As a FOSS (Free, Open Source Solution) company, that also offers a cloud-based software-as-a-service option, we’re sorting through more deal opportunities than we can handle right now. We’re hiring based upon real growth … which is the ultimate barometer of any startup’s progression.

“A down market is a great time for an emerging company to secure a beachhead against established players.”

CIOs and other tech decision makers still have the same problems to solve within their organizations, they just don’t have a blank check book to work with anymore.  No one ever got fired for bringing in a Microsoft, Avaya, SAP, or any other market leader to implement a solution.  But if they can’t afford to do that, they can either look to a startup or smaller company for a solution, or postpone the project until the market gets better. Tech decision makers like to be heroes, so cater to that.  Give them a solution that makes sense to them in a down market. A down market is a GREAT time for an emerging company to secure a beachhead against established players.

So how do you cater to them in a down market?  I suppose there isn’t one correct answer – it will vary depending upon your business, but … here are some thought starters based on what we’re seeing.

Startups can be more agile and creative with pricing and infrastructure. You don’t have 25,000 mouths to feed.  Yet … :) You have a handful.  Be aggressive with pricing – don’t try to get your whole nut on your first deal or two.  Get creative. Options are limitless – per seat, per transaction, per CPU hour, etc.  Are those up-front professional services fees getting in the way of closing the deal?  Waive them, and incorporate them into a transaction fee where the customer can pay for them over time.

Make your solution solve a real problem. In this market, the checks are being written to solution providers who can truly offer an efficiency or savings (of either time or money, or hopefully both).  If you aren’t doing this, you probably won’t last in the enterprise space. Don’t make your internal champion go back and explain why his or her boss needs to write a check to you.  Instead, arm them so they go back and show how much time and money they’ll save by bringing you in AND how painless it will be to get started. Everyone wants an on-demand solution these days – the days of NIH are shrinking.

If your solution doesn’t really solve a problem – make it solve one.

Get the deal DONE (especially if it involves a reference customer). If you can do this, others will dial down their perceived risk of entrusting a critical function to a startup provider.  It could even be worth losing money on a deal like that if you know it will open other doors for you – plus it slows your burn or at least helps you get to breakeven.

Put it in the cloud. Hardware is now a commodity.  It is a lot easier and cheaper to build a cloud solution these days.  Blade server prices are down to incredibly advantageous levels.  And if you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself, check out Scalr.net, which has a fantastic interface around Amazon’s EC2 service.

Enterprise services are the “ultimate mashup”. If you are an enterprise services startup, and you can effectively add value somewhere in a chain of web services, you have a decent shot at surviving this “Great Correction” as I’m calling the current market – but you are going to have to get deals done outside of the box.

Would love to hear some other thoughts …

Cheers.

Well, after four years of toiling, the StarPound project is finally seeing the light of day.  In the wee hours this morning, Wei Wang (CTO) and I published v1.1.0 RC1 of the open-source StarPound CORE platform to Sourceforge, and then published the new StarPound.net web site.  The team has been working nonstop over the past few months to make this launch date – we’re tired, but we made it.

You can read a lot more about the platform over on the site, but I’ll serve up a quick description of it here, and share a little bit about where we’re going.

StarPound CORE is a beautiful fusion of business process management (BPM), telephony (VoIP/SIP, PSTN/TDM, cellular, etc.), and web services (SOA).  What a mouthful.   In other words, the platform gives you an easy way to turn your organization’s business processes into web (or voice) services.  You can also use it to create any web service, not just those that are explicitly tied to some business process or telephony.

StarPound CORE is comprised of two key components: StarPound Studio and the StarPound Application Server.  StarPound Studio is a visual process modeling tool that is BPMN compliant (very cool), and built on top of the Eclipse IDE.  You create a visual model of what you want the voice/web service to do.  You can drag/drop really cool things like calls to external web services (e.g. Salesforce.com, Google, etc.), call control tasks, IVR tasks, etc.  Test it, then deploy it into the cloud on a StarPound App Server where it is ready to use.  The service can be initiated by a person, a phone call, an email, FAX, SMS, or web application request via SOAP or REST.

The platform is 100% Java/J2EE, but obviously you can invoke deployed StarPound services using whatever language you are using (via SOAP or REST calls).

There is a lot more to our vision than what I’ve described, but at its core (no pun intended), that’s what the platform does. You can read more about our vision here.

What’s even cooler than finally releasing the first release candidate of the platform is that we’ve also released two sample open-source applications that were built on top of the platform (StarPound PBX and StarPound Call Center).

StarPound PBX is a full-featured, free, open-source PBX that gives you pretty much all of the features you’d need out of a PBX for your office:

• Auto-attendant
• Voicemail (and web-based voicemail)
• Call menus
• Call hold
• Call forwarding
• Call routing
• Conference calling
• Hunt groups
• Unified messaging
• User directory
• Integrated voice response
• Call center support
• Web-based administration
• Open-source and free!

And, it is scalable because it is built on top of the StarPound platform.  Legally, I can’t mention any names, but one of the largest video game publishers in the world is now using StarPound PBX.  And why not? It kicks ass.

StarPound for Call Centers is also mega-cool. It provides mission critical functionality for call centers, like skills-based routing, automated call distribution (ACD), inbound/outbound, predictive dialing, workflow management, queue management, CTI integration, call recording/monitoring, screen pops, agent dashboard, supervisor dashboard, remote agent support, etc.  Again, free and open-source, and another really cool example of the types of apps you can build on top of StarPound CORE.

Right now we’ve got a ton of really exciting business and partnerships in the pipeline on the commercial side of things, and I’ll be writing some more about those things down the road as we work through them. But I can tell you that we are enjoying a tremendous push into the enterprise call center space, online marketplaces/exchanges, and scalable cloud services.

On a semi-related note, we’re also exploring opportunities to invest capital and resources in new startups that are in a position to take advantage of this new platform for creating disruptive applications within specific vertical markets.  More on this soon … but you can read the official particulars here.  We have a couple of deals that we’re already considering.

Now with all the cute cuddly launch comments out of the way, I’ll add this:  We have a long list of incumbent industry players that we’re going after, in multiple markets and sectors. And we’re coming fast and going for your jugular. Let the games begin.

Hats off to the whole StarPound dev team for this launch (Wei, Andrew, and the guys in St. Pete) – it has been a long time in the making, and I know that everyone is ecstatic right now about where we’re going with the company.  Good stuff …

Cheers.