Next month, Tucows will launch its new-and-improved hosted email service, which we built from the ground up to meet our customers' needs. I've been following this project from the very beginning, and over the next few weeks, I'll be posting all sorts of things — articles, podcasts, interviews and diagrams — on Tucows' email service, its features and the underlying technology.

In this first posting on email, I have a podcast interview with three key people here at Tucows about the new email service:

• Elliot Noss, Tucows' president and CEO
• Kim Phelan, Director of Product Management
• Rick Yazwinski, Director of Technical Operations and Planning

In the podcast, we talk about the importance of email, Tucows' focus on email and the technical and service advantages of our email service.

To list to the podcast, click the link below. The podcast is 18 minutes, 16 seconds long, just under 13MB in size and is an MP3 file that will play in any MP3 player, as well as iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Click here to play the podcast. (Right-click and select “Save as” to save it to your hard drive.)

We've had the podcast transcribed; the transcript appears below.

Podcast Transcript

[music]

Joey deVilla: Hello, and welcome to another Tucows Podcast. In this podcast, we'll be talking about Tucows Email and the new webmail feature. I'll be talking with CEO Elliot Noss, Director of Product Management Kim Phelan, and Director of Technical Operations and Planning Rick Yazwinski.

[music fades out; interview begins]

In the age of Web 2.0 and all sorts of new applications, why is this decades-old thing called “email” still important?

Elliot Noss: Well, I think that email, interestingly, has become, in orders of magnitude, more important than it used to be. One of the interesting things that we've observed over the last six months as email systems around the Internet have come under greater and greater pressure, both from load, but certainly, primarily from the massive amounts of spam that are now flowing through the system is that as there have been challenges around performance and deliverability across the Internet, you've seen businesses screaming in a way that, certainly, in my 12 years in this space have never seen before.

What has been clear to me is that the reliance that people, both individuals and businesses, now place on email in so many aspects of their lives has just taken it to a whole new level in terms of importance. So, just when you thought it couldn't get bigger, it did!

Joey:Why is Tucows, in particular, focusing on email?

Elliot: Well, this is something I've talked about previously, both on conference calls and on some of the earlier podcasts around some of the acquisitions that you and I did, Joey. The single largest providers of for-pay email, commercial email, of email that is central to people's Internet lives is delivered by service providers, and for service providers, there's really been a sea change over the last 12, 24, even as far back as 36 months.

For me, that centers around three things:

• One is, certainly, the massive increase in spam, where email is table stakes for service providers, and filtering spam was kind of a nice thing to have. Now, being able to do that at a massive scale, where 19 out of every 20 emails that pass through your system are garbage, has just become so much more difficult.
• The second is, now, the massive storage requirements. It's still the case, if you look around the Internet, that most service providers — most web hosting companies and ISPs — are still providing mailbox sizes of less than 100 MBs, or 100 MBs. That's a joke. There's no question that where Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have taken us is to a world of — whether it's a GB, or two GBs, or five GBs, or certainly in our view — something bordering on unlimited storage has become an absolute requirement for email.
  
  By the way, that storage requirement is driven because people use email differently now. To go back to your first question about why is email still relevant, people use email as backup now; people use email as transport between themselves at the office and at home. People use email as archival storage in a fundamentally different way than they ever have. That creates this huge storage requirement for service providers, who typically could get away with some simple attached storage; now they're being driven into massive storage or uncompetitive email offerings.
• The third is around the fundamental changes we've seen in webmail over the last 12 to 24 months, where webmail has moved from a kind of crappy looking HTML that you used when you had to remotely, to, now, a place where the best webmail implementations are starting to rival desktop mail apps.

So, I think those three things have made it fundamentally different for service providers, and have fundamentally changed the economics and the calculus in terms of what service providers have to look at. As you know, we really like to find opportunities where we can help service providers, and supply them with things that allow them to be more competitive and more successful.

Joey: Earlier, you mentioned Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which brings up an interesting question, and that is: why would you go with a Tucows-based email service, when Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are offering are offering it for free? Basically, how do you compete with free?

Elliot:So, there are two levels that you have to think about that at. One is the service provider level. I think it's a fundamentally different answer, but let's take that out to the end user, through the service provider. If you're a service provider, you need to think about why your customers are going to still want and take mail from you, and whether you care about that.

So, I start from if I'm a service provider, well, do I care if all of my customers are using Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and, maybe, AOL for email. That's less likely in a service provider context. For me, the answer is clearly yes. I'm a fundamental believer that what service providers are in the business of doing is helping their customers use the Internet more easily and effectively. If we agree on that, and if we agree that email is the most important application in that usage, then to have that be supplied somewhere else — and when it's supplied somewhere else that means it's being supported somewhere else, or not supported at all — it's a fundamental disconnect, if I'm a service provider, between me and relationship I can build with my customer.

So, that's kind of the “OK, if I'm a service provider, why do I care?” Now, it's “Why should my customer care?” Why would my customer more want that to come from me — the hosting company or the ISP — than from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft? There, I come down to roughly two or four important differences. First, those are, and will continue to be, generally, ad-supported models.

For me, personally, for the tiny increments in price that I need pay to get quality email from my service provider, for less than an expensive cup of coffee a month, for less than a cup of Starbucks coffee — one cup — put it in my monthly bundle, I can get email from my service provider with no advertising. That seems like an easy decision for me.

The second point is there's no question that a continuum that stretches from us through the service provider to the end user is going to provide, or should provide it we're all during our jobs, a significantly better user experience at a support and service level than Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft can provide — possibly, can possibly provide.

I say that because if you're a service provider, overwhelmingly it's the case that servicing and supporting that end user, helping them use the Internet, is what's in your DNA, and that's not what Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft are about. They all do great things, and do lots of them, but providing one to one support is not one of them, and it is for the folks that I'm talking about.

That's the second thing. I think that the third thing is one that we're going to start to see and hear of going forward, which is the fact that nobody has yet figured out how you migrate out of these services. One of the things, from my perspective, that people aren't making enough of out of that whole PhotoBucket/MySpace thing is that, boy, when you have free services, you probably don't own and control your data to nearly the extent that you should or will want to. That's, unfortunately, one of those things that you won't really feel the pain around, even though you care about it, until it's too late or until you have some sort of negative incident.

But, boy, if you're paying a service provider for email, and it's commercially provided and supported, your control of your data is going to be at a way higher level than it will be with a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, even though nobody's really figured out how to port of those places yet. So for me, those are the three big reasons.

Joey:Kim, it looks like you've got a fourth item that you have to add to Elliot's list. Go right head and tell me about it.

Kim Phelan:Well certainly, I realize that Microsoft and Google have announced the ability for people to use their own domain names with those tools. But, that's another aspect that I think about for the service provider relationship with their end customer: to be able to help along with that path. They've got names; they can then also bring that together with their email. Things like when we bought NetIdentity last year, that was exactly why we went there, that people have an online identity, and the loyalty to that online identity is huge. To have the service provider be able to weave that story and provide that service to them, I think, is great.

Joey:All right. Well Kim, you're the Product Manager for Email; tell us about the highlights of Tucows' Email Service.

Kim:All right. Obviously, with the background that Elliot provided, we really wanted to look at our email offering and build a new offering that really made sure that we were supporting the, obviously, desktop users that exist today, who are using those clients, but also really allow our service providers to compete against the Googles and the Yahoos of the world by a really great webmail experience.

So, we're really looking at how to make webmail not just something you have to use when you're traveling, but something want to use. Just like Gmail has changed how we look at webmail, we want to do the same thing but provide it in a way that's really centered around how the service provider wants to deliver. So, whether that's brandability, with Tucows being totally in the background, but just email that works and is really competitive and works inside their existing infrastructure.

Joey:Rick, as the tech guy, tell us a little bit about the underlying technology — the hamsters on wheels behind all this.

Rick Yazwinski:Our new email product is really a combination of the best of breed — hardware and software platforms that we could put together into the solution. From a hardware perspective, we have all the big names that you would expect to see: NetApp for storage, Sun with their 64-bit AMD Platforms, big IP load balancers to distribute the traffic across our farms.

From a software perspective, we've really looked at the solutions that we've run in the past, both the Critical Path hosted and the CommuniGate one previous, and seen what they did really well and where we had problems with those. From the hosted platform, we took some of the really leading-edge stuff that were doing, merged it with some of the Tucows legacy platform products that we had, then finally layered on a set of componentry from the open source realm that is being used for email delivery world-wide. With this combination, we have a solution that is really robust, very scalable, and we're very excited about it.

Joey:So Rick, all this great underlying hardware and software technology; what does it provide in the end?

Rick:I think the big three things that I would call out, specifically, in roughly the order that our customers would experience them, would be:

• First, the ease of integration. Our new platform is very easy to start communicating with, and to start creating users. We've scaled it and done a significant amount of testing around rolling out very large user bases — multi-million user bases into the mail solution. Where, historically, that might take days or weeks, it now takes hours. So, to get a customer going in the platform is now a very simple and quick operation.
• The second high-level item that I would touch on would be deliverability. We know that today, in the real world, people use email as they do conversations. They expect mail to be delivered; they expect it to be delivered in near real-time. Paging systems, doctors appointments, meetings at the office, interoffice communication; all those types of things are happening within email, and people just have the expectation that it happens. We found that with email it's very, very easy to disappoint. Five minutes of delay with an email translates into customer disappointment. What we're trying to build with this solution, and what we will build with this solution is excitement and delight.
  
  We've done this with that software/hardware layer that we were talking about, so the technology layer is very important. We also do a lot of research around optimizing mail flow, and getting that expectation met in the very, very large mail clusters that we're talking about.
• The last point that I would talk about is performance in the large, and this speaks to the power users that we're starting to see come on and using email, as Elliott was saying, as an archival means — as a way of tracking their history, as a way of documenting a company's past or their past in their department. At Tucows, in our operations department, we had guys with in-boxes with 10,000 messages in them.
  
  This exposed a challenge to us that we really didn't expect when we were looking at this problem space. It took a reasonable amount of work to work around; with some smart use of caching and some technologies that I'm not going go into here, we managed to overcome those in really interesting ways that give the end users a really clean, fast, and responsive experience.

Joey:Kim, beyond the nuts and bolts, the hardware/software combination that actually makes the email service go, what else is there that Tucows provides?

Kim:Well, Tucows provides — it's a hard to quantify benefit, but it really comes down to the human side of things. In the last six to 12 months, we've certainly learned a lot of lessons around anti-spam and how it's really changing. The volume is just exorbitant now.

Part of it is having good filters, and that should be a non-starter. But the second half of it is the human part, which is how do you deal with those different attacks. When you have all of these mail providers at war with each other, trying to the best service ever, there's always somebody blogging someone else.

Tucows actually has two different teams that deal with those types of issues:

• We have an abuse team, and they have great relationships with all of the mail providers and any of the spam list providers as well. It's up to them to actually work with those providers to make sure that any issues are eliminated.
• Then, the other side of it is our compliance team. We have some pretty extensive experience because of our domains background. Whether it's regulatory issues, legal issues, or even law enforcement issues, we take that same type of experience with our compliance group when it comes down to email, as well. So let's say one of your users has a phishing attack related to your email, we will certainly be reaching out to you as a service provider to help you with that problem and work through it, instead of you having to deal with it on your own.

So, it's that human side of things — good technology is great, but you also have our support, as well.

Elliot:It's our experience that the human side is what has the greatest impact on deliverability, and deliverability is single largest factor as it relates to support calls. I think that's such a “what's in it for me?”

 

[music fades in; interview ends]

Joey:This has been a podcast about Tucows Email Service and the new webmail feature with CEO Elliot Noss, Director of Product Management Kim Phelan, and Director of Technical Operations and Planning Rick Yazwinski. I'm Technical Evangelist Joey deVilla, your host.

For more information about Tucows Services, please visit our services website at services.tucows.com.

Thanks for listening.

It's always good to see Doc Searls, and I'm glad I had the chance to hang out with him at the recent ISPCON Fall 2006 conference. He's been a friend of Tucows since he first met us as ISPCON years ago, and he's been up to Toronto for a number of visits since then, the most recent one being last year's Christmas holiday party. In fact, it was a blogger get-together that he had during his visit in early 2003 that led to my getting a job here.

Doc's long time friendship with Tucows and Elliot is probably why their ISPCON opening keynote, Internet Service: The Fifth Utility? was more like a listening in on a casual conversation than attending a panel discussion. In their hour-long chat, Doc and Elliot talked about the internet not as a bonus service offered by telcos, but as a utility on par with things like roads, water, waste treatment and electricity. I attended this keynote and made a recording of their chat, which you can hear by downloading the podcast below.

We'd like to express our thanks to Jon Price, Denise Miller and the rest of the people behind ISPCON Fall 2006 for putting on a great conference, and to Doc for driving up to San Jose to take part in the keynote.

Podcast: The Internet: The Fifth Utility
File	Tucows Podcasts - Internet Service — The Fifth Utility.mp3
Format	MP3 file
Length	57 minutes, 54 seconds
File size	28.9 MB

Platypus is Tucows' billing system for web hosting and internet access providers, offering invoicing and billing, customer management and service provisioning. Version 6 is coming out soon, and on this Tucows Blog podcast, I chat about it with Bill Ford, Tucows' Director of Billing Services, who came from the Starkville office last week to visit us up here in Toronto.

The podcast is an MP3 file 10.7 MB in size and is 17 minutes, 16 seconds in length. Click here to play it (or right-click and choose “Save as”) to save it to your hard drive.

Also in this entry:

• Platypus Details
• Transcript of the Interview

What Platypus Can Do For You

• Easily create statements and invoices: Use Platypus to send paper and email statements, charge credit cards and perform direct bank debits.
• Manage your hosting services: Integration with cPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere and Ensim let Platypus communicate with these control panels seamlessly.
• Integrate with Tucows services: Domain name orders can be launched and managed directly from Platypus. Billing for Blogware orders can also be managed directly from Platypus.
• Drive sales from the web: Platypus and Tucows' Client Code Suite technology provide a direct sign-up process via the web.
• Charge customers based on any measurable piece of data: Platypus measures virtually any type of usage data to create clear, concise invoices.
• Communicate with your customers: Need to email only the shared hosting clients who exceeded their monthly transfer limit? The Platypus Message Wizard creates mailings based on any customer characteristic.
• Automatically provision services: When a service is added to a customer account, Platypus can communicate with the external system (such as a mail server) to enable it.
• Manage multiple companies: Platypus can handle all of a firm's subsidiary company data, and brand customer statements as needed.
• Protect sensitive data: Platypus lets you create security groups and assign access according to group, limiting employee access to data if desired.

Platypus 6 Features

• Integration with leading web hosting control panels: Platypus 6.0 features two-way communication with cPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere and Ensim.
• Multiple billing frequencies for a rate group: Individual rate groups can be set to bill at different intervals, providing more flexibility when billing customers.
• Ability to archive old rate groups and transfer rate groups: Rate groups can now be archived, reducing clutter within the Platypus interface, and can also be moved between customers.
• Nested services: Platypus 6.0 lets you tie multiple services to one product out of the box, with no custom configuration required.
• Logic-driven provisioning: Platypus' provisioning integration system now supports VB scripting, giving you the ability to develop logic-driven provisioning rules without complicated external coding.
• Hidden services: Services can be marked as hidden, allowing you to hide services that need to be provisioned but do not need to be displayed to customers.
• Simple service structure: Platypus 6.0's domain-centric focus allows hosting companies to tie multiple services to one domain name.
• Service contracts: Enforce contract terms with early cancellation penalties. Contract penalties can be fixed or scaled.
• “One click” invoice email feature: Platypus 6.0 includes an invoicing process that will take care of determining the format, exporting and emailing an invoice in a single mouse click.
• Server pooling: Use Platypus 6.0 to perform load balanced provisioning of end user control panels on web hosting servers.

For More Details

Visit the Platypus site at platypus.tucows.com.

Platypus Free Trial

If you're already a Platypus customer with a valid support contract, you can upgrade to Platypus 6 for free once it comes out

If you're not a Platypus customer and you'd like to try it out the current version (version 5) free for 30 days, you can download an evaluation copy here.

Transcript of the Interview

Joey deVilla: Hello, and welcome to the Tucows Blog Podcast. I'm Joey deVilla, technical evangelist for Tucows.

You may be aware of Tucows' head office, located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. That is where I am based.

But you may not be aware of our other office, located in Starkville, Mississippi, and that is where the Billing Solutions team is based.

I'm going to be talking with Bill Ford, Director of Billing Solutions for Tucows, about our premier billing solution system, called Platypus Version 6.

I'm talking with Bill Ford, Tucows Director of Billing Solutions, who is up here from the Starkville office. Hey, Bill, welcome to Toronto.

Bill Ford: Hi, Joey. Thanks.

Joey: Before we get into the meat of this podcast, let's start with a couple of easy ones. First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself, and the Starkville office, and what you do there?

Bill: Sure. For the last ten years, the guys and girls at the Starkville office have been delivering back-office solutions aimed at providers. So we have got a real kernel of expertise there, when it comes to things like billing, subscriber management, trouble ticketing, and that is what we, hopefully, have brought to Tucows.

Joey: All right. So how many people are in the Starkville office?

Bill: We've got about ten people down there, mostly developers; and the developers are led by Grant Spradling, a man without whom we would not be able to do any of these things.

We have a real low turnover in our office. We have all got, carved out, our own niche areas in the back offices, from a development point of view.

Joey: All right. Well, we might as well get to the meat of it, and that is: what is it you develop in the Starkville office? Tell us about it.

Bill: Sure. So, Platypus, as I mentioned, was released about ten years ago. Back then, the main focus of Platypus, obviously, was access providers, and so we wanted to develop a niche billing system that encompassed everything in the back office that an access provider would need.

So you have got your obvious things like invoicing and customer management; and then you have got provisioning.

Whenever a customer selects a certain product that they want to buy from the access provider, the billing system notes that, it bills the customer, and then it communicates with the external provisioning system, to make sure those services are delivered.

Joey: So what kind of customers do you get these days? Who, basically, makes use of Platypus?

Bill: These days, actually, over the past few years, our customer base has become more of the web hosting variety. While there is a lot of overlap in the billing and provisioning needs of web hosting companies, it is all about a niche product when you want to be really effective.

So there are a lot of real specific "host-y things" that we are adapting the software to address, while not leaving behind any of our access provider customers, we want to make sure we give the same level of attention to our web hosting customers.

Joey: Let's say I am a web host, and I'm running into the problem that a lot of web hosting companies actually run into, which is the billing, they're sending out bills late.

I'd say that at least half the people in this company have had problems where they haven't been billed for months by a web hosting service that they are making use of, and then all of a sudden they get hit with this giant bill at the end, because somebody at the company finally decided, "Oh, we don't have any money in the bank. We had better actually go bill." So I see it is a common problem.

So let's say I'm a web hosting company. How would I go about getting my hands on Platypus, and integrating it with my business flow?

Bill: Well, what we really want to accomplish, as a provider of a solution, is a system that actually drives those processes.

So you mentioned billing, or collections. That is an obvious, specific need that any web hosting company would have.

So Platypus is an application that is installed at your site, and once it is installed, for all the uses that it has–billing and collections, or managing trouble ticketing, or the other reasons that you have these back office systems–we want to do more than just store this information. We want to actually drive the process to completion.

So in your example of getting your bill, that's the beginning. Obviously the system would want to send the bill, it would want to charge the credit card, if that was the way the customer was paying, or if they are not paying by credit card, if they are paying by check, we want to make sure we send a late notice when it is appropriate, and charge late fees when appropriate.

So again, we're kind of driving, we're making these things happen. We are not just sort of passively assuming that they are going to happen.

Same for trouble ticketing. When the customer sends in a complaint, you want the system to turn that into a trouble ticket, assign it to the appropriate person, escalate the ticket if it hasn't been solved in the amount of time, and then give the customer a chance to provide feedback, in case the problem was handled either really well or poorly, in which case it needs to be, again, brought back to somebody's attention.

So Platypus is an application that is easily installed at the provider's site; and then there's an effort involved in integrating the system with their external system, such as their provisioning systems, or their QuickBooks program.

So that is just the technical exercise after a purchase.

Joey: All right. So I understand that there is a new, Version six Platypus, coming out shortly. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

Bill: Why sure. We really wanted to make sure we were giving the same level of niche attention to our web hosting companies that we do to our providers.

So we have two main areas of improvement for 6.0. Every one of our dot zero releases has hundreds of changes in functionality, and this one is no exception, but it really fits into two main things.

One of them is, we have updated our service model, to better match the way hosting companies sell their services.

Specifically, we have added the concept of nested services to Platypus, and if you are familiar with Platypus, you know that you can define a bundle, or a "rate group," as we call it, and then you specify what services are provided by that bundle; and that's the way it worked, and it worked pretty well.

But hosting companies, they needed it to be organized a little more specifically. They may have a bundle that provides a service, and that service provides other services. So if a bundle provides a domain, that domain may have associated with it email services, and DNS services, and things like that.

So we are giving it a better organizational structure, which not only makes better sense from a billing standpoint, but allows you to do provisioning in a much simpler way.

Instead of having to build these real knowledgeable provisioning scripts, that have this cascading effect of provisioning based on one certain package, each individual piece now knows its portion of the provisioning. It is much simpler to create the provisioning scripts.

In the same vein, we have added the ability to completely override pricing on a per-customer basis.

Hosting customers, particularly dedicated hosting companies, really they don't give the same price twice to anybody. Every one of their dedicated machines, they spec it out, and they quote it in a different way.

The old version of Platypus, they would have to create a brand new bundle for every one of those servers, whereas in 6-0, you'll be able, once you assign a bundle to a customer, to go in and override pricing in any way, shape, or form that you want to, so that you don't have all the overhead associated with keeping up with all of those bundles that you are only going to use once or twice.

The second main thrust is integration with third-party control panels, like cPanel, Ensim, H-Sphere, and then Hostopia, it's a similar situation.

But that is key to winning over a web hosting company. It is already using a control panel to take care of its customers, and they want to have it integrated tightly with the billing system. So that, at great pains, has been added full support for all of those products to Platypus 6.

Joey: Just out of curiosity, how did a hosting company do it before, when they had a control panel like, say, cPanel, a really popular one - I use it for my provider?

Bill: Well, if they were go-getters, they were able to do the integration themselves. They were able to make the tie between Platypus and cPanel.

So one thing that we're trying to do is to make it where they do not have to have all that kind of domain experience, in-house, to do all of the set-up. We are just kind of doing some of that work for them.

And while they may have an integration, it may not be a complete integration.

They may have the ability to add, set-up a new customer and give them access to their cPanel control panel, but they don't have the ability to suspend that customer for non-payment, or to upgrade the services he is allowed to have in cPanel, based on him upgrading from the Gold Plan to the Platinum Plan.

So we are making it easier, and we are extending the level of functionality they have already had.

Joey: All right, Bill. Well, you talk about integrating with various control panels that a lot of hosting services use. What is involved with that? Is that a lot of work, to do it?

Bill: Well that is one of the main benefits of the new 6-0 release, is that we have engineered the integrations for the major control panels, so it is really as simple as installing a module for your particular control panel, or control panels–you may be using more than one of these at one time, which is fine.

Once you do that, it is as simple as going into Platypus, defining your server pools, because we support load balancing for these products, and you are off to the races.

Platypus will then provision on the appropriate servers, based on the load-balancing formula that you have chosen.

And that's control panels. You have got all your other products that you might want to integrate with.

Platypus has a strong provisioning manager built in that allows you to create your own schemes to interface with other systems, like your own email system, or your own FTP box, or whatever you need to provision to.

We support a variety of schemes. We have added a new Visual Basic scripting scheme, that we can store and execute Visual Basic scripts with that, defined as sort of a template, so the fields can actually get filled in with the pertinent information as they are executed.

That flexibility is important. However, out-of-the-box functionality, where we have already got these things engineered for you, is equally important, so that you don't have to recreate the wheel for every product that you need to integrate with.

Joey: So, in a lot of cases, the set-up is pretty simple, and it is a script that a sys-admin could run, rather than requiring you to haul in a programmer or professional services team, or something like that.

Bill: That's right. We feel like we have achieved an out-of-the-box integration. We have removed the need for you to develop your own middleware.

Joey: Sounds cool. OK, let's go a little bit back, for a moment, and talk about bundles. Maybe something our listeners are not quite familiar with. Can you explain why hosting services would offer bundles, and how they normally work, and how much easier they are using Plat 6?

Bill: These days, to be competitive, a hosting company–or any company, but in particular hosting companies–have to provide a rich package of services when they are trying to attract a customer. Nobody sells an email account, but email is typically included with a product that you purchase.

So you need the ability to quickly roll out a variety of different bundles, to meet your regional market needs; and you need to be able to tell your billing system, or your back office system, what services you want to offer, the pricing you want to have, and have it enforce and execute these plans.

And you do not want to have to have a lot of hands-on going on.

Some examples: for the end user to be able to come to you as a new customer, choose a plan that meets his needs, and then go in and provision his services when he gets ready to define his fifth email address, and his sixth email address, or change the password on his hosting account, they need to be able to do that without contacting you.

Or if they want to upgrade to a more expensive plan, that provides more services, you need that to be a driven process as well; or have add-ons, where they may add on services that cost money–they're not included as part of the regular bundle.

All of those things, you want the system to not only support those things, but to actually drive those things, promote the up-sell of products to your customers, because that is a real added value to the billing system.

Joey: So, the idea is that it makes it easy so that, let's say I have got some kind of domain name registration bundle, and a couple of email addresses, and some web hosting, and I wanted to pick up a couple of extra services.

The system would allow a hosting provider to simply define it in a control panel, so I could just–even if I wanted to at 2:00 in the morning, when there's no customer support on the phone–could actually place the order and have the billing system updated for that.

Bill: That's right. It would all be real-time in that way. The system would make it clear to them what services they have paid for and haven't yet. It says, "You have paid for five emails. You've got three of them. You have two more to go. Click here to add one, or click on one of these existing email addresses to make changes to it."

So it really removes the need for them to interact with service personnel, but it still promotes the up-selling potential of your products.

Joey: That sounds great, and it sounds like it takes a lot of the pain out of the process of having to up-sell.

Bill: That's right.

Joey: Now, about branding. Tell us a little bit more about branding features.

Bill: So, Platypus allows you to define as many different brands–or what we call "virtual companies"–inside the system that you want to.

You may have more than one brand, for whatever reason. You may have a low-cost brand, and then a regular brand, that you use to keep your product lines separate. Or you might be providing billing services for one of your resellers of your products.

So Platypus gives you the ability to set these companies up inside of your system. And the neat thing about having those different companies inside of one system is that you can define your security model, and your product lines one time, if there is any crossover.

So if you have got staff members that have access to multiple companies, and you want to give them permissions to be able to do so, you can do that.

Or, if you have got staff at one virtual company that needs to have no access other than that one company, when they log in, to them, their company is the only one that exists in the system. They are not able to see any data that is not theirs, any customer that is not theirs, they are not able to access any products that are not theirs unless you want to expose those products across multiple companies.

Joey: All right; and what would I need to install Platypus? System-wise, that is.

Bill: Sure, well, Platypus runs on a sequel server database. The hardware requirements are fairly minimum. Any modern database server machine will be sufficient as the back end.

You can run the Platypus client, which is a Windows application, on practically any modern PC.

Or you can use, there is a web version that is supplied that has a subset of the functionality, that has most of the day-to-day functionality that would be pertinent to a CSR or a technician.

Or you could use the Platypus API, or your own. Companies, particularly bigger ones, have their own employee control panel that they have already deployed, and you couldn't pry that out of their hands on a bet.

So if they want to add functionality like "Add Customer" or "Add Package" or "Create Invoice," they could make calls to the Platypus API and never see our interface at all, and yet still use our billing engine and our provisioning engine to do all the functionality.

Joey: Well, that was great, Bill.

One more thing, and I guess I am going to see you next at ISPCon, Fall 2006. That is going to be at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Bill: That's right, and come by the booth. We will be happy to show you Platypus six in action.

Joey: Sounds good. Also, we'll be handing out squishy cows as well. All right, well, thanks very much Bill.

Bill: I appreciate it. We're headed back to Mississippi now.

Joey: All right. See you later. Have a good trip.

Bill: All right, bye.

Joey: That was an interview with Bill Ford, Tucows' Director of Billing Solutions, and we were talking about Platypus 6.

If you would like to find out more about Platypus, go to Platypus.Tucows.com. You will find all the information you need.

And if you would like to find out even more, maybe meet us up close and personal, your chance is coming up. It will be at ISPCon, at Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California, November 7th through 9th. Drop by the booth, say hi, give Platypus a test run, and we would be even happy to hand you a couple of squishy cows.

Well, that's it for this podcast. I'm Joey deVilla, technical evangelist for Tucows. Thanks for listening.

[music]

Since we launched this blog with the announcement of the Kiko acquisition, it's only fitting that we launch our podcast series with a Kiko-related podcast. This inaugural podcast is of an interview I conducted on Tuesday with Elliot and Ross in which they talk about acquiring a company on eBay while on vacation at the cottage, the so-called bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble, what's going to happen to Kiko's current users, “buy versus build” and the business of online calendars.

We'll post a transcript of this podcast next week.

The podcast is an MP3 file 13.2 MB in size and runs for 25 minutes, 47 seconds. Click here to play it (or right-click and choose “Save as”) to save it to your hard drive.