An interesting quarter, with work happening on multiple fronts:
Thin Client-Thick Server: We’ve got a good stable product ready for taking to trials. Waiting for Customer No. 1. Doing trials at a few places. Getting the brochures ready. We are also planning a series of seminars to get people to better understand the product. Also setting up a small lab in the office with about 10 TCs and a TS so that when people come we can give them a hands-on feel of the Thin Client Desktop. The key will be convincing channels and getting partners. Should talk to companies like Intel, AMD and Via (which benefits from sale of CPUs/motherboard on the server, and even on the TCs), IBM, HP and Sun (who can benefit from increased server sales), the large tech spenders, and the channels (software resellers and systems integrators). Need to find the “innovators” and “visionaries”, who can be our early adopters. This quarter must begin our revenue streams. On the tech front, one clear challenge is to get Windows and DOS applications to run on the TC-TS platform – its something we run into in nearly every company we meet.
Digital Dashboard: The past few weeks have given us a much clearer idea of what we need to do. In about 7-10 days, we will be able to launch it for internal use and that should be good. K-logs are already being used internally for sharing information. The Dashboard is critical because it becomes a very important differentiator in what we are doing. Our aim is to have it into a beta-able stage by the end of the December quarter.
Enterprise Software: We’ve been working on identifying the various building blocks that we need to put the internal information management system in place. Have looked at various open source applications. Narrowed to a few of them: Ofbiz, OpenCRM, SQLedger with JBoss and PostgreSQL as the underlying building blocks, and Java as the development environment. We’ve also done some work in defining various business process flows for enterprise activities. This quarter should see in make headway in architecting “Emergic Enterprise”.
BlogStreet: We launched BlogStreet as a neighbourhood analyser in August and got some very good feedback. After that, we did not innovate because (a) I wasn’t sure how it fit into what we were doing with Emergic (b) limited resources on the engineering front. However, seeing the positive feedback that we’ve received, have decided that we will build on it. It will, hopefully, get us some recognition in the blogging community. Best of all, it gets us relationships with people we did not know before. Immediately, we are putting a search engine on the 10K+ blogs that we bot regularly. The next few weeks should see some interesting enhancements on the site.
My Blog: We have continued to extend MovableType to add some nice features. We now want to package these together and contribute it back to the community.
Messaging: We had one good month in terms of revenues and two not-so-good months, so overall, a somewhat disappointing quarter. We could have done better. But some key orders have been a little delayed in coming, so hopefully, we can make up in the coming quarter. On the tech front, we are now working on MailServ version 4 (V4) which should be ready for launch by December.
So, in a nutshell, a quarter where we consolidated the good development work on the TC-TS front into a product which can now be sold, and took small but important steps on the other fronts. We are on the right track with Emergic. I look forward with great enthusiasm to each day (and hope my team does so too). There’s a lot to do ahead, but I think we’ve now left the plains behind and started climbing the mountain.
– Previous Quarter Update(July 1)
Emergic+Quarter+Update
