Conventional wisdom used to be that when a competitor made an announcement, you'd hope prospective customers and media folks wouldn't notice because you were trying to get their attention for your offering. While I am as competitive as one might suspect, the exploding interest in RSS in the enterprise is clearly a case of "a rising tide that raises all boats." I believe "Co-opetition" is anappropriate operative term to describe what we are all experiencing.
Both a press release for new customers and a blog post about overall RSS enterprise demand from our competitor NewsGator was music to my ears and a feast for my eyes. Attensa is a different animal than NewsGator in that our technology is attention-centric (not RSS centric) and our business is primarily focused on solving "information overload" for business. That said, Attensa, NewsGator and KnowNow are all in an exciting position of riding this enterprise RSS wave. And the first thing customers are in need of is getting a handle around the volume of RSS entering their organizations. Information overload is already here in the enterprise.
While we have been last to market with our Enterprise offering (the Attensa Feed Server) we have by no means folund ourselves "late to the party." This is a new, new market opportunity. And it is friggin HUGE. I can't believe the companies that are contacting us. BIG companies. Household names. NewsGator and KnowNow are no doubt experiencing the same. Like NG, we are seeing all kinds of different scenarios driving interest. Also like NG, we are not yet able to disclose who these charter customers are, but here's a quick summary of the scope and scenarios surrounding our first big customer wins (all of whom are F100 companies)
- A networking giant has deployed our Attensa Feed Server (appliance) and begun the deployment of 2,000 Attensa for Outlook clients. A world-wide company roll out is their 2007 objective.
- A major logistics company has deployed our Attensa Feed Server and is currently rolling it out to 1,250 userrs in the field who are using both blackberry devices and will occassionally need to to sync to their desktop (using both our Outlook client and our AJAX web client.)
- One of the world's biggest oil companies has licensed 100,000 seats of our Attensa for Outlook 2.0 client. Reading offline is paramount and the overhead of .net taxing the desktop made us the clear choice. Our attention based river of news slam dunked it.
I can't wait until we can share more about our first three MAJOR customers above, but in the meantime we are following up with several of the biggest banks, insurance, and pharmaceutical organizations in the world. While no two have the same rationale for inquiring, the desire for enterprise class RSS infrastructure is astounding.
Yes it is a rising tide, and will raise all boats in this coming RSS ocean (tsunami?) of ours.
P.S. THe image above is from the Attensa home page.
