Networking Nonprofits For a Profit

CGNet's lessons learned are good ones for VARs: Know your niche, stay focused on what your client base really needs, and keep the technology as bulletproof as you can, especially when you are rolling it out in faraway places.

CGNet started in 1983 as a World Bank agricultural-research foundation consulting project, and built a network for roughly 35 different agricultural-relief organizations in various developing countries. It currently brings in roughly $6 million in revenue annually, and has expanded to become a full-service solution provider. The organization offers remote dial-up services for international users, reselling the iPass network as Traveler's Access Service, making it easier for clients to download the necessary software and dial in from anywhere in the world. CGNet also hosts discussion list servers and provides remote Outlook Web access for high-profile charitable organizations, such as The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

CGNet's latest project is called NetHope, which covers locations in the Philippines, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, among others. The idea is that workers in various relief organizations will share ideas, projects and plans over the Internet, going beyond e-mail access and VPNs.

"As part of this project, everybody gets Web infrastructure, IP telephony and reliable e-mail," says Tim Haight, vice president of marketing. "Then individual programs can add more apps of their own, which they're just starting to do." So far, 15 sites are online as a result of CGNet staffers working with the local organizations' IT people and satellite-service VARs. Accenture has been engaged to evaluate the project and make recommendations going forward in terms of gear and processes.

CGNet also has played a role in relocating data centers when the politics of a particular city heat up and an agency wants to protect its data. In one case, CGNet was able to move a client's Exchange servers from an office occupied by rebel forces back to CGNet's offices in California, and provide Web access so its client could continue to communicate. This is possible because the cost of global telecommunications has dropped by an order of magnitude in the past few years. "The 'gotcha' is that the total cost of ownership can be hard to calculate and still be expensive because of gaps in local expertise or in the quality of the local electric power grid and data service," Haight says. To keep TCO down, CGNet specifies remote monitoring tools, uses turnkey appliances, such as Sun's Cobalt Qube and mixes up local ISPs with satellite dishes where needed.

Along the way, CGNet has developed some solid expertise, such as being able to tell its clients which are the better ISPs to deal with in any particular country. It's all about doing well by doing good.

Georg Lindsey, president of CGNet, puts it this way: "A few years ago during the dot-com boom, everyone here in Silicon Valley said we were nuts. Now they want to work for us because we are still in business and they aren't."

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