Just Enough Is Good Enough

An open source (but closed system) box priced right for small business continues to win accolades.

by ISP-Planet Staff [September 15, 2005]

Last week, we recommended that ISPs strive to acquire small business customers. Today, we talk to a vendor who focuses on small business services and ISP that is already focusing on small business services.

Dave Brown is president and CEO of Boise, Idaho-based Emergecore, a company whose $1,395 IT IN A BOX product is designed to enable ISPs to provide small business services.

"ISPs want to get behind the DMARC, but cannot put in multiple pieces of equipment from multiple vendors," says Brown.

He adds that most vendors sell solutions that are an order of magnitude more expensive than Emergecore's. "Vendors want to sell a $20,000 multibox solution to customers, but ISPs find that customers prefer the price of the box to be bundled into the monthly fee."

He admits that the product is not best of breed. For example, the box's CRM solution is not Siebel Systems. "It's good enough for small business," explains Brown, echoing comments by blogger and former IBM VP John Patrick, who in his recent entry, "Just Enough is Good Enough" noted:

My theory for office and personal productivity documents is "Just enough Is Good Enough"—in other words, having a standard document format that works on any kind of computer in the world is much more important than having some esoteric features that the vast majority of users will never take advantage of and which are proprietary to one company.

Brown says that the company recently added a carrier friendly feature. "We added SNMP, which gives carriers the ability to manage thousands of boxes from one location using a product like HP Openview. Carriers demanded this and we complied."

In the field
We reach Dave Singer, vice president of sales and distribution at Stamford, Conn.-based Citizens Communications, ranked 17th nationally on our subscriber rankings. The company incorporates ILEC, CLEC, and other communications-related subsidiaries including the much respected Vancouver, Wash.-based CLEC Electric Lightwave (ELI).

"We've been testing the Emergecore product since last year with ELI," says Singer. He explains that the company divides its business customers into four sectors: SOHO, small, medium, and enterprise. The Emergecore product is part of the company's bundles for small business and SOHO customers.

Currently, he's working on rolling out Frontierworks Business Connections Bundles in the 29 states served by the company's ILEC, Frontier. "We expect to have the bundles available in all markets over the next 30 days," Singer says.

— End