October 13, 2006 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 3:19 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (6)

Guess What? Winner of Office 2.0 Award is a Hosting Company!

David Young from Joyent gave a great presentation at the Office 2.0 Conference on his company's web services triple play.

Joyent's primary products are Connector, a suite of hosted apps that includes webmail, calendar, contact management and file sharing, TextDrive, a popular web hosting service that's home to 4,000+ Ruby on Rails projects, and StrongSpace, a secure storage service.

David argued that what business users need is a "PC in the sky" that offers read-to-use software for common tasks, computing power for other applications they might wish to run, and storage space for data. He announced a new $15 plan that provides single-account access to Connector, TextDrive and Strongspace.

Connector, by the way, features Skype and Jajah integration, voice being an indispensable mode of business communication. David also pointed out that all of Joyent's products support a wide range of protocols: RSS, IMAP, ichttp://www.inetword.com/mashup/mashup.htmlal, vCard, LDAP, WEBDAV, rsync, subversion... for easy interoperability with any other tools customers might use.

[Speaking of interoperability, check out this mashup grid and the SAM (Simple Ajax Mashup) techniques behind it.]

Joyent was voted Best Office Suite by two-thirds of the conference attendees, placing it far ahead of Zoho, ThinkFree, gOffice (NOT a Google product), and the very cool Salesforce/iNetWord/SharedMethods/Thumbstacks 4-way mashup (see mashup video here).

I think this shows that web hosting plays an important role in the Web 2.0/SaaS ecosystem - and that web hosting belongs in this ecosystem rather than on its own island.

PS - The Joyent folks have a great blog. Check it out, and watch the commercial they made with Sun.

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Excellent summary. Joyent was by far a stand out suite. In terms of O20 tools, I really picked up on SiteKreator (they also host the web 2.0 sites that are created with their service) and Vyew. Richard McManus, who didn't attend the event, asked some pretty good questions about Office 2.0 which I will visit in an upcoming post. I think he was shooting for the feedback similar to what Esther Dyson offered during her kick off speech.

# Posted By Brian Solis | 10/14/06 11:52 AM

Thanks Brian! Great coverage of the event on your blog! About Richard McManus, were you thinking of the "marriage of social and business apps" guest post by John Milan?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_busine...

I actually don't quite agree that Office 2.0 = social business apps. Take Freshbooks, for instance - their users benefit from information aggregation without directly collaborating with one another. In fact, the recurring theme I saw during the Blitz Demos was (surprisingly) using technology to improve accountability.

http://www.isabelwang.com/2006/10/office_20_is_no....

# Posted By Isabel Wang | 10/16/06 12:37 AM

That's interesting. One thing I would like to see for small businesses is to be able to select a product like ours (SalesGuru.com) as part of their hosting package. That way, we would be able to offer it for a lot less than we do. Right now, we offer it for $899 per year for up to 10 users, which is not that expensive when compared to salesforce.com, but if an ISP was offering it as part of a package, we could certainly offer it for a lot cheaper.

# Posted By Derek Mailhiot | 10/16/06 3:21 PM

Hi Derek- Your site says that your rates are 91% lower than SalesForce.com, which doesn't seem to be 100% accurate at the moment. SalesForce is offering a $995 10-user price, and a $695 5-user price. In addition, it looks like you are located at 1&1, which does not specialize in complex application hosting. SalesForce spent $50+ million building out their own data center infrastructure. Last and most importantly, SalesForce has a sizable developer network - over 400 third party apps are available through its platform. I don't mean to pick on you, but I think pricing comparisons should be make on an apples-to-apples basis? By the way, if I were a prospective customer or partner, I would love to see a list of current users on your website (SalesForce has dozens of case studies), as well as names and bios for your management team. I'd also be interested in some clarification on your database of 14 million companies. If I signed up, would my contact information be made available to others??

# Posted By Isabel Wang | 10/16/06 4:00 PM

Hi Isabel,

True, salesforce.com actually claims to have spent $100 million developing salesforce.com. That's precisely my point. Salesforce has so many bells and whistles that it is confusing to learn and use; bells and whistles that 99% of small companies don't need or want. We spent $100,000 developing SalesGuru.com. It is easy to learn and use, and it does all the basics that most companies need in terms of CRM, SFA, Marketing, and Sales Leads. Also, salesforce developed their application in the 1999; today it costs a fraction of the cost to develop on-demand software. Regarding price, I am not really talking about the special deals that salesforce has. We recently offered a subscription to SalesGuru.com at $99. Salesforce.com charges $65 per user per month, so 50 users would cost $39,000 per year. At SalesGuru.com, a company with 50 users is $1,999 per year.That means that SalesGuru.com is 94.87% less expensive. I should say, SalesGuru.com is NOT for large companies that need powerful servers. SalesGuru.com is for small companies, that simply want a basic on-demand CRM application to use. We have a few hundred companies signed up and have never had a problem with a slow server or downtime. We currently use 1and1.com, as well as Datapipe.com. Both have served us well. Once we're larger, and we need to upgrade, of course we will. But right now, we'll keep our costs down and compete against salesforce on price. Of course, SalesGuru.com can be bundled and put on any server, should a client require that. Finally, a lot of our clients are actually more interested in the Sales Leads that SalesGuru.com provides, so we have seen quite a few salesgenie.com clients sign up at SalesGuru.com. Thanks!

# Posted By Derek Mailhiot | 11/23/06 1:22 AM

Derek, your sales leads offer is my least favorite aspect of SalesGuru. Your website doesn't say where this data comes from? Are the 14,015,082 US leads aware that you are providing their contact information to whomever signs up for your service? With every new signup you receive, the folks on your sales leads list may hear from yet another vendor. Wouldn't they be overloaded at some point? Also, who is responsible for maintaining the list? Would a company's record be removed/updated it if objects to being contacted? Goes out of business? Moves?

# Posted By Isabel Wang | 11/23/06 12:56 PM

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