoo Shuts Down Geocities.com

Yahoo has closed Geocities.com, an online property it bought several years ago for $4 billion. During its heyday–during the dotcom boom of the late 90s and early 2000, Geocities.com was one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet with its offer of free webhosting and web page building service. At the time it was the Blogger, Wordress, MySpace or Facebook of its day. A lot of web developers, web designers, and bloggers I know–including myself, used the service to learn and teach ourselves HTML. My first website I believe was hosted there (or was it Tripod?) and it was called “Boogie’s Base on the Web.” Sadly I couldnt find an online archive of this as this website predates Google and I think even the Internet Archive –can you imagine that?

Here’s to Yahoo Geocities! We will miss you.

Filed under: Business, Internet , closure, geocities, yahoo

What it Takes for Filipino IT Companies to Go Global

Melvin Calimag, a Filipino journalist and blogger for ZDNet Asia posts in his blog PinoyPost a question on why, unlike in India, there are very few IT/Tech companies in the Philippines who have gone global. He writes:

Need for Filipino IT firms to go global : Pinoy Post : Blogs : ZDNet Asia

Unlike India which has launched quite a number of successful global IT firms, mostly in the BPO (business process outsourcing) sector, the Philippines seems to be content in merely hosting multinational companies in the country.

A cursory glance at the composition of the largest tech firms in the country would reveal that the majority, if not all, of them are foreign-owned. Even in the field of outsourcing where the Philippines has made some inroads, the biggest names are still those from the United States, United Kingdom, and yes, India.

Sure, there are some Filipino-owned BPO firms which have expanded into foreign shores, but none of them have approximated the level of prominence or success the likes of India’s Infosys, and even Satyam, have achieved–just the mention of these company names would earn recognition of their country of origin.

Sadly, that’s not the case with the Philippines. While the country has somehow been able to market itself as a viable offshore destination, there are no homegrown icons to speak of that can serve as IT ambassadors for the country.

While I certainly share the sentiment, let me share my insight on why that is–specially for tech product companies (which have a different set of challenges than IT service or IT-enabled service companies). I think the challenge for many tech companies in the Philippines (and in Asia for that matter) is that it takes a considerable amount of capital to market one’s products and services abroad.

By this I dont mean just using Internet marketing for small, transactional deals with little value add. By this I mean creating a scalable business with considerable presence and doing the requisite marketing activities such as joining trade shows, going on trade missions, meeting face to face with decision makers , providing onsite consulting and support, developing partner/reseller channels, etc).

In order to do this, often times you need funding from a) a wealthy angel investor (as in the case of GSC and G2iX as mentioned in Melvin’s blog post), or you would need b) venture funds, or a third route is to c) get capital organically through growth.

Now the first is difficult as it requires the right sort of connections or “social capital.” This is something not all Filipino entrepreneurs have access to, but is something that considerably more Indian companies have with the success of many technopreneurs who made it big in the US in the 80s and 90s like Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems and Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail.

The second is hard, because the Philippines and many countries in Asia simply don’t have the capital markets and venture capital ecosystem that entrepreneurs in the US enjoy (but for how long given the state of their economy their I’m not so sure). In this regard, GSC and G2iX struggle as well as evidenced by their aborted IPOs.

The third route is hardest as it requires a large enough local customer base as it requires a robust, growing local economy that is able support and fund that kind of internal growth. This is hardest as it is outside of the entrepreneur’s control. For Filipinos it is difficult because of lackluster economic performance of the country. This is compounded by the fact that the market is too small to fuel the kind of focused expansion/growth required for quick product development, innobvation and market penetration (notice how many Singapore tech companies with the exception of a very few, themselves struggle to create truly global tech product companies).

Technical brilliance, innovative products, smart people unfortunately are not enough. The environment, connections, capital, luck plays a part as well.

*In this view I am heavily influenced by the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwwell

Filed under: Business, IT , Business, Business process outsourcing, entrepreneurship, philippines, Venture capital

This just in: Oracle to Buy Sun

After several weeks of flirting with IBM, now comes news that troubled technology company Sun Microsystems will be acquired (for sure?!) by big bad tech behemoth Oracle. Just a few years after ingesting Siebel, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, BEA, and many others, now Oracle will take on ingesting the considerable assets, talent and notable history of Sun. Among the new properties that will be folded intor Oracle? OpenOffice, ZFS, Glassfish, and what many consider to be Sun’s Crown Jewels: Solaris, Java and recently open source database MySQL (!)

Everybody is holding their breath to find out what will happen next. The press relase is below:

Sun and Oracle

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Filed under: Business, Enterprise Software, Open Source , Business, merger, oracle, sun

Google Losing (Massive Amounts of) Money in Youtube

Google may be losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube–this is according to an article by David Silversmith in his blog at Internet Evolution.

He bases his assessment from research provided by financial firm Credit Suisse and Internet measurement provider comScore Inc. According to their estimates, Youtube is on track to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009. From this amount of users and traffic, it is estimated they earn only anywhere from a low of $90 million (Bear Stearns) to a high of $240 million (Credit Suisse). Revenues come from adwords and home page banner advertising, and premium dedicated channel content.

To earn this however, they spend an estimated $753 million annually on bandwidth and infrastructure. So, depending on whose version of
revenues you accept, Google is losing anywhere from $513 million to
$663 million annually on YouTube, or anywhere from $1.4 million to as
much as $1.65 million every day (see chart below).

Internet Evolution – David Silversmith – Google Losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube

You can read more of David’s post here, or read a post from Technologizer, which expects Youtube to radically shift its strategy and content to survive.

Now if Youtube is having a hard time monetizing its massive user base and traffic–what does this bode for the site’s smaller competitors such as Veoh, Brightcove, and others? Or for that matter sites that offer free services such as Twitter. What does this say about the viability of businesses whose business model is around free and user-generated content?

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web 2.0 , business model, google, youtube