Tucows Has Work to Do

In its ISPCON vendor session, Tucows described the company's product road map, which focuses on a better and faster product development cycle.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 25, 2007]

The Tucows vendor session started with a presentation of the big picture by Elliot Noss, ISP industry veteran and Tucows president and CEO. He said that the residential and small business markets are about to get more difficult as companies put together targeted packages. For example, Google could combine Open Office with Jabber and GMail and Google Checkout and AdWords.

Noss said that ISPs always have provided customer service. Large scale cut-price operations (such as Google) will always provide an unbeatable price, but because they rely on automation, they cannot compete on service. They cannot provide a human being to answer the phone.

Then Noss turned over the floor to his colleagues, who talked about Tucows' plans for the future.

Single sign-on
When Ken Schafer, Tucows vice president of product management and marketing, admitted, "in the past, we had over thirty websites for our products," there was a sigh of recognition and frustration.

The new plan, he said, is "one site to rule them all." It will be located at services.tucows.com, a site that is already live but that is being improved.

The company cannot move over all of its services at once to this site, so it is moving services one at a time, a process that involves moving the service's control panel and support documentation.

Platypus 6.1
This summer, Schafer said, the company will release the latest update to its billing system. The update will include over one hundred tweaks and fixes, Microsoft Vista support, and integration with Tucows e-mail and domain services.

Tucows webmail
Kim Phelan, Tucows director of product management, introduced what may become Tucows' second service (second only to domain name registration): webmail.

The company's webmail design, still being improved, has many features. It is designed with a familiar desktop-style interface. Features include:

• Ajax-based
• Folders
• Address groups
• Spell check (in five languages)
• Forwarding and out of office
• A login and password change screen that the ISP can enable or disable
• Filter to folder
• Add POP account
• Listen to audio and view images
• Skins, including a branding tool
• 2 GB storage out of the box

Tucows is incorporating its Email Defense service into the webmail service.

The company is also incorporating a calendar application called Kiko that it bought on eBay last September.

ISPCON attendees did request additional services. For example, one asked for a ruleset for passwords in order to enforce corporate rules on password complexity. Phelan said that was a good idea.

Another ISP asked how to read call records into Platypus.

Adapting to SaaS
The big picture, Schafer stressed, is that the company is moving from software license regime-like upgrades (he called it a "waterfall") to constant improvement, the SaaS model, which he called "multiple iterations." He said this change will allows Tucows to deliver more features faster. "We're more nimble," he said. "We're working in smaller teams."

Expect to hear from Tucows regularly from now on.

For a more detailed description of Noss' view of the ISP space, see Common Sense in Selling Services in Related articles, below.

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