I met up with a friend few days back. I told him our OpenMail.SG has a new look-and-feel. It's a rebranding exercise to attract even more customers.
He asked about the business model of OpenMail.SG. In brief, I told him we are no different from what Gmail or Yahoo provides, except:
- We are a phone-call away (especially for the non-technicals);
- We provide mostly for the Singapore corporates (especially for the SMEs);
- We know our product (we are the Sun product specialists)
We need to be a little different and we better be best in our differentiators.
We believe the pie is always big enough for everyone.
Even with tough competition from Google Apps, there is a segment where customers still prefer personal service ("warm" phone call, rather than "cold" email correspondences).
We also concentrate our effort in the Singapore SME (Small-Medium Enterprises) market. This is the market that requires a service provider that can explain the various technologies in simpler terms for them. (You'll be surprised they do not even know what "domain name" means)
Lastly, we know our product! We have been providing Professional Services on behalf of Sun Microsystems for the past 5 years. We are especially strong in Portal, Messaging and Identity.
We could have easily provide our customers with Fedorda/SendMail/SquirrelMail combination. ROI would have be much higher. However, we are not value-adding to our customers.
That is why we deploy what we think is best-of-breed product for our customers - Solaris/Sun Java System Communications Suite. (which comes with 2 choices of Webmail - Communications Express or Sun Convergence).
More costly setup but if this is what our customers are looking for, we are game for it!
A happy customer will refer 2 more potential customers ... and the maths continues ....
No comments:
Post a Comment