Kolab Summit 2.0 - Partner Programme
Seigo, Aaron
Lemken, Peter
Aaron stayed on to explain the different types of partners we work with, and how resellers, ISPs and integrators were using Kolab to offer more and better services to their clients, while cutting costs and boosting business at the same time. Peter Lemken, Account and Partner manager at Kolab Systems Austria, then went into much more detail as to how Kolab Systems helps and supports partnerships with integrators (starts at
 Look about the partner program that Colab Systems is developing around Colab in general. What it is, why we're doing it, and where we are with it right now, etc. So the subtitle accelerating into the market together probably gives you a good idea of what we're trying to achieve with this. Is this plugged in? Sorry, a moment. That's okay. I can... Nope. Let me see this. Alright, so we've talked yesterday quite a bit about, as Georg mentioned in the introduction about the missing freedom online. And that's kind of one of these really ironic and sadly ironic things that the internet was once held as a beacon of change that people would be able to communicate freely. We would democratize the ability for people to publish information and store information and transmit it. And it would just, yes, people would be empowered from the bottom up. And instead, the internet has turned into the world's best and most advanced surveillance engine that we've ever built, which is tragic. And with our mission with Colab is to, at least in the area of collaboration, thank you, in the area of collaboration to address or try and address those problems directly by giving people a open and free means that is secure, that isn't backdoor, that you can choose where your data is on your own servers or not. So we're choosing to address that problem head on. As a small-ish company and a product that doesn't quite have the same number of users as, say, Gmail yet, bringing that to the world at large is a really big task. It's a huge task. There's also an immense amount of commercial opportunity out there. So not only is there a good fight to be fought in terms of returning freedom to people that we all deserve and should have, but there's also the more pragmatic there's money to be made. And addressing those two issues on a global scale or even just in Europe is something that we feel there's only so fast and so far we can do it on our own without the participation of others. So after we've got Colab 3 on its feet, it's deployed in some very large areas. The name recognition on the world is reasonable. We get commercial requests continuously every single day from around the world looking into Colab. So we've raised awareness, we've proven that it works in the market, and we feel that at this point it's time to be working with others as well in those two goals of bringing freedom and Colab into the market. And we feel that by having a proper partner program and extensive one focusing on that, we'll be able to achieve these goals much faster and on a much larger scale. And there are numerous reasons for that, and it's not just, it's not only size. If you go to Colab now, it's, you know, the pricing is reasonable, but it's definitely Eurocentric in its pricing or North American-centric as well. If you go to, say, Brazil, you have multiple issues there with the cloud hosted version of Colab 1. The economy is different, so it's in real value terms more expensive there. And then getting support in your time zone, getting support in your language, getting support that is culturally attuned to you as a customer is difficult for us as a European, Central European company to provide. So we've started to look at how can we work with others, other companies, other interests, other communities to bring Colab into the market. And we've gotten to the point where we've actually, we have a few of our first partners in these veins, and we're working now the rest of the year to roll this out in a very large and coordinated way. And so we're going to take a look at both the definition of the partner program, who we're looking to work with, what each of these types of partners will be doing or can do with us and what we can do with you, as well as some of the details of when you become a partner, what you get out of the deal as well. So in addition to just being a partner with Colab systems and in Colab, we have a larger ecosystem as well around us, such as we've been talking a lot about PowerA to this event with IBM and their partners as well. And so when we bring in partners to work with us on Colab, we're actually inviting you into a much larger space and a much larger ecosystem that has the likes of IBM and Red Hat and behind it. Who here has seen, I know that all you guys were at the Taster events, but who here has seen the Colab Taster events online? So for those who are shaking your head, if you go to Taster.colab, colabsystems.com, you will see these events we've done over the last few weeks in coordination with IBM and Red Hat, focusing on the open stack from the hardware through the operating system up to the application stack. So we talk about partnering, keep in mind that this is not only with us, but our broader ecosystem and our set of partners and technology delivery partners as well. So we broke the larger partner concept into three very specific defined markets and profiles of partners. And you'll notice they map quite nicely actually to how we deliver Colab in general. So at Colab Systems, we deliver Colab in basically three basic packages. One is on site, it's your server. You say where it is, we put it on there with you for you or you can yourself. So you have on site delivery. We have hosted instances, so you can have your own dedicated instance that you don't worry about, you don't know management of, no backups, it's all handled for you. So hosting. And we also do the Colab Now public cloud, where you can go on and put your email accounts in with a larger pool on infrastructure that we manage for you as well. So the first, and that's our software as a service offerings. And so the first class, if you will, or type of partner that we start to work with are resellers, just straight resellers of the software as a service. So these are groups that can take the product we already have online and re-bundle it, repackage it and deliver it into their market, to their target audience, allowing for both vertical application of it, but also regional application. So has everyone here seen what Colab Now looks like, user interface-wise? Yeah, oh yes, you've all seen it over there. That's right. Oh yes, we have demonstrations. True enough. So just keep that in mind, because I'm going to show you what our first big reseller, we have three resellers now, but this one is I think the more exciting one. They're right in the middle of doing their official launch right now. If you were at CBit and visited us there, you would have seen them. And that is Secure Swiss Data. So this is their white-labeled version of, or entry point to, the Colab Now Cloud. It looks completely different. It has a completely different message to it. And this is their messaging. They're really focused on the primarily the North American, but also European audience. So they've got a bit more of an edgy approach to it, which is really nice. Also beautiful pictures of mountains, because it's Swiss. But this really shows the possibility. If you looked at it, you would go, well, okay, this looks like Secure Swiss Data. All they're doing is simply reselling the software, the services that we provide. They don't manage any servers. They don't manage the billing backends, et cetera. We work with them to do that. They turn around and resell. They've actually defined their own packages, so that if you go to Colab Now and sign up, while the feature set is the same, what comes included and what the names of the default packages are, vary. So we really are able to, from the service level all the way through to presentational wide label or customize for our resellers. Within that, we obviously have a revenue sharing model. So the reseller is free to set the pricing that they want. And then we share revenue from there on a case-by-case basis. So they're actually reselling both Colab Now Public Cloud as well as hosted instances. So the full software services suite. The second class of partner that we defined is ASPs and ISPs. We lump them together because from our perspective and how we deliver to them is the same, even though they have different business models and different audiences that they cater to. So the application service provider and the internet service provider market. Essentially what we do for them is help set up their own Colab Now, but on their servers, under their management, et cetera. We provide technical training. We provide sales training to them as well. We consult as to how it should be set up, how do you manage it in the long term, make sure that they deliver a quality service to their customers and their clients. Again they're free to set their pricing. We have also a revenue model for them where the more seats they have, it obviously descends down to a very affordable per seat price. The pricing for them is based purely on active seats and their installation. No base level entry fee to pay up front, which is refreshing to many of them because they're used to more of the Microsoft model where you pay a whole bunch of licensing fees just to get going and then you start paying per seat. But free software to the rescue, it's purely based on per seat. So they get the ability from us as the experts around Colab to deliver instantly a high quality service that they own. And this has become more and more interesting to this segment of the market in particular since Microsoft has moved to Office 365. And they're pushing people towards Office 365 and their solutions. They say, no, you can edit your office files there. You can have your Skype-based virtual VoIP system. And so what's happening for a lot of these companies is that Microsoft is coming in just scooping out their customer base from them to the point where, especially for ISPs, they just become a pipe and nothing more. There's nothing to differentiate them from their competitors. They've lost a very important way of building a relationship and retaining customer loyalty. And so Colab fits into that very nice area where we have a proven, scalable solution that you can manage quite effectively and affordably, but it gets you away from these larger companies like Microsoft and Google that are essentially trying to take your customers away from you for all intents and purposes. So as with the example of Swiss Secure data or Secure Swiss data, we have a ASP partner in Switzerland, a Vectris. They were a, used to be many years ago, the IT departments for four different energy companies in Switzerland. And the energy companies looked at it and went, well, we're not IT companies. This is silly. So we could, if we just put them all together, kick them out the door, make them a for-profit company of their own, they can deliver the same services and we might even make some money. They're now in the main engineering building. They've got 400-some-odd technical people. So you just add the management and sales on top of that. They primarily service the energy sector in Europe, energy sector companies in Europe. They do have customers in Asia as well. Interestingly enough, a Vectris is one of the five Microsoft Platinum partners in Switzerland. So they're one of the top five Microsoft licensees in the country. They had one guy on staff who had Linux expertise officially. And so when we walked in and they asked us to come in, we demoed our solution next to others, showed how the model works for partnership and how, due to the nature of free software and open source, they just get benefits. They wouldn't get elsewhere. And they went, okay, great. Only problem is we have no Linux infrastructure. We have no Linux expertise. We want what you have. Can you help us? And we're going to go through the course exactly what we've done. Originally they were planning on deploying it on the Windows, the Microsoft virtualization platform. That's what they deliver everything else on. We got it set up for them on that platform. They said, well, can we hook it into Active Directory? We said, yes, of course. Here's how it looks. We worked with them to do that. But then they took a step back after this is all done. They crunched the numbers. They said, the funny thing is the Hyper-V platform is going to be the most expensive part of the solution now. With our other Microsoft or proprietary, not just Microsoft, proprietary solutions, the licensing of the proprietary solutions just hides the virtualization layer. It's just not an important line item. But suddenly with Colab, both because we can run it on less hardware, fewer resources, fewer people to keep it up as a result. And because of the very good model for the perceived licensing, suddenly the virtualization platform they're paying for was visible in the budget. And they said, can we get rid of that? And we said, yeah, you could. You could move to an entirely Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution. I guess what we do. We could put the virtualization on there. So they actually built out an entirely new hardware solution specifically to run Linux. They've hired a few new engineers that actually have Linux expertise. So this has been a really interesting journey with them. We walked in and said, yes, we can make it work in your environment on the choice of your platform. We can do this. We showed them we could do it. But then at the end, they turned around and went, no, we're going to do it your way anyways. We understand now why you've picked Linux as your base and built on that. This is a really nice example. So one of their first customers that they've rolled this out to, they're using it internally, but they're also using it with their customers. And they're offering it as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. And the first customer, they didn't want to migrate everybody off, a few hundred accounts that were on the Microsoft Exchange, because that's disruptive. So they're actually running it in parallel and all the new accounts and all the people that were moving off of an older system are in Colab. And while the 100-some-odd seats are still in the old Exchange, they don't have to deal with transferring data. And the people just use it together. We went in, we trained their support staff to do basically handle first level, second level kind of requests. We actually got another set of training coming up next week, actually, with them to help their engineers understand how to do more complex maintenance things. And so we're there with them all the way along, including for that one customer that they've already rolled out to, we provide a white label presentation branded with their customers branding. So they have a version that they, with its branded for a Vectris, their logo, their colors, it looks like, you know, a Vectris, but it's just powered by Colab. And then when they deliver it to the customers, we again help them white label that for each customer. So each customer gets this beautiful, tailor-made solution. And they're able to deliver that at a lower price without the fear of Microsoft coming in and stealing them off to Office 365. The third sort of, or third class of partners that we're working with are integrators. And these are your typical IT, often very regional, ranging in size from a few people working out of a small office to international with thousands of IT specialists who go into companies that need IT, which is everybody, and sorts out their IT from printers and laptops to server-side software and everything, often everything in between. We're working with integrators to help them add Colab to their suite of offerings so they can walk in and go, yes, we can set up your Windows machines, yes, we can do that, we can put your printers in, great, we can do your networking, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can also provide your VoIP and now they can provide a proven open-source collaboration platform. And again, just as with the first two categories of partners, we have a revenue model that is standardized that keeps everybody very much incentivated to sell and support and keep our customers, our combined customers happy. And so with these three different groups or types of partners, we're able to, currently and in the future, to really broaden our impact and reach new audiences. With resellers, we get to hit the consumer market a lot harder and a lot with a lot better coverage. With the ASB ISP customers, we're able to get into the hosting environments a lot more than we could ever do on our own. And with integrators, we're able to mobilize with our partners on the ground, if you will, Army of IT specialists that can bring Colab into your local town, your local cities, governments, companies, et cetera, et cetera. And just as with the previous two, we have a support system for them as well. So to talk a bit about how we support and what we offer to integrators in specific, I'm going to invite Peter Lemkin to come up, who is with Colab Austria. We just recently officially opened an office in Austria due to demand and interest there. Peter is heading that up and is a partner manager for us as well. So he's got a fair amount of information to share with us about how we plan to help our integrators. Okay. Yeah. Still good morning. It's one minute before noon. Thank you for the introduction to that. Integrators, in a general sense, Aaron has already given the overview of that. What I'd like to focus on is the local and regional aspect of it, because, just to give you a short background on me, I've been working for another open source company for the past four years. And in that capacity, I have worked with local integrators all over the world. I managed to get new regions. I worked for a new company in Israel. I worked the region of South Africa. I worked in the UK and Ireland. And the idea for CoLab to move over to Austria actually came from a customer request from a big, large institutional customer from the government, and who specifically said, yes, we would like to work with CoLab, but we also need to have a local integrator that you are working closely with and that you have good collaboration with. And so we can feel secure in having local support and local people to talk to so that we feel secure in having our infrastructure set up by a local company. So enabling a local customer is actually what all this is about. So what I'd like to talk about is the question of whether can we scale up as CoLab headquartered in Switzerland and manage all the regions on the planet that are interested in CoLab? The answer is no, we can't. Not without local integrators, not without local partners that support us, that are interested in pushing our message forward and that are interested in actually pushing the product and enabling us to get new customers. I'd like to get a little more specific about how we did this in Austria, how this worked out in Austria and how we believe that scales to other countries as well and how we can actually win a lot more new customers with local partners. So that's the idea behind it. You haven't actually shown me, can I move on from there? All right, we've got the partner benefits. And I'd like to just give you an overview of what we have designed as part of our partner program and I will give you some examples of how we did this in Austria, how we'll continue to do this in Austria and in a later stage move this on to other countries. So selling the product actually is the most important thing because without getting new customers you will not be interested, no local partner will be interested in actually working for us together with us. So what we'll do and what we continue to do already is to enable them in terms of sales support and training. So how do you sell an open source product? Well, you can't because there is no licensing fee, we all know that. So what you have to do is to make a customer understand that there is added value in using an open source solution and using the support and the technical knowledge of the company behind the product itself. So it is talking to the customer, it's talking to our partner and making him understand what we stand for, what our values are, what our technology is able to do and what that really gives the benefits to his own customer. There are a lot of regional aspects in that and let me give you a small idea about doing business in Austria. As most of you know, I'm not Austrian, I live in Austria but I'm a German and even if I had lived as a German in Austria for the past 20 years, which I have not, I would not be privy to all the intricacies of Austrian politics, Austrian policies and Austrian personal involvements and all the connections that are going on. For that, you need a local partner. Now, Austria may be very, very close to Germany and Switzerland but if we are talking about other regions like Israel or India or Australia or whatever, you will always find there are regional specifics that nobody else than a local partner can actually handle. By handling means actually selling our services and products. We are really, really depending on the local partner and integrator. What we are doing is we are giving them the training to make them understand what our value proposition is in terms of open source software and our services and then make him translate that to his regional market and actually make his customers understand why Colob is a good choice, how we are positioned against our competitors and how we are managing to move forward and actually win and make money with us. That's what he boils down to. Every local integrator wants to make money and needs to see our support in making them translate that into their local business. So that's the part of sales support and training. Now, we have had the Colob Taster, as you know, we have had that in Zurich, we will have that in Bern next week and we have just had one in Vienna and Vienna was really a prime example of really entering a new market. So we gave our local partner, which we have, the opportunity of talking to his customers through our marketing assets. We do this in collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, so the event was actually covered. So the task was to go out and make contacts to the local customers in Austria, make them understand, hey, there is a new kid in town, just visit us, get an idea about what we are doing in a technical sense and get an idea of how we collaborate with our local partners and our technology partners like IBM and Red Hat. So they are getting professional marketing assistance. We have a continuous effort going on and standardizing our marketing efforts. We have a great guy on board who actually does that very, very well. And so this is how we are able to provide a package of marketing support that many other open source companies do not have in that comprehensive level. All right. Now, the technical support and training is probably one of the most important aspects of this. If you have a local partner and a local integrator who just is not a reseller, but actually an integrator, he needs to be technically savvy. He needs to know what he is doing. For the simple reason that we as a company, we cannot scale up to actually serving all the end customers. So the requirement for us is to sign up a partner who is able to do a level one and level two support. And us always being in the background and being available on a very high service level to actually solve real technical problems that a regular engineer cannot handle. We are talking about source code level support. This is what we can provide to them. So we are providing the kind of technical expertise to our local partners. And we are able to do that on a very high level. We have certifications coming up. This is all still playing out in the future. This is what I am working on with Aaron. But in the end, we already provide the kind of technical support for a local partner that he feels confident in implementing and supporting his customers. All right. This again goes back to marketing. So exclusive monthly updates by newsletters is just giving a local partner an idea of where are we moving? Or are we moving at all? Yes, we are. We are winning new customers. We are giving updates about our technology. We are giving an overview of where we are going, what our roadmap is, and stuff like that. We don't want to overdo this. So a monthly newsletter is going to be comprehensive. It's going to be short. But it's going to be having interesting information that will enable a partner to talk to his customers and say, hey, something new has come up with CoalUp. They are doing some really interesting stuff. RoundQube2 is coming up. CoalUp is a male client is coming up. And there is going to be stuff that you will be really excited about in the upcoming months. All right. So one of the things is, as an open source company, we are heavily dependent. No, we are actually addicted. And we can't do without the community. Right? So the community as a development and support and as actually moving forward the development in terms of roadmap and stuff like that. We want to do that on our partner level as well. What we are trying to do is to find a point of where our partners do not interact with us directly, but interact within their community as partners as well. They are talking about their regional aspects. They are talking about customers that they have and exchanging themselves. So we want to take ourselves back. We just want to provide a platform for our partners to interact, which gives them the opportunity to actually find out what can I do as an integrator? What have you done? Do you have an example of how you did it with your customer? So this is our plan. It's not implemented yet, but it's still on the roadmap. But this is something that we are going to do. A lot of that, by the way, is still work in progress. But it's cool to actually be working on that and trying to get feedback from our existing local customers and local partners and trying to scale that to new partners, winning them and making them understand that working with call-up is actually a cool idea. Just as Red Hat tries to offload a lot of their technical expertise on a non-personal level, we are trying to work up on a knowledge base. That knowledge base is designed to be available to partners only. Because those are very, very practical things that our partners have already started implementing. They are working with their local customers and they encountered problems, they encountered challenges and they came up with cool new ideas. We want to do is to make that available to all of our partners as kind of an online knowledge base. The co-marketing actually goes back to anything related to marketing. We luckily have somebody who actually is really, really heavily involved in marketing, creating an identity of call-up that will enable a partner to be part of an ecosystem within themselves. Creating co-marketing opportunities in one place will give us the opportunity to do that in 10 places and 50 places all around the world. This is what we are targeting at. The technology ecosystem, you have heard about all the things that we can do on the server side like the PowerAid system that we have had a vast experience with now which is a cool and new technology. We are working on the new technologies like RoundCube2 and Q as a mail client. We want to inform partners about that as early as possible because that makes them interested in telling their customers, hey, something new is coming up. We are reaching out to potential new customers and we are reaching out to new potential partners by having them in our ecosystem as well. The last thing is actually one of the most important things is to have online capabilities as much as we can. You may remember like 10 years ago, the service-oriented architecture was a big thing. Everybody talked about that. Very few people actually implemented it. It is our idea to give our partners and our big customers the opportunity to self-service them, selves as much as possible. Also this is still a work in progress. We have very cool ideas coming up from Aaron and from the rest of the company to make it as easy as possible for a partner to interact with Colab. To interact with Colab is a business partner because in the end it all boils down to money. You want to spend at least a very little time in interacting with your provider of software. You want to do as much for yourself as you can and we want to do that by actually do all the online purchasing, subscription management, reminders of when your subscription is running out, we want to do that online as much as possible. Having exclusive access into our partner ecosystem as part of our website is going to be one of the steps that we are going to be implementing at the end of the year. A lot of things really going on. As you can see, I'm still struggling to give you very, very many specifics. It's all a lot of work in progress, but we are pretty much on the same page of where we want to go. Where do we want to go? We want to have a worldwide partner ecosystem that spreads out the message of Colab being the really, really cool thing in terms of open source and replacing existing technologies with a different business model. In the end, which is the most important thing, if you work with Colab as a partner, you have the really, really big opportunity of making lots of money because we are individual. We can talk to us, we can design our business model around your requirements as a local partner for your customers and really servicing big infrastructures as we are doing in Austria now. That's what we are going. Still, a lot of work to be done, but it's an exciting thing to be part of actually working on that and trying to find out how we can best work with our partners to make them happy, actually make a lot of money. This is what it is all about. I hope to be part of that. It's cool to be part of that. Thank you very much. Thank you.
 Look about the partner program that Colab Systems is developing around Colab in general.  What it is, why we're doing it, and where we are with it right now, etc.  So the subtitle accelerating into the market together probably gives you a good idea of  what we're trying to achieve with this.  Is this plugged in?  Sorry, a moment.  That's okay.  I can...  Nope.  Let me see this.  Alright, so we've talked yesterday quite a bit about, as Georg mentioned in the introduction  about the missing freedom online.  And that's kind of one of these really ironic and sadly ironic things that the internet  was once held as a beacon of change that people would be able to communicate freely.  We would democratize the ability for people to publish information and store information  and transmit it.  And it would just, yes, people would be empowered from the bottom up.  And instead, the internet has turned into the world's best and most advanced surveillance  engine that we've ever built, which is tragic.  And with our mission with Colab is to, at least in the area of collaboration, thank you,  in the area of collaboration to address or try and address those problems directly by  giving people a open and free means that is secure, that isn't backdoor, that you can  choose where your data is on your own servers or not.  So we're choosing to address that problem head on.  As a small-ish company and a product that doesn't quite have the same number of users  as, say, Gmail yet, bringing that to the world at large is a really big task.  It's a huge task.  There's also an immense amount of commercial opportunity out there.  So not only is there a good fight to be fought in terms of returning freedom to people that  we all deserve and should have, but there's also the more pragmatic there's money to be  made.  And addressing those two issues on a global scale or even just in Europe is something  that we feel there's only so fast and so far we can do it on our own without the participation  of others.  So after we've got Colab 3 on its feet, it's deployed in some very large areas.  The name recognition on the world is reasonable.  We get commercial requests continuously every single day from around the world looking into  Colab.  So we've raised awareness, we've proven that it works in the market, and we feel that at  this point it's time to be working with others as well in those two goals of bringing freedom  and Colab into the market.  And we feel that by having a proper partner program and extensive one focusing on that,  we'll be able to achieve these goals much faster and on a much larger scale.  And there are numerous reasons for that, and it's not just, it's not only size.  If you go to Colab now, it's, you know, the pricing is reasonable, but it's definitely  Eurocentric in its pricing or North American-centric as well.  If you go to, say, Brazil, you have multiple issues there with the cloud hosted version  of Colab 1.  The economy is different, so it's in real value terms more expensive there.  And then getting support in your time zone, getting support in your language, getting  support that is culturally attuned to you as a customer is difficult for us as a European,  Central European company to provide.  So we've started to look at how can we work with others, other companies, other interests,  other communities to bring Colab into the market.  And we've gotten to the point where we've actually, we have a few of our first partners  in these veins, and we're working now the rest of the year to roll this out in a very  large and coordinated way.  And so we're going to take a look at both the definition of the partner program, who  we're looking to work with, what each of these types of partners will be doing or can do  with us and what we can do with you, as well as some of the details of when you become  a partner, what you get out of the deal as well.  So in addition to just being a partner with Colab systems and in Colab, we have a larger  ecosystem as well around us, such as we've been talking a lot about PowerA to this event  with IBM and their partners as well.  And so when we bring in partners to work with us on Colab, we're actually inviting you into  a much larger space and a much larger ecosystem that has the likes of IBM and Red Hat and  behind it.  Who here has seen, I know that all you guys were at the Taster events, but who here has  seen the Colab Taster events online?  So for those who are shaking your head, if you go to Taster.colab, colabsystems.com, you  will see these events we've done over the last few weeks in coordination with IBM and  Red Hat, focusing on the open stack from the hardware through the operating system up to  the application stack.  So we talk about partnering, keep in mind that this is not only with us, but our broader  ecosystem and our set of partners and technology delivery partners as well.  So we broke the larger partner concept into three very specific defined markets and profiles  of partners.  And you'll notice they map quite nicely actually to how we deliver Colab in general.  So at Colab Systems, we deliver Colab in basically three basic packages.  One is on site, it's your server.  You say where it is, we put it on there with you for you or you can yourself.  So you have on site delivery.  We have hosted instances, so you can have your own dedicated instance that you don't  worry about, you don't know management of, no backups, it's all handled for you.  So hosting.  And we also do the Colab Now public cloud, where you can go on and put your email accounts  in with a larger pool on infrastructure that we manage for you as well.  So the first, and that's our software as a service offerings.  And so the first class, if you will, or type of partner that we start to work with are  resellers, just straight resellers of the software as a service.  So these are groups that can take the product we already have online and re-bundle it, repackage  it and deliver it into their market, to their target audience, allowing for both vertical  application of it, but also regional application.  So has everyone here seen what Colab Now looks like, user interface-wise?  Yeah, oh yes, you've all seen it over there.  That's right.  Oh yes, we have demonstrations.  True enough.  So just keep that in mind, because I'm going to show you what our first big reseller, we  have three resellers now, but this one is I think the more exciting one.  They're right in the middle of doing their official launch right now.  If you were at CBit and visited us there, you would have seen them.  And that is Secure Swiss Data.  So this is their white-labeled version of, or entry point to, the Colab Now Cloud.  It looks completely different.  It has a completely different message to it.  And this is their messaging.  They're really focused on the primarily the North American, but also European audience.  So they've got a bit more of an edgy approach to it, which is really nice.  Also beautiful pictures of mountains, because it's Swiss.  But this really shows the possibility.  If you looked at it, you would go, well, okay, this looks like Secure Swiss Data.  All they're doing is simply reselling the software, the services that we provide.  They don't manage any servers.  They don't manage the billing backends, et cetera.  We work with them to do that.  They turn around and resell.  They've actually defined their own packages, so that if you go to Colab Now and sign up,  while the feature set is the same, what comes included and what the names of the default  packages are, vary.  So we really are able to, from the service level all the way through to presentational  wide label or customize for our resellers.  Within that, we obviously have a revenue sharing model.  So the reseller is free to set the pricing that they want.  And then we share revenue from there on a case-by-case basis.  So they're actually reselling both Colab Now Public Cloud as well as hosted instances.  So the full software services suite.  The second class of partner that we defined is ASPs and ISPs.  We lump them together because from our perspective and how we deliver to them is the same, even  though they have different business models and different audiences that they cater to.  So the application service provider and the internet service provider market.  Essentially what we do for them is help set up their own Colab Now, but on their servers,  under their management, et cetera.  We provide technical training.  We provide sales training to them as well.  We consult as to how it should be set up, how do you manage it in the long term, make sure  that they deliver a quality service to their customers and their clients.  Again they're free to set their pricing.  We have also a revenue model for them where the more seats they have, it obviously descends  down to a very affordable per seat price.  The pricing for them is based purely on active seats and their installation.  No base level entry fee to pay up front, which is refreshing to many of them because they're  used to more of the Microsoft model where you pay a whole bunch of licensing fees just  to get going and then you start paying per seat.  But free software to the rescue, it's purely based on per seat.  So they get the ability from us as the experts around Colab to deliver instantly a high quality  service that they own.  And this has become more and more interesting to this segment of the market in particular  since Microsoft has moved to Office 365.  And they're pushing people towards Office 365 and their solutions.  They say, no, you can edit your office files there.  You can have your Skype-based virtual VoIP system.  And so what's happening for a lot of these companies is that Microsoft is coming in just  scooping out their customer base from them to the point where, especially for ISPs, they  just become a pipe and nothing more.  There's nothing to differentiate them from their competitors.  They've lost a very important way of building a relationship and retaining customer loyalty.  And so Colab fits into that very nice area where we have a proven, scalable solution  that you can manage quite effectively and affordably, but it gets you away from these  larger companies like Microsoft and Google that are essentially trying to take your customers  away from you for all intents and purposes.  So as with the example of Swiss Secure data or Secure Swiss data, we have a ASP partner  in Switzerland, a Vectris.  They were a, used to be many years ago, the IT departments for four different energy companies  in Switzerland.  And the energy companies looked at it and went, well, we're not IT companies.  This is silly.  So we could, if we just put them all together, kick them out the door, make them a for-profit  company of their own, they can deliver the same services and we might even make some  money.  They're now in the main engineering building.  They've got 400-some-odd technical people.  So you just add the management and sales on top of that.  They primarily service the energy sector in Europe, energy sector companies in Europe.  They do have customers in Asia as well.  Interestingly enough, a Vectris is one of the five Microsoft Platinum partners in Switzerland.  So they're one of the top five Microsoft licensees in the country.  They had one guy on staff who had Linux expertise officially.  And so when we walked in and they asked us to come in, we demoed our solution next to  others, showed how the model works for partnership and how, due to the nature of free software  and open source, they just get benefits.  They wouldn't get elsewhere.  And they went, okay, great.  Only problem is we have no Linux infrastructure.  We have no Linux expertise.  We want what you have.  Can you help us?  And we're going to go through the course exactly what we've done.  Originally they were planning on deploying it on the Windows, the Microsoft virtualization  platform.  That's what they deliver everything else on.  We got it set up for them on that platform.  They said, well, can we hook it into Active Directory?  We said, yes, of course.  Here's how it looks.  We worked with them to do that.  But then they took a step back after this is all done.  They crunched the numbers.  They said, the funny thing is the Hyper-V platform is going to be the most expensive part of  the solution now.  With our other Microsoft or proprietary, not just Microsoft, proprietary solutions, the  licensing of the proprietary solutions just hides the virtualization layer.  It's just not an important line item.  But suddenly with Colab, both because we can run it on less hardware, fewer resources,  fewer people to keep it up as a result.  And because of the very good model for the perceived licensing, suddenly the virtualization  platform they're paying for was visible in the budget.  And they said, can we get rid of that?  And we said, yeah, you could.  You could move to an entirely Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution.  I guess what we do.  We could put the virtualization on there.  So they actually built out an entirely new hardware solution specifically to run Linux.  They've hired a few new engineers that actually have Linux expertise.  So this has been a really interesting journey with them.  We walked in and said, yes, we can make it work in your environment on the choice of  your platform.  We can do this.  We showed them we could do it.  But then at the end, they turned around and went, no, we're going to do it your way anyways.  We understand now why you've picked Linux as your base and built on that.  This is a really nice example.  So one of their first customers that they've rolled this out to, they're using it internally,  but they're also using it with their customers.  And they're offering it as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange.  And the first customer, they didn't want to migrate everybody off, a few hundred accounts  that were on the Microsoft Exchange, because that's disruptive.  So they're actually running it in parallel and all the new accounts and all the people  that were moving off of an older system are in Colab.  And while the 100-some-odd seats are still in the old Exchange, they don't have to deal  with transferring data.  And the people just use it together.  We went in, we trained their support staff to do basically handle first level, second  level kind of requests.  We actually got another set of training coming up next week, actually, with them to help  their engineers understand how to do more complex maintenance things.  And so we're there with them all the way along, including for that one customer that they've  already rolled out to, we provide a white label presentation branded with their customers  branding.  So they have a version that they, with its branded for a Vectris, their logo, their colors,  it looks like, you know, a Vectris, but it's just powered by Colab.  And then when they deliver it to the customers, we again help them white label that for each  customer.  So each customer gets this beautiful, tailor-made solution.  And they're able to deliver that at a lower price without the fear of Microsoft coming  in and stealing them off to Office 365.  The third sort of, or third class of partners that we're working with are integrators.  And these are your typical IT, often very regional, ranging in size from a few people  working out of a small office to international with thousands of IT specialists who go into  companies that need IT, which is everybody, and sorts out their IT from printers and laptops  to server-side software and everything, often everything in between.  We're working with integrators to help them add Colab to their suite of offerings so  they can walk in and go, yes, we can set up your Windows machines, yes, we can do that,  we can put your printers in, great, we can do your networking, blah, blah, blah, blah.  We can also provide your VoIP and now they can provide a proven open-source collaboration  platform.  And again, just as with the first two categories of partners, we have a revenue model that  is standardized that keeps everybody very much incentivated to sell and support and  keep our customers, our combined customers happy.  And so with these three different groups or types of partners, we're able to, currently  and in the future, to really broaden our impact and reach new audiences.  With resellers, we get to hit the consumer market a lot harder and a lot with a lot better  coverage.  With the ASB ISP customers, we're able to get into the hosting environments a lot more  than we could ever do on our own.  And with integrators, we're able to mobilize with our partners on the ground, if you will,  Army of IT specialists that can bring Colab into your local town, your local cities, governments,  companies, et cetera, et cetera.  And just as with the previous two, we have a support system for them as well.  So to talk a bit about how we support and what we offer to integrators in specific,  I'm going to invite Peter Lemkin to come up, who is with Colab Austria.  We just recently officially opened an office in Austria due to demand and interest there.  Peter is heading that up and is a partner manager for us as well.  So he's got a fair amount of information to share with us about how we plan to help our  integrators.  Okay.  Yeah.  Still good morning.  It's one minute before noon.  Thank you for the introduction to that.  Integrators, in a general sense, Aaron has already given the overview of that.  What I'd like to focus on is the local and regional aspect of it, because, just to give  you a short background on me, I've been working for another open source company for the past  four years.  And in that capacity, I have worked with local integrators all over the world.  I managed to get new regions.  I worked for a new company in Israel.  I worked the region of South Africa.  I worked in the UK and Ireland.  And the idea for CoLab to move over to Austria actually came from a customer request from  a big, large institutional customer from the government, and who specifically said, yes,  we would like to work with CoLab, but we also need to have a local integrator that you are  working closely with and that you have good collaboration with.  And so we can feel secure in having local support and local people to talk to so that  we feel secure in having our infrastructure set up by a local company.  So enabling a local customer is actually what all this is about.  So what I'd like to talk about is the question of whether can we scale up as CoLab headquartered  in Switzerland and manage all the regions on the planet that are interested in CoLab?  The answer is no, we can't.  Not without local integrators, not without local partners that support us, that are interested  in pushing our message forward and that are interested in actually pushing the product  and enabling us to get new customers.  I'd like to get a little more specific about how we did this in Austria, how this worked  out in Austria and how we believe that scales to other countries as well and how we can  actually win a lot more new customers with local partners.  So that's the idea behind it.  You haven't actually shown me, can I move on from there?  All right, we've got the partner benefits.  And I'd like to just give you an overview of what we have designed as part of our partner  program and I will give you some examples of how we did this in Austria, how we'll continue  to do this in Austria and in a later stage move this on to other countries.  So selling the product actually is the most important thing because without getting new  customers you will not be interested, no local partner will be interested in actually working  for us together with us.  So what we'll do and what we continue to do already is to enable them in terms of sales  support and training.  So how do you sell an open source product?  Well, you can't because there is no licensing fee, we all know that.  So what you have to do is to make a customer understand that there is added value in using  an open source solution and using the support and the technical knowledge of the company  behind the product itself.  So it is talking to the customer, it's talking to our partner and making him understand what  we stand for, what our values are, what our technology is able to do and what that really  gives the benefits to his own customer.  There are a lot of regional aspects in that and let me give you a small idea about doing  business in Austria.  As most of you know, I'm not Austrian, I live in Austria but I'm a German and even  if I had lived as a German in Austria for the past 20 years, which I have not, I would  not be privy to all the intricacies of Austrian politics, Austrian policies and Austrian personal  involvements and all the connections that are going on.  For that, you need a local partner.  Now, Austria may be very, very close to Germany and Switzerland but if we are talking about  other regions like Israel or India or Australia or whatever, you will always find there are  regional specifics that nobody else than a local partner can actually handle.  By handling means actually selling our services and products.  We are really, really depending on the local partner and integrator.  What we are doing is we are giving them the training to make them understand what our  value proposition is in terms of open source software and our services and then make him  translate that to his regional market and actually make his customers understand why  Colob is a good choice, how we are positioned against our competitors and how we are managing  to move forward and actually win and make money with us.  That's what he boils down to.  Every local integrator wants to make money and needs to see our support in making them  translate that into their local business.  So that's the part of sales support and training.  Now, we have had the Colob Taster, as you know, we have had that in Zurich, we will have  that in Bern next week and we have just had one in Vienna and Vienna was really a prime  example of really entering a new market.  So we gave our local partner, which we have, the opportunity of talking to his customers  through our marketing assets.  We do this in collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, so the event was actually covered.  So the task was to go out and make contacts to the local customers in Austria, make them  understand, hey, there is a new kid in town, just visit us, get an idea about what we are  doing in a technical sense and get an idea of how we collaborate with our local partners  and our technology partners like IBM and Red Hat.  So they are getting professional marketing assistance.  We have a continuous effort going on and standardizing our marketing efforts.  We have a great guy on board who actually does that very, very well.  And so this is how we are able to provide a package of marketing support that many other  open source companies do not have in that comprehensive level.  All right.  Now, the technical support and training is probably one of the most important aspects  of this.  If you have a local partner and a local integrator who just is not a reseller, but actually an  integrator, he needs to be technically savvy.  He needs to know what he is doing.  For the simple reason that we as a company, we cannot scale up to actually serving all  the end customers.  So the requirement for us is to sign up a partner who is able to do a level one and  level two support.  And us always being in the background and being available on a very high service level  to actually solve real technical problems that a regular engineer cannot handle.  We are talking about source code level support.  This is what we can provide to them.  So we are providing the kind of technical expertise to our local partners.  And we are able to do that on a very high level.  We have certifications coming up.  This is all still playing out in the future.  This is what I am working on with Aaron.  But in the end, we already provide the kind of technical support for a local partner that  he feels confident in implementing and supporting his customers.  All right.  This again goes back to marketing.  So exclusive monthly updates by newsletters is just giving a local partner an idea of  where are we moving?  Or are we moving at all?  Yes, we are.  We are winning new customers.  We are giving updates about our technology.  We are giving an overview of where we are going, what our roadmap is, and stuff like  that.  We don't want to overdo this.  So a monthly newsletter is going to be comprehensive.  It's going to be short.  But it's going to be having interesting information that will enable a partner to talk to his  customers and say, hey, something new has come up with CoalUp.  They are doing some really interesting stuff.  RoundQube2 is coming up.  CoalUp is a male client is coming up.  And there is going to be stuff that you will be really excited about in the upcoming months.  All right.  So one of the things is, as an open source company, we are heavily dependent.  No, we are actually addicted.  And we can't do without the community.  Right?  So the community as a development and support and as actually moving forward the development  in terms of roadmap and stuff like that.  We want to do that on our partner level as well.  What we are trying to do is to find a point of where our partners do not interact with  us directly, but interact within their community as partners as well.  They are talking about their regional aspects.  They are talking about customers that they have and exchanging themselves.  So we want to take ourselves back.  We just want to provide a platform for our partners to interact, which gives them the  opportunity to actually find out what can I do as an integrator?  What have you done?  Do you have an example of how you did it with your customer?  So this is our plan.  It's not implemented yet, but it's still on the roadmap.  But this is something that we are going to do.  A lot of that, by the way, is still work in progress.  But it's cool to actually be working on that and trying to get feedback from our existing  local customers and local partners and trying to scale that to new partners, winning them  and making them understand that working with call-up is actually a cool idea.  Just as Red Hat tries to offload a lot of their technical expertise on a non-personal  level, we are trying to work up on a knowledge base.  That knowledge base is designed to be available to partners only.  Because those are very, very practical things that our partners have already started implementing.  They are working with their local customers and they encountered problems, they encountered  challenges and they came up with cool new ideas.  We want to do is to make that available to all of our partners as kind of an online knowledge  base.  The co-marketing actually goes back to anything related to marketing.  We luckily have somebody who actually is really, really heavily involved in marketing, creating  an identity of call-up that will enable a partner to be part of an ecosystem within  themselves.  Creating co-marketing opportunities in one place will give us the opportunity to do that  in 10 places and 50 places all around the world.  This is what we are targeting at.  The technology ecosystem, you have heard about all the things that we can do on the  server side like the PowerAid system that we have had a vast experience with now which  is a cool and new technology.  We are working on the new technologies like RoundCube2 and Q as a mail client.  We want to inform partners about that as early as possible because that makes them interested  in telling their customers, hey, something new is coming up.  We are reaching out to potential new customers and we are reaching out to new potential partners  by having them in our ecosystem as well.  The last thing is actually one of the most important things is to have online capabilities  as much as we can.  You may remember like 10 years ago, the service-oriented architecture was a big thing.  Everybody talked about that.  Very few people actually implemented it.  It is our idea to give our partners and our big customers the opportunity to self-service  them, selves as much as possible.  Also this is still a work in progress.  We have very cool ideas coming up from Aaron and from the rest of the company to make it  as easy as possible for a partner to interact with Colab.  To interact with Colab is a business partner because in the end it all boils down to money.  You want to spend at least a very little time in interacting with your provider of software.  You want to do as much for yourself as you can and we want to do that by actually do  all the online purchasing, subscription management, reminders of when your subscription is running  out, we want to do that online as much as possible.  Having exclusive access into our partner ecosystem as part of our website is going to be one  of the steps that we are going to be implementing at the end of the year.  A lot of things really going on.  As you can see, I'm still struggling to give you very, very many specifics.  It's all a lot of work in progress, but we are pretty much on the same page of where  we want to go.  Where do we want to go?  We want to have a worldwide partner ecosystem that spreads out the message of Colab being  the really, really cool thing in terms of open source and replacing existing technologies  with a different business model.  In the end, which is the most important thing, if you work with Colab as a partner, you have  the really, really big opportunity of making lots of money because we are individual.  We can talk to us, we can design our business model around your requirements as a local  partner for your customers and really servicing big infrastructures as we are doing in Austria  now.  That's what we are going.  Still, a lot of work to be done, but it's an exciting thing to be part of actually working  on that and trying to find out how we can best work with our partners to make them happy,  actually make a lot of money.  This is what it is all about.  I hope to be part of that.  It's cool to be part of that.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.
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Look about the partner program that Colab Systems is developing around Colab in general. What it is, why we're doing it, and where we are with it right now, etc. So the subtitle accelerating into the market together probably gives you a good idea of what we're trying to achieve with this. Is this plugged in? Sorry, a moment. That's okay. I can... Nope. Let me see this. Alright, so we've talked yesterday quite a bit about, as Georg mentioned in the introduction about the missing freedom online. And that's kind of one of these really ironic and sadly ironic things that the internet was once held as a beacon of change that people would be able to communicate freely. We would democratize the ability for people to publish information and store information and transmit it. And it would just, yes, people would be empowered from the bottom up. And instead, the internet has turned into the world's best and most advanced surveillance engine that we've ever built, which is tragic. And with our mission with Colab is to, at least in the area of collaboration, thank you, in the area of collaboration to address or try and address those problems directly by giving people a open and free means that is secure, that isn't backdoor, that you can choose where your data is on your own servers or not. So we're choosing to address that problem head on. As a small-ish company and a product that doesn't quite have the same number of users as, say, Gmail yet, bringing that to the world at large is a really big task. It's a huge task. There's also an immense amount of commercial opportunity out there. So not only is there a good fight to be fought in terms of returning freedom to people that we all deserve and should have, but there's also the more pragmatic there's money to be made. And addressing those two issues on a global scale or even just in Europe is something that we feel there's only so fast and so far we can do it on our own without the participation of others. So after we've got Colab 3 on its feet, it's deployed in some very large areas. The name recognition on the world is reasonable. We get commercial requests continuously every single day from around the world looking into Colab. So we've raised awareness, we've proven that it works in the market, and we feel that at this point it's time to be working with others as well in those two goals of bringing freedom and Colab into the market. And we feel that by having a proper partner program and extensive one focusing on that, we'll be able to achieve these goals much faster and on a much larger scale. And there are numerous reasons for that, and it's not just, it's not only size. If you go to Colab now, it's, you know, the pricing is reasonable, but it's definitely Eurocentric in its pricing or North American-centric as well. If you go to, say, Brazil, you have multiple issues there with the cloud hosted version of Colab 1. The economy is different, so it's in real value terms more expensive there. And then getting support in your time zone, getting support in your language, getting support that is culturally attuned to you as a customer is difficult for us as a European, Central European company to provide. So we've started to look at how can we work with others, other companies, other interests, other communities to bring Colab into the market. And we've gotten to the point where we've actually, we have a few of our first partners in these veins, and we're working now the rest of the year to roll this out in a very large and coordinated way. And so we're going to take a look at both the definition of the partner program, who we're looking to work with, what each of these types of partners will be doing or can do with us and what we can do with you, as well as some of the details of when you become a partner, what you get out of the deal as well. So in addition to just being a partner with Colab systems and in Colab, we have a larger ecosystem as well around us, such as we've been talking a lot about PowerA to this event with IBM and their partners as well. And so when we bring in partners to work with us on Colab, we're actually inviting you into a much larger space and a much larger ecosystem that has the likes of IBM and Red Hat and behind it. Who here has seen, I know that all you guys were at the Taster events, but who here has seen the Colab Taster events online? So for those who are shaking your head, if you go to Taster.colab, colabsystems.com, you will see these events we've done over the last few weeks in coordination with IBM and Red Hat, focusing on the open stack from the hardware through the operating system up to the application stack. So we talk about partnering, keep in mind that this is not only with us, but our broader ecosystem and our set of partners and technology delivery partners as well. So we broke the larger partner concept into three very specific defined markets and profiles of partners. And you'll notice they map quite nicely actually to how we deliver Colab in general. So at Colab Systems, we deliver Colab in basically three basic packages. One is on site, it's your server. You say where it is, we put it on there with you for you or you can yourself. So you have on site delivery. We have hosted instances, so you can have your own dedicated instance that you don't worry about, you don't know management of, no backups, it's all handled for you. So hosting. And we also do the Colab Now public cloud, where you can go on and put your email accounts in with a larger pool on infrastructure that we manage for you as well. So the first, and that's our software as a service offerings. And so the first class, if you will, or type of partner that we start to work with are resellers, just straight resellers of the software as a service. So these are groups that can take the product we already have online and re-bundle it, repackage it and deliver it into their market, to their target audience, allowing for both vertical application of it, but also regional application. So has everyone here seen what Colab Now looks like, user interface-wise? Yeah, oh yes, you've all seen it over there. That's right. Oh yes, we have demonstrations. True enough. So just keep that in mind, because I'm going to show you what our first big reseller, we have three resellers now, but this one is I think the more exciting one. They're right in the middle of doing their official launch right now. If you were at CBit and visited us there, you would have seen them. And that is Secure Swiss Data. So this is their white-labeled version of, or entry point to, the Colab Now Cloud. It looks completely different. It has a completely different message to it. And this is their messaging. They're really focused on the primarily the North American, but also European audience. So they've got a bit more of an edgy approach to it, which is really nice. Also beautiful pictures of mountains, because it's Swiss. But this really shows the possibility. If you looked at it, you would go, well, okay, this looks like Secure Swiss Data. All they're doing is simply reselling the software, the services that we provide. They don't manage any servers. They don't manage the billing backends, et cetera. We work with them to do that. They turn around and resell. They've actually defined their own packages, so that if you go to Colab Now and sign up, while the feature set is the same, what comes included and what the names of the default packages are, vary. So we really are able to, from the service level all the way through to presentational wide label or customize for our resellers. Within that, we obviously have a revenue sharing model. So the reseller is free to set the pricing that they want. And then we share revenue from there on a case-by-case basis. So they're actually reselling both Colab Now Public Cloud as well as hosted instances. So the full software services suite. The second class of partner that we defined is ASPs and ISPs. We lump them together because from our perspective and how we deliver to them is the same, even though they have different business models and different audiences that they cater to. So the application service provider and the internet service provider market. Essentially what we do for them is help set up their own Colab Now, but on their servers, under their management, et cetera. We provide technical training. We provide sales training to them as well. We consult as to how it should be set up, how do you manage it in the long term, make sure that they deliver a quality service to their customers and their clients. Again they're free to set their pricing. We have also a revenue model for them where the more seats they have, it obviously descends down to a very affordable per seat price. The pricing for them is based purely on active seats and their installation. No base level entry fee to pay up front, which is refreshing to many of them because they're used to more of the Microsoft model where you pay a whole bunch of licensing fees just to get going and then you start paying per seat. But free software to the rescue, it's purely based on per seat. So they get the ability from us as the experts around Colab to deliver instantly a high quality service that they own. And this has become more and more interesting to this segment of the market in particular since Microsoft has moved to Office 365. And they're pushing people towards Office 365 and their solutions. They say, no, you can edit your office files there. You can have your Skype-based virtual VoIP system. And so what's happening for a lot of these companies is that Microsoft is coming in just scooping out their customer base from them to the point where, especially for ISPs, they just become a pipe and nothing more. There's nothing to differentiate them from their competitors. They've lost a very important way of building a relationship and retaining customer loyalty. And so Colab fits into that very nice area where we have a proven, scalable solution that you can manage quite effectively and affordably, but it gets you away from these larger companies like Microsoft and Google that are essentially trying to take your customers away from you for all intents and purposes. So as with the example of Swiss Secure data or Secure Swiss data, we have a ASP partner in Switzerland, a Vectris. They were a, used to be many years ago, the IT departments for four different energy companies in Switzerland. And the energy companies looked at it and went, well, we're not IT companies. This is silly. So we could, if we just put them all together, kick them out the door, make them a for-profit company of their own, they can deliver the same services and we might even make some money. They're now in the main engineering building. They've got 400-some-odd technical people. So you just add the management and sales on top of that. They primarily service the energy sector in Europe, energy sector companies in Europe. They do have customers in Asia as well. Interestingly enough, a Vectris is one of the five Microsoft Platinum partners in Switzerland. So they're one of the top five Microsoft licensees in the country. They had one guy on staff who had Linux expertise officially. And so when we walked in and they asked us to come in, we demoed our solution next to others, showed how the model works for partnership and how, due to the nature of free software and open source, they just get benefits. They wouldn't get elsewhere. And they went, okay, great. Only problem is we have no Linux infrastructure. We have no Linux expertise. We want what you have. Can you help us? And we're going to go through the course exactly what we've done. Originally they were planning on deploying it on the Windows, the Microsoft virtualization platform. That's what they deliver everything else on. We got it set up for them on that platform. They said, well, can we hook it into Active Directory? We said, yes, of course. Here's how it looks. We worked with them to do that. But then they took a step back after this is all done. They crunched the numbers. They said, the funny thing is the Hyper-V platform is going to be the most expensive part of the solution now. With our other Microsoft or proprietary, not just Microsoft, proprietary solutions, the licensing of the proprietary solutions just hides the virtualization layer. It's just not an important line item. But suddenly with Colab, both because we can run it on less hardware, fewer resources, fewer people to keep it up as a result. And because of the very good model for the perceived licensing, suddenly the virtualization platform they're paying for was visible in the budget. And they said, can we get rid of that? And we said, yeah, you could. You could move to an entirely Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution. I guess what we do. We could put the virtualization on there. So they actually built out an entirely new hardware solution specifically to run Linux. They've hired a few new engineers that actually have Linux expertise. So this has been a really interesting journey with them. We walked in and said, yes, we can make it work in your environment on the choice of your platform. We can do this. We showed them we could do it. But then at the end, they turned around and went, no, we're going to do it your way anyways. We understand now why you've picked Linux as your base and built on that. This is a really nice example. So one of their first customers that they've rolled this out to, they're using it internally, but they're also using it with their customers. And they're offering it as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. And the first customer, they didn't want to migrate everybody off, a few hundred accounts that were on the Microsoft Exchange, because that's disruptive. So they're actually running it in parallel and all the new accounts and all the people that were moving off of an older system are in Colab. And while the 100-some-odd seats are still in the old Exchange, they don't have to deal with transferring data. And the people just use it together. We went in, we trained their support staff to do basically handle first level, second level kind of requests. We actually got another set of training coming up next week, actually, with them to help their engineers understand how to do more complex maintenance things. And so we're there with them all the way along, including for that one customer that they've already rolled out to, we provide a white label presentation branded with their customers branding. So they have a version that they, with its branded for a Vectris, their logo, their colors, it looks like, you know, a Vectris, but it's just powered by Colab. And then when they deliver it to the customers, we again help them white label that for each customer. So each customer gets this beautiful, tailor-made solution. And they're able to deliver that at a lower price without the fear of Microsoft coming in and stealing them off to Office 365. The third sort of, or third class of partners that we're working with are integrators. And these are your typical IT, often very regional, ranging in size from a few people working out of a small office to international with thousands of IT specialists who go into companies that need IT, which is everybody, and sorts out their IT from printers and laptops to server-side software and everything, often everything in between. We're working with integrators to help them add Colab to their suite of offerings so they can walk in and go, yes, we can set up your Windows machines, yes, we can do that, we can put your printers in, great, we can do your networking, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can also provide your VoIP and now they can provide a proven open-source collaboration platform. And again, just as with the first two categories of partners, we have a revenue model that is standardized that keeps everybody very much incentivated to sell and support and keep our customers, our combined customers happy. And so with these three different groups or types of partners, we're able to, currently and in the future, to really broaden our impact and reach new audiences. With resellers, we get to hit the consumer market a lot harder and a lot with a lot better coverage. With the ASB ISP customers, we're able to get into the hosting environments a lot more than we could ever do on our own. And with integrators, we're able to mobilize with our partners on the ground, if you will, Army of IT specialists that can bring Colab into your local town, your local cities, governments, companies, et cetera, et cetera. And just as with the previous two, we have a support system for them as well. So to talk a bit about how we support and what we offer to integrators in specific, I'm going to invite Peter Lemkin to come up, who is with Colab Austria. We just recently officially opened an office in Austria due to demand and interest there. Peter is heading that up and is a partner manager for us as well. So he's got a fair amount of information to share with us about how we plan to help our integrators. Okay. Yeah. Still good morning. It's one minute before noon. Thank you for the introduction to that. Integrators, in a general sense, Aaron has already given the overview of that. What I'd like to focus on is the local and regional aspect of it, because, just to give you a short background on me, I've been working for another open source company for the past four years. And in that capacity, I have worked with local integrators all over the world. I managed to get new regions. I worked for a new company in Israel. I worked the region of South Africa. I worked in the UK and Ireland. And the idea for CoLab to move over to Austria actually came from a customer request from a big, large institutional customer from the government, and who specifically said, yes, we would like to work with CoLab, but we also need to have a local integrator that you are working closely with and that you have good collaboration with. And so we can feel secure in having local support and local people to talk to so that we feel secure in having our infrastructure set up by a local company. So enabling a local customer is actually what all this is about. So what I'd like to talk about is the question of whether can we scale up as CoLab headquartered in Switzerland and manage all the regions on the planet that are interested in CoLab? The answer is no, we can't. Not without local integrators, not without local partners that support us, that are interested in pushing our message forward and that are interested in actually pushing the product and enabling us to get new customers. I'd like to get a little more specific about how we did this in Austria, how this worked out in Austria and how we believe that scales to other countries as well and how we can actually win a lot more new customers with local partners. So that's the idea behind it. You haven't actually shown me, can I move on from there? All right, we've got the partner benefits. And I'd like to just give you an overview of what we have designed as part of our partner program and I will give you some examples of how we did this in Austria, how we'll continue to do this in Austria and in a later stage move this on to other countries. So selling the product actually is the most important thing because without getting new customers you will not be interested, no local partner will be interested in actually working for us together with us. So what we'll do and what we continue to do already is to enable them in terms of sales support and training. So how do you sell an open source product? Well, you can't because there is no licensing fee, we all know that. So what you have to do is to make a customer understand that there is added value in using an open source solution and using the support and the technical knowledge of the company behind the product itself. So it is talking to the customer, it's talking to our partner and making him understand what we stand for, what our values are, what our technology is able to do and what that really gives the benefits to his own customer. There are a lot of regional aspects in that and let me give you a small idea about doing business in Austria. As most of you know, I'm not Austrian, I live in Austria but I'm a German and even if I had lived as a German in Austria for the past 20 years, which I have not, I would not be privy to all the intricacies of Austrian politics, Austrian policies and Austrian personal involvements and all the connections that are going on. For that, you need a local partner. Now, Austria may be very, very close to Germany and Switzerland but if we are talking about other regions like Israel or India or Australia or whatever, you will always find there are regional specifics that nobody else than a local partner can actually handle. By handling means actually selling our services and products. We are really, really depending on the local partner and integrator. What we are doing is we are giving them the training to make them understand what our value proposition is in terms of open source software and our services and then make him translate that to his regional market and actually make his customers understand why Colob is a good choice, how we are positioned against our competitors and how we are managing to move forward and actually win and make money with us. That's what he boils down to. Every local integrator wants to make money and needs to see our support in making them translate that into their local business. So that's the part of sales support and training. Now, we have had the Colob Taster, as you know, we have had that in Zurich, we will have that in Bern next week and we have just had one in Vienna and Vienna was really a prime example of really entering a new market. So we gave our local partner, which we have, the opportunity of talking to his customers through our marketing assets. We do this in collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, so the event was actually covered. So the task was to go out and make contacts to the local customers in Austria, make them understand, hey, there is a new kid in town, just visit us, get an idea about what we are doing in a technical sense and get an idea of how we collaborate with our local partners and our technology partners like IBM and Red Hat. So they are getting professional marketing assistance. We have a continuous effort going on and standardizing our marketing efforts. We have a great guy on board who actually does that very, very well. And so this is how we are able to provide a package of marketing support that many other open source companies do not have in that comprehensive level. All right. Now, the technical support and training is probably one of the most important aspects of this. If you have a local partner and a local integrator who just is not a reseller, but actually an integrator, he needs to be technically savvy. He needs to know what he is doing. For the simple reason that we as a company, we cannot scale up to actually serving all the end customers. So the requirement for us is to sign up a partner who is able to do a level one and level two support. And us always being in the background and being available on a very high service level to actually solve real technical problems that a regular engineer cannot handle. We are talking about source code level support. This is what we can provide to them. So we are providing the kind of technical expertise to our local partners. And we are able to do that on a very high level. We have certifications coming up. This is all still playing out in the future. This is what I am working on with Aaron. But in the end, we already provide the kind of technical support for a local partner that he feels confident in implementing and supporting his customers. All right. This again goes back to marketing. So exclusive monthly updates by newsletters is just giving a local partner an idea of where are we moving? Or are we moving at all? Yes, we are. We are winning new customers. We are giving updates about our technology. We are giving an overview of where we are going, what our roadmap is, and stuff like that. We don't want to overdo this. So a monthly newsletter is going to be comprehensive. It's going to be short. But it's going to be having interesting information that will enable a partner to talk to his customers and say, hey, something new has come up with CoalUp. They are doing some really interesting stuff. RoundQube2 is coming up. CoalUp is a male client is coming up. And there is going to be stuff that you will be really excited about in the upcoming months. All right. So one of the things is, as an open source company, we are heavily dependent. No, we are actually addicted. And we can't do without the community. Right? So the community as a development and support and as actually moving forward the development in terms of roadmap and stuff like that. We want to do that on our partner level as well. What we are trying to do is to find a point of where our partners do not interact with us directly, but interact within their community as partners as well. They are talking about their regional aspects. They are talking about customers that they have and exchanging themselves. So we want to take ourselves back. We just want to provide a platform for our partners to interact, which gives them the opportunity to actually find out what can I do as an integrator? What have you done? Do you have an example of how you did it with your customer? So this is our plan. It's not implemented yet, but it's still on the roadmap. But this is something that we are going to do. A lot of that, by the way, is still work in progress. But it's cool to actually be working on that and trying to get feedback from our existing local customers and local partners and trying to scale that to new partners, winning them and making them understand that working with call-up is actually a cool idea. Just as Red Hat tries to offload a lot of their technical expertise on a non-personal level, we are trying to work up on a knowledge base. That knowledge base is designed to be available to partners only. Because those are very, very practical things that our partners have already started implementing. They are working with their local customers and they encountered problems, they encountered challenges and they came up with cool new ideas. We want to do is to make that available to all of our partners as kind of an online knowledge base. The co-marketing actually goes back to anything related to marketing. We luckily have somebody who actually is really, really heavily involved in marketing, creating an identity of call-up that will enable a partner to be part of an ecosystem within themselves. Creating co-marketing opportunities in one place will give us the opportunity to do that in 10 places and 50 places all around the world. This is what we are targeting at. The technology ecosystem, you have heard about all the things that we can do on the server side like the PowerAid system that we have had a vast experience with now which is a cool and new technology. We are working on the new technologies like RoundCube2 and Q as a mail client. We want to inform partners about that as early as possible because that makes them interested in telling their customers, hey, something new is coming up. We are reaching out to potential new customers and we are reaching out to new potential partners by having them in our ecosystem as well. The last thing is actually one of the most important things is to have online capabilities as much as we can. You may remember like 10 years ago, the service-oriented architecture was a big thing. Everybody talked about that. Very few people actually implemented it. It is our idea to give our partners and our big customers the opportunity to self-service them, selves as much as possible. Also this is still a work in progress. We have very cool ideas coming up from Aaron and from the rest of the company to make it as easy as possible for a partner to interact with Colab. To interact with Colab is a business partner because in the end it all boils down to money. You want to spend at least a very little time in interacting with your provider of software. You want to do as much for yourself as you can and we want to do that by actually do all the online purchasing, subscription management, reminders of when your subscription is running out, we want to do that online as much as possible. Having exclusive access into our partner ecosystem as part of our website is going to be one of the steps that we are going to be implementing at the end of the year. A lot of things really going on. As you can see, I'm still struggling to give you very, very many specifics. It's all a lot of work in progress, but we are pretty much on the same page of where we want to go. Where do we want to go? We want to have a worldwide partner ecosystem that spreads out the message of Colab being the really, really cool thing in terms of open source and replacing existing technologies with a different business model. In the end, which is the most important thing, if you work with Colab as a partner, you have the really, really big opportunity of making lots of money because we are individual. We can talk to us, we can design our business model around your requirements as a local partner for your customers and really servicing big infrastructures as we are doing in Austria now. That's what we are going. Still, a lot of work to be done, but it's an exciting thing to be part of actually working on that and trying to find out how we can best work with our partners to make them happy, actually make a lot of money. This is what it is all about. I hope to be part of that. It's cool to be part of that. Thank you very much. Thank you.
started to look at how can we work with others, into a much larger space and a much larger customers and their clients. Again they're free become more and more interesting to this segment of their own, they can deliver the same services then at the end, they turned around and went, no, different groups or types of partners, we're able could ever do on our own. And with integrators, our business model around your requirements as a