Friedbeef’s Tech

A truly seamless collaboration work platform has been a holy grail of sorts for many firms, especially global ones which work in decentralised teams. One of the largest issues that face corporations today is the over-reliance of email as an end-all communication tool within the company, which just doesn’t work very well in distributed groups.

cyn.in (pronounced “Sign-in”) is an Internet based service from Cynapse that allows teams, companies or communities to manage, organize, store, version, search through, collaborate & discuss upon, share and publish any kind of information or data.

I managed to catch up with Apurva Roy Choudhury, CEO of Cynapse, and among other things in this interview, we cover business models, and competition - Two increasingly important topics, especially in the wake of Web 2.0 companies starting to go out of business, heralding the dawn of a new Internet bubble.

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What size business will be your main customer focus?

Medium to small sized businesses. This segment has been, in the last 5 years, the most sought after and chased market space. However, it is also the trickiest to capture. One of the reasons is because usually the small and the medium businesses demand and require technology enablers to be at par with (and some times more than) the large enterprise, so as to get ‘the technology edge over competition’. But never afford budgets close to what their larger counterparts can. They land up using sub standard, custom developed software, with little or no support.

Our SaaS based delivery and support model, allows us to reach out to small businesses across the world, at unbelievably low costs. Now small businesses can buy an enterprise class system which they tangibly ‘touch and feel’ before buying. When they do buy, they can get started with using it within the next 5 minutes. Moreover customers pay for the system for only as long as they are benefiting from it and are satisfied with using it. They do not incur additional support costs because we support all their users through the integrated support forums.

Many web 2.0 companies are struggling with business models (they have none). How soon do you expect to be making money as a business?

Within the first quarter. cyn.in is not a startup. Cynapse is a self funded 5 year old company which has been profitable since the year of inception. cyn.in is a 4th generation product, based on Amieo, which has been a highly successful product by the company. Amieo is an application framework for building highly customized enterprise collaboration and community systems. We already have a large number of pre-commitments for cyn.in from a lot of our existing customers.

How do you expect to price these products?

cyn.in is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service offering, intended to be a rapid adoption, off-the-shelf product. cyn.in is an automated multi tenant web service. Every customer (an organization or a team) is provided with an independent sub system, simply called a site, which could be located at ‘yourcompany.cyn.in’ or at ‘www.yourowndomain.com’. These sub systems or sites are hosted within the secure cyn.in datacenters, and are managed, monitored and upgraded by the cyn.in team.

Customers pay a monthly fee for every user from their team or organization that uses the system. Per user costs will start from $30 (USD) and go as low as $20, based on the number of users. There are no setup costs or other additional costs to the service. Customers can start using the service with a minimum of two users, and scale up to thousands.

Is this Cyn.In pricing similliar to the Ameio pricing model?

No, Amieo was priced in the $30,000 to $250,000 segment. Amieo was always a custom implementation, and hence expensive. cyn.in could be considered a next generation, shrink wrapped off the shelf product based out of Amieo, for the masses.

How interoperable is your data going to be with other software?

cyn.in, if technically described, is an advanced online file system. cyn.in can contain any kind of files, and deep indexes all kinds of file formats including all MS office formats, PDF, etc. However cyn.in in its current version is completely browser based, and does not hard integrate into any desktop software.

However, we do not intend to be a pure browser based system, and are already beta testing various rich clients and integration tools that will allow seamless integration of cyn.in with the desktop file system to further enhance productivity. These tools are currently slated for a later release, and I cannot disclose much about it just yet. All I can say is that the next version of our end user product SyncNotes (www.syncnotes.com) and the cyn.in desktop tools share a lot of the synchronization technology.

Most web applications only focus on Internet publishing. Tell me more about the intranet publishing you also offer?

The Intranet is a logical space within a customer’s cyn.in site. All internal users of the respective site can publish any note to the intranet space. Shared notes can be published to the intranet space too. Let me illustrate with an example: a team of five people are working on a user manual for, let’s say a widget, and have been working on a shared note. They can publish the note containing the document, images and some rough texts to the Intranet space under the ‘SlashTags’: /widgets/product documentation/user manual/ and say /documents for review/technical.

Once published, every user in the organization can view the note and download its contents, while the five authors of the note can continue to work on it and update it. Now consider the product management team subscribes to the RSS feed of /documents for review/technical, they will be immediately alerted regarding the publish or update to the note. Notes can be discussed in the comments, where the team may collect inputs of the management or the rest of the organization.

Can you tell us who some of your clients are?

Amieo has been successfully implemented in custom solution scenarios for Cynapse’s clients. Our disclosure agreements prevent us from disclosing most of our customers, since they are using Amieo internally. INSEAD Singapore, Microsoft India and Microsoft Asia Pacific, and Printo are few of our existing clients.

Do you see yourself as a easy-to-use-and-setup MS Sharepoint alternative? Strange that Microsoft India chose you instead of their own homegrown Sharepoint to manage their information?

Yes we see cyn.in as a sharepoint replacement and more. Amieo however is an application framework that could be used to build various collaborative environments. This makes Amieo and Sharepoint different and incomparable. It wasn’t just Microsoft India, MS Asia pacific was the largest customer of Amieo. Why? Well sharepoint is very limited to intranet environments and it is much, much more an effort and expense to customize Sharepoint and extend it to do things that it doesn’t do by default. Also, we delivered development and customization in time spans of a couple of weeks, as opposed to months of work required on other platforms.

How do you see 37signals basecamp as a competitor and in what way would you say you are better than them?

37signals basecamp is similar to cyn.in only in its delivery model and its philosophy of simplicity. In my opinion, both offerings have very different focuses. Basecamp manages activity. cyn.in manages information. That said, its too early for cyn.in to draw parallels to any existing offering.

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Apurva Roy Choudhury is the CEO of Cynapse and is based in Mumbai, India. You can find a review of Cyn.In at Enterprise 2.0.

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