December 20, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- At October's ISPCON event, service provider solutions developer Tucows hosted a customer event, at which CEO Elliot Noss promised big things from the company's Blogware and Platypus brands, and invited customers to contribute to the development effort. Noss sat down with us the next day to discuss his company's efforts at integrating Web hosting's back end.
One of the key things for Tucows right now is the integration of its services. Is that something that was lacking in your services?
Elliot Noss: Let me try to come at that like this. The industry is lacking in a couple of key places. And as this industry has grown up, there really is a hole in the back office. You can just look at the billing space, the payment space, the CRM space. Back offices are a mess for service providers broadly. We are partly victims of that, and we certainly think that part of where we can help is to try to address some of that. Right now, there's not a lot of back-office software that plays nice. I think if you look at what Platypus, our billing software, is ? if you look at what control panels are ? they all purport to be provisioning tools and billing tools, but they're all really used in a customer management sense. And it's just a problem right now.
Is Tucows particularly well positioned to address that problem?
EN: I think we bring a couple things to that problem that do put us in a really strong position. I think that we have a trust from our customers and a good relationship with our customers. And I do think that's somewhat unique. Second, I think we've got a unique understanding of the problem. We have been dealing with service providers for a decade. So the problems aren't [new] to us. Another important element of that is service providers have historically been mistreated by suppliers. There's a general mistrust and I think that has led to an over-reliance on build-it-yourself. I get it. I understand where that comes from. I might be in that place myself if I was one of them. But boy, you just can't bake your own bread. You can't do everything yourself.
How many Tucows customers really use everything that Tucows can provide?
EN: The short answer is we have a lot of just domain customers, or just billing customers. You have to remember that billing, Blogware, email and email defense have really just been out there and pushed hard for the last 12 to 18 months. So we've got plenty of customers with two services. Probably the majority of our customers have more than one service. But very few have four and five. And, by the way, we've done a horrible job of integrating our own services. It's only two months ago that platypus started billing for domain names. Who can we blame for that but ourselves?
Specifically how are you working to make Platypus more relevant for Web hosts?
EN: We recognized when we bought Boardtown, and picked up Platypus, that it was primarily an ISP billing solution, and the bulk of our customers are Web hosting companies. We have a huge number of customers that are ISPs, but the single largest base is Web hosting companies. We've just started, with the 5.1 release, even taking the product to our Web hosting company customers. So this is the first time that we're really starting to get feedback around where we're at. Are we 20 percent of the way there? Are we 80 percent of the way there? So that's an ongoing process. In terms of what that means, specifically, service providers' back offices, Web hosting companies' back offices, are generally a mess. You'd be shocked if I told you what the back offices of some of the biggest players in the industry look like. There's so much scotch tape and band aids and gum sticking pieces together. It's amazing that these companies can function at the 100,000 or 300,000 user level. So what we need Platypus to do is to make all that billing, provisioning and customer care so much more lights-out than it is.
You kind of touched on how involved Tucows customers are in the development of the products. How unique is that among providers of this kind of service?
EN: There are a bunch of examples of small service providers in the space that, whether by design or by accident, have great user-centric feedback loops. I think we have always, very explicitly, viewed that as extremely important. In our history we have done, at varying times, okay, good and great jobs of that. I think right now we're in a pretty good place. We have great discussion forums around Platypus, around domains in general and around Blogware. We've got one of the most trafficked developer's blogs on the Internet with the Farm. And we haven't tied all that stuff together. We think there's a ton of room to get better there. It's something that we think that we've done an okay job of, but we're miles from optimized.
I think I was struck by the fact, not necessarily that it was a well-oiled machine, but that the desire to make it that participatory seemed so genuine.
EN: Boy, it's a lot easier than being smart. There's no question that we very consciously want to do that. We screw up in communication all the time, though, and it's always going to be a work in progress. The whole concept of customer participation in development, in support and in strategy is pretty new. And it's really the Internet that facilitates that at a whole other level. I don't think we, or anybody, have an idea of what that looks like anywhere near an end game.
