Getting Started In Collaboration

Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix LLC, a St. Louis-based managed hosting service provider that hosts Zimbra's collaboration applications, on the challenges of hosting collaboration software:

Know Thy Customer: Hosting collaboration software requires different skills than hosting infrastructure software because with collaboration applications you're getting closer and closer to the end user. You have to understand the full life cycle of collaboration application usage. And replacing one collaboration system with another can be difficult because you're dealing with end-user expectations—we do a lot of swapping out of [Microsoft] Exchange for Zimbra.

Know Thy Customer's Business: You need to have an understanding of business processes in order to understand your clients' collaboration requirements and what problems they are trying to solve. Understanding their needs also provides opportunities to sell new add-on features and plug-ins. And when you're selling to your existing customers, it lowers your customer acquisition costs.

Easy Sell? Generally we don't have to demonstrate the value of collaboration software, as the customer has already assessed their needs and chosen Zimbra before coming to us. And when they put collaboration software in, it may not be a mission-critical application. But oftentimes this is the first time the company has outsourced any part of their IT system. That can be a hurdle.

Technology Hurdles: The biggest technology challenges for hosting collaboration applications are trying to establish the base infrastructure that's needed to serve the expected number of users. Also, plug-ins may not be scalable: A company may want to outsource a plug-in that was developed for 150 people, but when you try to scale to 1,000 people it won't work.

Expect Uneven Usage Patterns: You're constantly dealing with huge usage spikes with collaboration applications. You may plug in some new features and people will suddenly start trying them out. It becomes a viral thing. Infrastructure software has more of a steady, predictable growth pattern. We use Hyperic [open-source Web infrastructure management software] to monitor the health of the application.