So, here’s a good one. A few weeks ago I registered to attend a TechWeb / Information Week seminar in San Francisco – Making the Case for Unified Communications. The agenda for this event indicated that it would be a discussion of “unified communications – winning converts from IT departments to lines of business for its ability to enable employees to rapidly and seamlessly share knowledge across multiple communications platforms, such as voice, e-mail, IM, videoconferencing, and telepresence.” Sounded like a perfect fit for my interests, and I was especially excited to have a chance to meet Melanie Turek, Principal Analyst for Frost Sullivan and blogger for Enterprise 2.0. We showed Apeer to Melanie in a demo, and she wrote a great blog post about the demo in July of this year.
The registration form indicated that I’d hear back in 3 business days with my confirmation, and after 3 weeks I followed up myself to see if I should keep this event on my calendar. I got a prompt response that indicated that one of their reps would follow up with me the next day. To their credit, they did – only to tell me that unfortunately, since I am the VP of Sales for a company with competitive technology to the sponsor of the event (Seimens), that I wouldn’t be able to attend. I had to laugh.
I find it amusing, and somewhat flattering, that a multi-billion dollar company with close to 400,000 employees is competitively threatened by a start up that is just this month launching our first commercially available release. If we are a competitive threat to Unified Communication technologies from Seimens, I guess we are also a threat to the telephone, email and instant messaging. Good news is – we play well with others, and most “competitive technology” actually can be enhanced with the simultaneous use of Apeer across all those multiple communications platforms mentioned above. If anything we are a “complementary technology”.
Look out world – Apeer is coming, and it’s the beginning of a whole new way to communicate.
