At the recent Cobweb Hosted CRM preview event last week I included one slide in my presentation about the Cobweb journey and illustrated this by the changing industry acronyms that have tracked the changes in the industry and at Cobweb. I share this with you now....
Founded in 1996 set up as a FrontPage web hosting company we were without identity as there was no suitable acronym to use at the time. Fortunately we managed to address this serious business issue in 1998 when we started providing dial up internet connection services, great we were now an Internet Service Provider, ISP, so we were on our way.
Of course the turn of the century was not a time to stand still and in the new millennium we started offering Hosted Microsoft Exchange to business customers, pretty pioneering in those days, and so we had evolved into an Application Service Provider, ASP, but, as many will know this delivery model was about 3-5 years too due dues to the lack of cheap fast bandwidth and the applications being offered were not quite ready.
However we persevered and succeeded where many struggled by ensuring we did offer a great level of service to support the applications we provided and in October 2003 we launched, on the same date as Microsoft released to market, Hosted Exchange 2003 and Hosted SharePoint 2003. Once we figured out how to support these applications properly, which did not take long and in 2004, I think we were due for an acronym change and had earned the right to be called a Managed Service Provider, MSP.
So I feel it is about the right time for a change, and fortunately the technology cycle has not let us down again. With the launch of Microsoft Hosted CRM and the way we can use this great platform to work with Hosted SharePoint and Exchange we can really offer our customer great business solutions based on process workflow, reporting and dashboard tools and enterprise class compliant messaging and communications, so you heard it here first, Cobweb is officially the Worlds-first, self proclaimed Solution Service Provider - SSP
For RIP MSP and long live the SSP
Mark (with obviously too much time on his hands!)
Comments