The Scale of Evil

Google's famous company motto "Don't be evil" was evolved a couple of years ago by the search giant to an 'evil scale' that allowed company operatives to accept "small evils" to allow for greater good. The notion of 'evil' here refers to doing something not exactly according to your purest principles in order to gain a business advantage.


Let's face it. In business, decisions are not always black and white, and there is often temptation to bend the rules a bit for an immediate gain. For instance, one could be tempted to bypass your regular channel for a specific large opportunity in order to increase margin on that deal, or take a quick sale from a customer even though you think the product might not be a perfect fit for what he/she is trying to do. So every business in fact operates on an evil scale, sometimes being more evil, sometimes being less evil. In general, being less evil pays up, but in the (very) long term. Some companies are unfortunately tempted to take a shortcut sometimes...:)

I like Sangoma's position on that scale. The company treats its customers fairly and makes sure the channel is rewarded from working us. That's different from other companies in our industry. In particular, some companies in the open source telephony market have recently tried to increase their business at the expense of their long-standing partners, by offering competing products. Ouch! That gives them a few points on the evil scale. Will the move pay off for them? The market is already rumbling. In the long run, I think the less evil will prevail. Oh well, time will tell.

Insourcing: Is anybody home?

So the economy is bad. Unemployment reaches record highs. Competition everywhere is fierce. What can businesses do in such a climate?

Well, many of our North American customers are accelerating their insourcing plans. "What's insourcing?" you may ask. It means taking call center agents that were outsourced to some developing country, and bringing these agents back in North America, most often having agents work from their homes. It's a trend that certainly benefits from the recent availability of a great number of workers in North America. Some of these people may be a bit less demanding these days in terms of salaries and benefits. With new technologies like our NetBorder Agent Bridge, it becomes easier than ever to add agents working from their home to a centralized call center. This means call centers can recruit and enable agents working from their home faster than ever.

Insourcing is great from the perspective of giving employment opportunities locally, and in assisting corporations to reduce their costs and improve the quality of their service in an increasingly competitive market. Perhaps a part of an economic recovery plan that was overlooked?

Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco. Really???

There's an old belief that you can't go wrong by selecting a technology supplier that is the large incumbent. The "safe bet" if you are willing to pay some hefty premium in IT services is IBM. In VoIP connectivity, this would be Cisco.

But the decision is not quite that easy, especially these days. While it's true that one has to choose a vendor that has solid financials and will be around for the next little while, businesses today need to spend their money wisely and select vendors that will stay flexible and keep up with rapidly changing conditions. What good is it to pay twice the price of other solutions for the "safe bet", when you won't be able to get personalized service and will not be able to get the attention you need when your plans change (and they will!).

I remember one of our early customers. A company that hosted CRM applications and needed VoIP gateways. The particular business unit we were working with selected our company originally because of our domain expertise and the belief they could get much better service and more cost effective solutions than the "safe bets" out there. And they did! They had very successful deployments and grew their hosted infrastructure quite a bit. In fact, they were victims of their own success. One day, I received a call from my contact in their business unit telling me they were transitioning all their hosted infrastructure to "corporate IT". Oh boy. These guys only knew Cisco and wouldn't bother with a "small supplier" like us. Well, one guy made the decision to buy all new Cisco gear, and move all the hosted infrastructure on Cisco. It took them 4 motnhs to "reprogram" all the routing logic using Cisco. Because Cisco does not have a product that is as flexible as ours, it added quite a bit of management complexity, making the architecture difficult to maintain. But hey...who were we to argue...

A few months later I met my contact at a conference. Because of all the extra complexity introduced, their infrastructure had sufffered major quality problems that affected the end users. And guess what, the guys who was responsible for displacing our product for Cisco got fired because of that!!!

Especially these days, when money is really tight and the need for flexibility is higher than ever, the "safe bet" is no longer the "no brainer" choice it was before. Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco??? I think not...

Starting my own blog

Well, it's about time I join the 21st century and start a blog of my own. I will use this platform to provide my thoughts on what's happening in my company (Sangoma Technologies -TSXV:STC)), thoughts on the VoIP industry, and any other topic I would find relevant and interesting.

Sangoma acquired the company I co-founded (Paraxip Technologies) in July 2008. It's been a wild ride, and it's not over yet...

My name is Serge Forest, and hopefully these comments will find a few interested readers...

Talk to you soon...