New product ideas come from everywhere—customers, vendors, sales teams, competitive pressures, government regulations…you get the idea. Your product dreams are often bigger than your ability to productize and bring them to market. There is a proven way to see through the clutter and prioritize the winners: Listen to your customers.

At Intermedia, we help Web hosts, MSPs and other IT service providers bring their customers’ demands for better email, Web mail, wireless email and lightweight business applications to market. We prioritize new features and products based on real customer problems articulated to us. It sounds obvious, but too many companies launch new products and features that are not solving even a single problem for their customers. The product, and in some cases the company, are doomed to slow growth and failure since the market messaging never strikes a tone with a customer.

What drives Intermedia? Customer feedback about their business challenges. Two business problems we are asked to repeatedly assist with are productivity and security—primary issues that all businesses struggle with today. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo and AIM are great tools for communicating with others. We all use them, but using them at the office is becoming an issue for many businesses. From productivity problems to security problems to intellectual property leaks, public IM access at work is a problem.

After listening to our customers’ frequent requests, we recently launched a secure instant messaging solution based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This product idea was driven directly from our customers and is driving rapid adoption of this new service. In the end, this product will be successful because we are solving fundamental business problems with secure, business centric, instant messaging.

In 2007, the masses spoke and demanded access to their email from anywhere. No longer could email access be limited to the desk at the office, the computer at home or an executive with a BlackBerry/Treo. In 2007, 24x7x365 email access from any device became the norm.

In early 2007 in the US, we saw the success of the AT&T Blackjack, T-Mobile Wing and BlackBerry's Pearl become available in fashionable colors. In June, we had the blockbuster success of Apple's iPhone launch. Clearly, the masses had decided that access to their email and the Internet on the go was mandatory.

Our role as service providers should be to foster access to email in any way possible. 2007 might go down in US technology history as the last year that the wireless carriers dictated not only the device, but also the accessibility and affordability of email on the device.

2008 brings many changes to the mobile device world – from Apple's promise of an SDK for the iPhone, to further enhancements and more device permeations in the Windows Mobile world, to the excitement around the Google Android devices.  In January 2008 the iPod touch was given the ability to send and receive email via WiFi.

While some argue that the iPhone is not a "business device," momentum seems to be moving that way as AT&T has recently created "business plans" for the iPhone. With a secure IMAP connection, business owners and IT administrators should rest assured that their users' email is being transmitted securely to an iPhone. While push email is always preferable and always part of the BlackBerry/Windows Mobile/Good Mobile – Microsoft Exchange combination, a business that has their employees connected to their corporate email 24x7x365 sees a giant productivity boost.

All of this is disruptive to Web hosts, IT Administrators and wireless carriers. It is important that we all strategize to create an unhindered email-connected world and making hosted Exchange available to your customers is the easiest way to get started.

On premise installations of Microsoft Exchange or other enterprise class email platforms no longer make sense for most companies with less than 1,000 mailboxes. Beyond the costs for hardware, licenses and IT administration time, companies are increasingly accounting for employee productivity loss due to downtime, SPAM and lack of mobile access to email.

This week I spoke to Lee Karjala, General Manager of STKUSA. STKGM.COM is a leading wholesaler of dry goods to dollar stores. They have been in business for 20 years. They primarily sell to independent stores, convenience stores and drug stores.

In the last year they have moved several of their back-office and internal systems to outsourced Web-based providers. Previously they had an IT staff of two with a cost of over $100k per year to maintain basic services such as their on-premise Microsoft Exchange corporate email. Previously they had daily issues with an excessive amount of SPAM, viruses and downtime. Previously they had standalone fax machines.

By switching to Intermedia's Hosted Exchange service, they instantly had relief for their SPAM and virus problems. They also no longer had to experience regular outages that the IT staff would spend hours struggling with. Employees are also regular users of Outlook Web Access for full email capability off site.

STKUSA also subscribes to Intermedia's Fax via Email service. Now, all employees can have their own fax number and all of their faxes are sent directly to their email. Faxes are now never lost, backed up and are accessible from anywhere.

When I proposed a future where email, fax, voicemail and more could be tied to a CRM platform, Lee agreed that this would be the perfect integration.

As hosting providers we know that these services are becoming more accessible to small and medium sized business – but as of yet are not as integrated as they are at large enterprises. Hosting providers that help make this vision come to life will see great revenue growth and will successfully transition from a hosting provider to an IT solutions provider.

Being a product management professional at hosting companies for eight years now, I have had the opportunity to listen to a lot of "pitches" - for services ranging from web design tools to intrusion detection systems.  I am always amazed that many of these companies do not know how to "talk to me" and have not "done research" on our industry. 

In reviewing opportunities and preparing business cases I keep the following points in mind:

-Choosing a vendor with a service/product that customers want and an experience that customers will find intuitive and elegant
-Choosing a vendor that understands our business model
-Choosing vendor that has a long term strategy
-Choosing a vendor that can support these services over time

The business opportunity for these vendors looking for growth and market share in our industry often find two results: little or a lot.  The companies that are successful in the middle have a habit of disappearing or becoming a commodity. 

Often times these days it comes down to the business model.  Hosting margins can be high and hosting companies expect the same high margins on the add-on services we are bundling.  The problem is many of the vendors in our space are moving off perpetual licensing business models to monthly services/licensing revenue models.  Having not experienced 30 or more months of recurring revenue from a customer, like hosting companies do, these vendors do not know how to license and price their service.

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that aggressively sign-up hosting companies only to have a wavering interest in our space or a short term strategy.  That leaves hosting companies customers with a bad experience, especially when you have to retire the offering.  A good example from my distant past was PowerMailbox.  They signed up over 50 hosting companies, only to have been sold and shut down less than one year from launching.  Another example is a famous Anti-Spam vendor, who, after being acquired by a famous software company seemed to have stopped updating their platform.

In the end, it's about choosing services that your customers want from vendors that understand your business model and are in it for the long run.

Recently, I spoke to an employee at Point MultiMedia, a pre-trial consulting firm that specializes in audio and video services for law firms and court cases around the country.  The company is small, yet has wide experience and thousands of hours of experience in video depositions, to in-court technical support.  They are a customer of Intermedia’s messaging and collaboration services. 

Point MultiMedia has employees managing several clients at locations across the US at all times.  They depend on their access to email, to communicate with each other and their clients.  They use several different devices to connect to the Exchange 2007 service including Microsoft Outlook 2007, Outlook Web Access,  and BlackBerry’s.  All of these connections are secure, easy to use and reliable.  They also use Exchange’s public folders features, to store documents, files and have a company calendar.  They have also created distribution lists to consistently handle communication across the company’s employees. 

Recently Point MultiMedia signed up for Intermedia’s Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services account.  Doing so entitled them to a free copy of Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007, which was recently shipped to them.  While they have not yet built out a SharePoint site, they do have plans to do so in the near future.

Talking with this customer highlighted that existing customer's can sign-up for new services, yet take some time to start using them.  This demonstrates the benefits of communicating with existing customers on a regular basis.

Many of our clients have employees that need to be connected to their mailboxes and their content stored in SharePoint at all times. More and more companies are moving to a distributed workforce, serving clients and their offices nationwide on a project basis. As this trend grows, the technology supporting it becomes the center of the business.

Last week I spoke with two employees of DiscoverReady, an interesting professional services company that is assisting their clients in their need to streamline the process and management of discovery. DiscoverReady has a unique team of process-driven attorneys, project managers and technology integrators committed to bringing order and efficiency to the challenging world of discovery. The company provides law firms and legal departments with effective discovery management solutions delivered by highly skilled professional resources. Founded in 2005, DiscoverReady is headquartered in New York City.

Discovery needs of the fortune 1,000 and now SMB’s are exploding thanks to new laws and increased regulation and oversight. Recent rulings known as The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are regulations governing civil procedure in United States district (federal) courts, that is, court procedures for civil suits. The most recent revisions, which took effect in December 2006, made practical changes to discovery rules to make it easier for courts and litigating parties to manage electronic records.

For hosting providers these new laws mean several things, including the need for clients to electronically store and archive their email files while having the ability to search them when needed. With the explosive growth of information being stored – it is estimated that over 80% of all corporate information is now in digital form http://www.onlinesecurity.com – and the platforms to store them on, the services that hosting providers enable, are often at the center of these investigations.

DiscoverReady uses Intermedia's SharePoint collaboration hosting platform to distribute and share information across the organization. With employees and client offices all over the U.S., SharePoint has become the critical link that ties the company together. The project manager that I spoke to creates the document workspaces and templates for storing project related files and reports. The technology and legal teams each have their information accessible wherever and whenever they need it.

DiscoverReady chose SharePoint as it not only suits their collaboration needs but is also cost-effective and integrated with their hosted Microsoft Exchange mailbox users, making it easy to have a secure and backed-up platform. With more and more business working online from disparate locations across the country, SharePoint is becoming an increasingly essential business tool. Microsoft recently announced year-over-year growth in SharePoint revenues of 35%.

Conferences, Conventions and Expos are great events to interact with customers - both existing and potential. Last week I had the pleasure to attend Layered Technologies second annual "LT PACT" and two weeks ago I attended Microsoft's TechEd. While the events were different in many ways they were similar in several. Both events were sponsored by companies that appreciate their customers and the need to build a deep multi-level relationships with them.

Much of the work in our industry is done virtually and we do not have a chance to meet many of the hundreds or thousands of customers that purchase or resell our products. As my blog focuses on customers, and interviewing them on the phone, being able to meet many of them has been a great source of information and inspiration. Intermedia had a booth at TechEd and dozens, if not, more customers walked up and chatted about our services. Direct, interactive and person-to-person feedback is great.

When a reseller, developer, or a hosting company executive attends these events they are also able to quickly see, learn about, and consider the trends that are changing our industry. From my first hosting related industry trade show in Fall 2000 – "Internet World" – to these last two, I have always left each one with a sense of "what is hot". In our industry, "what is hot" is primarily driven by the vendors, developers, customers and sometimes outside influences, like government regulations.

At Microsoft's TechEd we left with a sense that SharePoint, virtualization, Silverlight, CRM and mobility were the hot concepts. For example, many of the SharePoint sessions were standing room only and at TechEd that means hundreds or more people attending a session. As for Intermedia, we were able to get a better sense of what developers, Exchange admins and more SharePoint users and designers are working on and thinking about. All this feedback translates back to new features and a clear road ahead.

At Layered Technologies' event we left with a sense that they are a great company, with great customers who are all at the forefront of new technologies that are causing a paradigm shift in hosting services. The concept of grid computing and virtual data centers is leading the way forward. Layered Technologies "Client Centric" approach was demonstrated by the event's focus on helping their clients learn and grow their businesses.

Connecting with your customers is valuable on so many levels and being able to connect in person is why events like TechEd and LT PACT are more than worth the time spent there.

Web and Application/SharePoint hosting is not a true "utility", like many seem to refer to our industry as. It's an evolving set of technology enablers that allow for the constant evolution of Web content and productivity applications to be developed. I can't think of any utilities that innovate at the rate that hosting companies, and the platforms that we enable for our customers, do. Both Microsoft and the open-source community continue to evolve the tools, frameworks, languages and applications that hosting customers use to develop new Web sites and applications.

Web 2.0 is here and many say Web 3.0 is here or just about to start. Web and application users around the world are becoming more sophisticated and have become accustomed to very rich interactive experiences as they interact with Web sites and Web applications. Today Web content needs to be interactive and driven by the AJAX experience. Web applications must be easy to use and engage the user. No longer will simple HTML pages and forms with frustrating validation interaction models suffice.

Yesterday I attended an event that Microsoft is sponsoring in three cities. (You may still be able to attend in Denver or Los Angeles). The massive Web 2.0 strategy that Microsoft has in place was neatly presented in a one-day event. There is no doubt, in my or the attendees' minds that Microsoft is just finishing the launch of the key technologies for the next generation of Web based experiences. Microsoft is once again re-invigorating the world of the designer and developer. The new Web 3.0 tools that they have recently launched are revolutionary. Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, IIS 7.0, the Expression Studio and its applications, some of recent plug-ins for Visual Studio 2005, and the pending next release of Visual Studio (code- named ORCAS), all have the potential to create a whole generation of Web sites and applications.

The toolset may just be the biggest enabler of the future. Designers and developers have always worked somewhat independently. For example, Photoshop and Visio designs and mock-ups did not always make it to a live implementation. But now with the Expression tools, all of these foundational technologies are accessible by both designers and developers, enabling them to work together. The new workflow that these tools enable between these two very different disciplines has the potential to bring about a whole new model for how Web sites and Web-based applications are developed. The beneficiaries of the results will be the Web hosting customer.

New beautiful and engaging Web sites. New beautiful and engaging Web-based applications. All to be hosted by Web hosts.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform! Customers have been actively using SharePoint to enhance their businesses ability to collaborate, and enhance their business processes for years. WSS v3 takes the platform to the next level. If you have not looked at SharePoint in the last few years or at WSS v3, I encourage you to have a look.

This week I spoke to an Intermedia.NET Windows SharePoint Services customer. Cybernetic Learning Systems (CLS), a product technical training company, has been using Windows SharePoint services to manage consulting and training engagements with customers. They specialize in developing training for sales & marketing management, product management, and technology at global 1,000 companies. Today it is common for large corporations to bring in professionals to develop and implement a training program. CLS is also a vendor for other companies that need to supply a training component during an implementation.

If you can imagine, CLS is managing many projects and training programs for many companies at one time. One of their core uses of Windows SharePoint Services is to track projects, tasks and people. WSS is a world class, yet affordable solution that was simple to implement for the company. The templates included with SharePoint allowed CLS to quickly get started with managing their projects and clients. A SharePoint project site is a key component of each of their engagements.

They also use SharePoint to share documents with their partners and clients. Many of their clients already have intranets, however gaining access and creating a shared documents library can take a long time for a large company's IT team to set-up and create access profiles for. A secure WSS document sharing site can be created in a short time by CLS.

CLS has been an Intermedia.NET customer since the late 1990's. They have continued to evolve and grow and chose hosted Windows SharePoint services to solve a need. They told me that their core competency is training, and not managing servers and applications.

So, do you think SharePoint is a hosted application? To me, SharePoint is the ultimate SaaS platform - it's got all the core plumbing and features that are needed to build customizeable and scalable applications. With WSS v3, SharePoint has become a viable alternative. I attend the SharePoint user group meetings in NYC, and the buzz, user & developer interest and attendance is at the highest level ever!

This week I spoke to a project manager from Boyd Tamney Cross, a full service marketing firm. They produce and manage Web sites for a variety of companies, including consumer goods and business services companies. Some of the sites are developed in home grown ASP.NET based content management systems, e-commerce applications and large databases. With these home grown site and application management solutions they are able to empower their customers to update portions of their sites, product descriptions and even special offers in the e-commerce stores.

It's the little features that count. With little prompting, the customer indicated that several of the proprietary and lesser known features of the Intermedia.NET Windows hosting control panel are very helpful in the quest to efficiently manage the Web applications. Features not often found on a shared Web hosting account such as Start/Stop/Restart the Web server, the ability to add "Web server" users, each with their own unique permissions, and the ability to back up an SQL 2005 server database were all mentioned as features that are not often seen at other hosting providers.

Most hosting providers provide a control panel that is either proprietary or provided by one of the great hosting control panel vendors like cPanel, Helm, SWsoft, Ensim or others. All provide a core feature-set and have a different look and feel. All need to be continually updated for compatibility with their specific implementations, hardware & networking architecture, Web server updates, databases, security, etc. The balance between maintainability, upgradeability and differentiated feature sets will always be widely discussed and is often the cause of heated discussion.

One of the most important concepts to consider when choosing a control panel vendor or new features to add to your proprietary control panel is the feature set. Continually listening to your customers and tracking their requests will help you prioritize the ever growing list. I listen to/read every request and the more I hear customers making the same request, the more priority that item is given.