Interview Notes: The Planet's Urvish Vashi

Yesterday we posted a feature about The Planet’s new plan for distributing a hosted version of Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

Last week, I spoke with Urvish Vashi, director of product management at the company.

As is most often the case, there was much more discussed in the interview than could possibly fit the feature. And as has become somewhat customary, I think this would be a good place to let a few more of those ideas loose.

One of the most interesting aspects of the announcement is the decision by The Planet to pursue not just a new market, but also a new channel for reaching that market. Looking to spread its hosted Small Business Server offering throughout the small business market required the crafting of a partner program for the systems integrators who quite often do the IT decision making in that space.

For much of the conversation, Vashi discussed the specific value of the service to that systems integrator community. From the perspective of the hosting business, and most likely from the perspective of the small business, the value of a hosted solution is evident. But for the partners The Planet is looking to acquire, a considerable shift is required in deployment model, pricing and the way they approach their business.

Vashi says, probably rightly so, those small business specialists have a lot to gain from pursuing the switch, turning their static relationships into sources of recurring revenue.

For The Planet, the most interesting aspect of these prospective partners is their ability to customize the solution for the specific niches with which they most closely associate:

“I think this kind of keys in on the model we selected. These small business specialists often specialize in niches that I would never have thought of. There’s the guy that’s doing legal in Atlanta. There’s the person that’s doing non-profits in DC. They all have very different needs, and often different applications. Unlike some other markets, where you might be going into a cookie-cutter thing with shared Exchange or SharePoint, we decided to go with a dedicated offering, which means that the offering is a dedicated server for each individual end customer. So that partner can now install, configure and manage whatever third-party application they might have. Maybe it’s a customer homegrown application.”

The Planet has every intention of cultivating the channel for future growth. But the task at hand is creating a profitable relationship with the resellers while letting them steer the already-profitable relationships they have with end customers.

 “I think we’re going to learn a lot from these customers. And as we cultivate this channel, I think they’re going to take us to the next set of products. Maybe it’s going to be something like Microsoft Dynamics after this. Maybe it’ll be something like another CRM package, or financials.

“Once we create a profitable relationship with these partners – they’ve already figured out how to have a profitable relationship with their customers – we’re going to let them drag us any way that makes sense.”