todays thread plus a paste of a google news hit that might be spam...."Managed Services in the New Age: Yousendit.com"
Joy Miller
"Managed Services in the New Age: Yousendit.com
Trip back in time for a bit. It's 2003 and you have a 4.7Mb document that you have to email out to a client who has to fly out in the morning. Web-based email could certainly be an option, except that even in those days, most webmail services were giving you 2Mb or less in terms of storage space. You could have logged onto your Yahoo! account and shared the briefcase, but the chance of living in Pakistan and finding a client who knew how to use that specific option was a long shot.
Trip back in time for a bit. It's 2003 and you have a 4.7Mb document that you have to email out to a client who has to fly out in the morning. Web-based email could certainly be an option, except that even in those days, most webmail services were giving you 2Mb or less in terms of storage space. You could have logged onto your Yahoo! account and shared the briefcase, but the chance of living in Pakistan and finding a client who knew how to use that specific option was a long shot.
FTP was always an option but since we were still primarily on Dialup internet, the uplink made courier a much more attractive proposition. So when companies began setting up online storage spaces, people who had to move documents quickly, caught on very quickly. The online storage space would allow you to create an account and upload and send someone else the link to the download the files while they were held there temporarily. Some services were free however some began to turn this process into a business.
In retrospect however, these companies were already on the path to offering Managed Services almost a full 4 years before the buzzword hit the rest of the world.
But let's look at the real story here -- when the likes of Gmail came on the scene and began to offer 1Gb worth of mailbox space to users for free, Hotmail and Yahoo! also revised their strategies to increase their offerings. Today, users enjoy several Gigabytes worth of storage and transfer for virtually zero cost. So if free webmail users can transfer millions of bytes worth of documents free, the fact that Managed Services which started back in the early part of this decade are giving the shiny, new packaged services some serious competition, is a story worth looking into.
According to Yousendit.com founder Ranjith Kumaran, trends have changed as has the entire outlook of the what web-based services were supposed to be offering. "5 years ago when we started off, everything online seemed like an experiment. In the earlier days, the service was primarily used by consumers but with time, professionals and C-level companies began using it more." And when you have the enterprise user searching for a service, you have to ensure that your feature set matches his needs. Security, for example, was something that Yousendit spent a lot of time on.
But with the Web open to all kinds of innovation, the fact even the first mover advantage tends to become vulnerable. How did services such as Yousendit.com survive the wrath of almost unlimited storage space? Did users really need services such as theirs any longer? Ranjith explains, "Sure you can use any email services online in order to send large files but they do tend to have restrictions. The large enterprises have been shrinking their inbox storage space since the cost of managing them are huge. That's where services like ours helps to reduce their workload. Gmail accounts may have endless storage but sending files over to large enterprises remains to be a problem -- the destination at the enterprise might have a quota restricting the delivery."
Standing the Test of TimeIt's pretty amazing when you consider that Yousendit.com has about 10 million registered users and enables individuals and enterprises to send, receive and track digital files securely.
Back in the day, the service stared off as a managed storage solution though it used to be referred to as an FTP storage device, a storage location where you could exchange large files and have someone download it directly onto their computer rather than have to worry about downloading through their mail server. "At the surface, it was made to be a simple service which had a quick learning curve and make attachment delivery, a hassle-free option. Our objective is to make it more reliable and easy to access," explains Ranjith Kumaran.
Online storage solutions are dependent on the speed of internet connectivity. And as the awareness continues to increase, so do their needs and expectations of the services they use. Ranjith adds, "As time moves on and an increasing number of enterprise customers are coming on, they need more reliable backup facilities and simply cannot afford downtime. Data centers need to ensure that the source capacity they have, is huge. Technology has enabled the Center to guarantee the reliability of the data, even if it is there for a temporary duration. Service providers today need to ensure that they are giving their customers, the best. Work with the best bandwidth providers and top notch hardware centers. For example, we make sure there are no less than two copies of every file kept on different servers. The system has its own unique algorithm to figure out how many copies of a file to keep and for how long in which location." And there are other Best Practices followed such as ensuring that there is a backup of the Data Center site itself. "You can never be too cautious with this. In case there is an incident at one location, the service never goes down for our users."
With the level of competition comes the element of customer service. While you might not be able to compete with the giants on the numbers, you certainly can do so, on the value proposition. Making sure your visitors, free and paid, have something to come back to -- could be the service, the aesthetics, the user experience or something personable about the company itself. Give people something to take back with them and chances are high that they will return.
The LevelerIt never ceases to amaze us how it took forever to set up a website or blog back in the late 90's, compared to what it is today. Same goes for Managed Services solutions. If you have the money and are in the know, you can probably buy your own server and lease it out clients and make money. Doing this today is so much easier than it was probably when Ranjith started off. "When people come to this service, they think that it's so simple and they can put it up themselves and get a bunch of users. Sure. But it's one thing to serve a few customers and earn a paycheck and another to serve the 6 million customers a month that we do."
He continues to say that, "One of their goals very early on was to be one of the biggest service providers. Today we are by far, the largest service of its kind, especially if you consider the businesses and brands we are servicing. Their brand names are very plainly associated with business-to-business transactions and we have earned their trust."
In a time when businesses are looking to cut down their overhead costs and outsource some of their services to third-party vendors, the experience that Ranjith has been able to garner will certainly work in his favor. "We get a lot of our business through word-of-mouth and our recent growth has been off the charts."
But as time goes by, services such as yousendit.com will need to continuously evolve and integrate the user's changing needs. "Services that are more about user collaboration, for example," says the Founder. "There isn't much lead time for online business to change their value propositions based on expanding customer profiles because everyone wants the service as fast as possible, and you have to move in quickly before someone else does -- that's the sheer nature of Web 2.0. There is so much competition out there and each time the business goes into a new direction, customers get so many new ideas that they want to the service to offer. It's really all about speed."
With more companies venturing into the Cloud, the future of Managed Services will only get brighter and bigger, which means more competition and a truckload more of innovation and creativity. With everyone offering the same basic portfolio of services, the rest of the magic can only happen once the service provider finds and grabs onto their customers.
Please visit Yousendit.com for more details. If you'd like to hear Ranjith Kumaran's podcast, please long onto http://tinyurl.com/ycfce2o on the CIO Pakistan WebStudio."
So it took me ten days to moderate the below, but S. you are now
unmoderated so speak further if you dare to us all............
On Mar 17, 7:35 am, Syed Munna <munna.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Respected Sir,
>
> I am using yahoo brief Case sine 21-08-2007, so there is my important files
> in that briefcase. please send it back to my mail.
>
> Regards
>
> S.Munna
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