Additional Business Partnering Opportunities for Web Connections

Background.

In the Global Small Business "All Hands" meeting at Whistle Communications on Friday, 21 January 2000, the invited Customer Guest Speaker was Lonnie Robinson, of RK Electric. He made the following points, among others, about his experience with both the InterJet I as a product, and the InterJet II as a part of the Web Connections service.

• His business model involved using the Internet to share construction design drawings in AutoCAD file format with the general contractor purchasers of his electrical contractor services. This occurred in two modes, either downloading files from one another, reviewing them, marking up needed changes, and uploading the changed files, or doing the same "red line markup" chore interactively on files residing at his customer's sites. Typically in either case this work would be done by or under the direction of one of about 25 individual RK Electric project managers, the major users of Internet services.

• His engineering IT capability prior to his initial InterJet solution was a mixed LAN of Macintoshes and "Wintel" platforms, sharing files on a "Wintel" server and accessing the Internet via modems and dialup lines to a separate ISP account per user.

• His technical support model consisted of doing the Macintosh support himself, and hiring a "Wintel" network guru who dropped by once a month to take care of accumulated support needs.

• By using the Interjet instead of separate lines and accounts, he was able to support 25 intermittent Internet users more cheaply and with perceived better interactive response and file upload and download times.

• Another big win, and a major reason for his initial selection of an InterJet solution from a Macintosh trade publication ad, was the InterJet's compatible support of both Macintosh and "Wintel" platforms, which matched the installed base of machines at RK Electric.

• Getting a web presence, even a passive one with just a couple of pages for his customers to see, was important to him, because the business community with whom he dealt gave his company more respect as an up to date and "with it" business for the "RKElectric.com" on his business card, both as part of an email address and as part of a web site name.

• The speed improvement brought to his business process by having a DSL line attached to his InterJet, compared to RK Electric's prior use of individual dial up modems, was a real productivity boost for his company, allowed days faster turn around time on these markup changes, and provided more reliable communications.

• He mentioned repeatedly that we needed to advertise the InterJet solution in trade publications commonly read by the contracting community, and repeated throughout his presentation how much we needed to emphasize the ease of installation and speed of configuration of the InterJet solution to our customers. He seemed completely amazed and enthralled with that aspect of the WebConnections service, in particular since he did the InterJet administration himself. This glee with the InterJet continued despite that he also had a story of problems getting the DSL line working. In this latter case he had nothing but praise for the technical support he received. This part of his talk was a real moral booster for GSB and particularly Whistle listeners.

• He mentioned being offput when upgrading from an InterJet I to an InterJet II, to find that he was no longer able to "buy the box", but instead was being forced into a service contract, though he grudgingly admitted that the service contract "seemed OK" once he had time to understand it.

  [Comment:

  IBM is eager to get out of the commodity hardware selling business, because when you "sell the box and kiss the customer goodbye", profit margins vanish.

  Instead, IBM seeks an ongoing "electronic" relationship with the customer, by selling a service contract, in conjunction with which follow-on sales opportunities are anticipated.

  However, this creates an essential conflict with the desires of the customer.

  The customer who went though the AT&T breakup, discovered the lifecycle financial benefits of owning hardware instead of leasing it. That customer has learned with good reason to be suspicious of being placed on the paying end of a revenue stream.]

  He suggested that we change our business model to sell the box and then let users later subscribe to the service at their own pace and in response to their own perception of need.

• When asked to describe any improvements he would make to the InterJet solution, he mentioned his need to control separately the Internet access hours for a secretary who had become addicted to the Web to the exclusion of useful work. He was promised help finding existing facilities in the WebConnections / InterJet II service to do just that.

• When asked for names of standard "productivity" software packages in use at his business, he rather surprised the audience by telling us there were very few. Instead, an acounting package "American Contractor" tailored to the need of the contracting trades was the main business application run, while his billing was accomplished using Filemaker Professional Version.

The New Opportunity Revealed in the Above Presentation

Hidden in the above is a huge, generalizable, win-win business partnership opportunity for WebConnections, but where? Let's review the players. We have Whistle/IBM supplying the InterJet/WebConnections solution, looking for a way to find customers to whom to sell more service contracts. We have RK Electric, happy customer, using the speed, sharing, and convenience of the InterJet to provide a web presence, to support multiple simultaneous users trading and marking up AutoCAD files. On the other end of the trade and markup are the well served general contractors who have hired RK Electric to do electrical work on larger projects, and see the job planning and design phrase being done well and more quickly than ever before.

Oh, yes, and hidden offstage is AutoDesk Corporation, the provider of the AutoCAD software and widely accepted file interchange format that makes use of the net to do any of this possible and profitable. Consider the relationship between AutoDesk and WebConnections for a moment. What does WebConnections do for AutoDesk?

WebConnections is an enabling mechanism for the AutoCAD product, making its use in a distributed design environment, faster, better, more productive and profitable for AutoCAD users. The result? RK Electric gets more contracts, makes more profit, hires more staff, and adds to its seat license count for AutoCAD. The general contractors using AutoCAD get more value from their AutoCAD designs, get faster turnaround on design markups, do their job faster and better, more often come in on time and under budget, prosper, hire more staff, license more AutoDesk seats. Their competition, seeing this success, also opts for an AutoCAD solution, to be compatible with the subcontractors like RK Electric, funneling even more profits back to AutoDesk.

To AutoDesk, this means that helping make AutoCAD customers existing and potential aware of the additional value of AutoCAD used in conjunction with WebConnections and the InterJet is a path to higher profits. Partnered with Whistle/IBM, AutoDesk will be more successful, and so will WebConnections.

AutoDesk and AutoCAD are just one vendor and product pair whose facilities are in use across the Internet in cooperative fashion between separate businesses. There are probably at least hundreds of data sharing formats standardized among ISO, ANSI, EIA, IEEE, and a raft of other standards bodies. Associated with many of these are one or a few major vendors offering products which implement these standards. Each and every one of them is a potential WebConnections business partner in a win-win situation to direct users of their products to an InterJet solution to make that use more productive.

To give just a taste of the wide variety of opportunities here, marketing and sales can research to find many more, here are a few of the ones I've encountered.

• Medical facilities started sharing X-Ray, CAT and MRI scans, Ultrasound scans, images of stained microscope slides, and other image data across the net several years ago.

• The Initial Graphics Exchange Standard provides a rich format for sharing mechanical design information with both graphics and non-graphical components.

• The Computer Graphics Metafile has for years provided a file exchange format of last resort for graphics images between shrink wrapped productivity product packages.

• Framemaker, Photoshop, and many other similar products are commonly used in the printing and publishing industry in a cooperative fashion between content providers and paper product realizers, including in some cases copier and computer equipment resource centers like Kinkos.

• Almost any IT offsite outsourcing service would benefit from happier customers using WebConnections to interact with their services.

• Even IBM's own CATIA heavy industry design product, and DB2 database products, might benefit from WebConnections at customer sites.

• Major pharmaceutical companies share complex drug design information with biotechnology startup companies across the net.

• Plant and animal genome researchers and agriculture seed and livestock providers share massive genome data files across the Web.

• This link points to an article describing a leading edge business to business fully automated data sharing enterprise whose customers should be using WebConnections, model for probably hundreds of similar web service providers:

  http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/opinion/story?id=387e41b20

• The list goes on endlessly, but I'm out of steam.