The last couple of posts I’ve shared a few discoveries and ideas on how Software as a Service and in particular some of the services already available online could be used to set up a very low cost start-up business. This week I’ve been looking into how to take this idea further by using the same sorts of technologies to set up a point of presence in a country without actually being there.

As it turns out, for a few hundred dollars put down online via a credit card you can have a virtual office set up in a lot of cities where you might want to be, or at least give the impression you have a local presence. In my case I thought that with some upcoming business in that part of the world and with its de-facto “regional hub” status Singapore would be a good candidate.

A simple Google search reveals that there are a number of service office companies operating in Singapore. They offer a range of services – from office space and meeting rooms with secretarial services at the top end through to a so called virtual office with mail forwarding only for a few hundred Singapore dollars per year.

In fact most of these companies can provide pretty much everything you need for a basic “virtual office” including mail forwarding, a physical address you can use on business cards right up to IP based telephone or telephone answering and forwarding services. For those of us on a shoestring budget we need to be a little more devious however and pick and choose the bits from several providers to get the lowest/best value for money.

In my case I found the wining combination was in fact to use a 3rd party IP telephony provider such as mydivert who was able to provide a local Singapore telephone number for a few Euro per month. If you’re a bit more adventurous you can connect this to a low cost IP based telephone (such as the Linksys SPA901 pictured) and plug into an internet connection or even use software phones like x-lite which is a free download and runs on your PC or Mac.

If not you can just forward any calls to your local Singapore number through to a number in your home country or even just turn on the message service and get emailed any messages left by customers. MyDivert is just one of many providers and can be up and running within a few hours if you pay online with a credit card. You can also use the number to make calls to the country of choice as well as receive them avoiding local telephone toll charges.

Once you have a phone up and running in your newly added office in the country of your choice, you can subscribe online with a local virtual office provider to obtain a physical address with mail forwarding. It should be noted however, that if you actually plan to conduct business locally you may also need to register your company locally. If you are just providing a local point of contact though this is not usually a problem.

Once this is done all you need to do is have a few business cards and updated letterhead printed if you intend to do the occasional trip there. This can take a bit longer, but once again you can probably save a lot of money by outsourcing to the design and print work overseas. In the case of New Zealand, our experience has been that this is both cheaper and faster  as well as having fewer mistakes than even using local design and print companies which is a bit sad.

For design work, assuming you are bit more hands on you can try elance and for printing I have had a good experience (although the paper weight is a little thinner for the finished product) with Print100 based in Hong Kong. They can courier world wide or deliver to your hotel – unless you are quite familiar with Hong Kong or speak Cantonese I would suggest pickup in person may be a bit challenging.

Firstly, its important not to get caught up in all the hype around the so called “Cloud”, and recognize that the Google Offering isn’t as comprehensive as many common stand-alone email servers such as Microsoft Exchange. There are a number of features which don’t work quite as expected, are still in Beta (pre-release) form or simply haven’t been implemented as yet in Google Apps at all.

What switching to Google Apps does achieve however, is to effectively outsource the need to maintain and provide the infrastructure for email within your own organization. When also considering that Microsoft Outlook is no longer required on every desktop, and a very basic word processor and Intranet tools are also provided with Google Apps – it can be quite easy to build up a positive business case showing overall savings for your organization.

Another big plus is the generous amount of storage space provided for each user (currently 25 GB) to store their email, compared with what most organizations are able to offer their users on an internally offered Exchange email server. Usually this generates the need for large amounts of backup capacity, which quickly becomes very expensive and complicated to manage with many users with large email in-boxes. You also have to ask how limiting in-box size to a few GB per user works with legislation that requires historical business information (which email can be considered) to be kept for 3-5 years – Google’s generous storage for the most part quietly solves this compliance issue.

So lets say you make the decision to go ahead and migrate – how difficult actually is this process? The first challenge you are likely to have is actually signing up for the service. It seems like you must have a Google account set up with an email different from the domain you plan to migrate in order to create your Google mail domain. This avoids the chicken and egg scenario – but is confusing to say the least.

Once you have accounts set up, Google apps have a number of migration tools allowing you to move email from your existing email server using IMAP protocol. This works ok, but typically won’t migrate 100% of email for 100% of your users successfully, with simple things like exchange in-box rules, large files or folders named with atypical characters such as “/” derailing the process.

Once your initial migration is kicked off, you can then configure individual Google Accounts to stay “up to date” by retrieving any emails arriving to exchange after your IMAP migration completes. This does require logging into each newly created account in google to set up – kind of a pain if you have a large number of users though. In our even with POP and IMAP running some email couldn’t be brought across and we had to do this manually from each PC using that user’s Outlook account. POP and IMAP also won’t migrate email stored locally on each computer in an outlook PST file – this too must be manually migrated on each user’s desktop.

Once you have mail migrated across you can make changes to DNS, per the instructions on google mail to ensure all new mail now gets delivered to google instead of your old server. This does require a bit of mucking around, which can be problematic if your registrar doesn’t give you full control of things like MX records. This proved to be a problem for us for our New Zealand domains hosted at domainz.co.nz who provided very limited DNS control only and no support after hours or the weekend – so we ended up migrating our domains to a different registrar to resolve these issues, which unfortunately can’t easily be tested in advance as with IMAP and POP.

Feature wise there are a few things missing from Google, and the online help whilst being voluminous is often difficult to navigate. This is a  particular problem where there are differences between GMail and Google Apps and the help doesn’t seem to clearly differentiate between the two. Also, often help refers to a feature which doesn’t appear to be there – usually this is a result of omitting instructions to turn on “Labs” or enable features from the manage this domain console. Google often takes up to 30 minutes to enable a feature once it is turned on, so it can sometimes be hard to know if you have been successful in configuring something.

There are quite a few helper applications available for Google to help solving some of the other problems that corporates are likely to encounter although not always easy to find. It does seem as though Google is not very coordinated in its approach, with many different employees posting help and solutions independently? Two of these are the Mobile Apps and Google Apps Directory Sync which should help mobile devices receive “push mail”/ synchronize calendars etc and synchronize user passwords between corporate domain and google apps. Both of these tools require a bit of experimentation to make work – and we found the built in Active Sync utility on windows mobile actually worked better in the case of the former.

Issues which are of particular concern for most heavy corporate email users we have found to date include:

• Lack of support for email sub-folders within the Google web interface. If you have a large number of nested sub-folders in your exchange account these are effectively flattened into a single level making sub folders near un-usable in Google Mail. You can get around this by continuing to use Outlook on local client computers to access Google via the Google App Sync tool for windows where folders are rendered correctly.
• The global address list listing all your colleague’s email addresses and details isn’t available out of the box. There is a workaround involving downloading the list, sharing it on your network and hacking every client machine’s registry to bring it into outlook – but it is not kept up to date automatically and quite a hassle to get working.
• Giving other user’s access to your email, contacts and calendar is still problematic. This can be enabled within the user’s settings, but in our experience it only worked properly with email with calendars and contacts not being available or shared as expected.
• Although Google mail allows the use of multiple domains (in our case aviation.co.nz, aviationassessment.co.uk, aspeq.com, aslexam.com etc) and set up aliases such as sean.davidson or seand or just sean to receive emails across all those domains – it is an all or nothing proposition. You can’t have email for info@aviation.co.nz and info@aspeq.com go to two different accounts, although we worked around this with a rule to forward email.

Over time we expect a lot of these problems to be fixed, and in our case we think the benefit of being able to decomission exchange, free up a lot of server and backup storage space and infrastructure – as well as not having to maintain Exchange make the change more than worth it. Google Apps also has good spam detection, so we are able to save on the complexity and costs of an additional 3rd party spam filter for Exchange.

At $50 USD per user, that Google also works out cheaper than just buying the licenses for Microsoft Exchange and outlook, and upgrading every three years – not to mention freeing up our Information Services team to do other more strategic stuff.

SaaS or “Software as a Service” on the other hand can be simply described as the practice of renting out software which is usually accessed remotely via the internet rather bought as a “shrink wrap” product in the traditional way. With web user interface technology evolving into something more capable along with decent speed internet connections being available to most businesses these days – SaaS in my opinion is about to substantially change (and potentially already has) many organizations’ approach to information technology.

SaaS removes the need for an organization to buy software and infrastructure to run it on, as well as maintain in-house or contracted on-site capability to install, maintain and upgrade it every few years. Businesses can usually just turn on the software by subscribing online, then using it via a web browser. Upgrades just happen, and there is no need to spend any money on servers or related infrastructure or integration with other systems as this is all included.

From a pricing perspective there are also some interesting effects. Usually with SaaS offerings organizations just pay for what they use functionally or by the number of transactions – but all benefit from an enterprise level architecture and technical team supporting the software no matter what the size. This means that a small organization potentially gets the same level of technical support, redundancy and backup as a large one – for a price that reflects usage rather than the cost of high end equipment. SaaS can be a real equalizer for a small business trying to carve a niche against a bigger player.

From a SaaS services provider’s perspective, the service they provide can (if designed appropriately) be available worldwide from day one as well. This means that a small New Zealand provider has the potential to disrupt a much larger US based provider, and potentially take advantage of lower cost labour locally but still target larger markets. It is much harder to do this with a traditional product led approach which requires distributors, and a larger commitment vs the free trial and/or monthly based billing offered by SaaS providers.

So what does this mean for the average small start-up or run from home type business? Effectively it means that for a small monthly outlay, they can have most of what the bigger players have in terms of technology for a potentially smaller monthly outgoing. A lot of these SaaS applications are also integrated together out of the box – this means it is even possible to build up a kind of basic ERP system usually only able to be afforded by large organizations.

It turns out New Zealand actually has quite a few budding SaaS providers and with a closer look it is easy to see the potential for combining these together to great effect in a small or not so small business – established or in start-up mode.

Imagine a virtual, serviced or home office – the only real requirement is a PC (preferably a laptop), a SIP based IP Phone (those from Linksys works well) and some sort of Internet connection. You should then be able to put together a business with all the usual tools using service offerings with a monthly fee lower than the comparable off the shelf product from some of the following providers – and I am sure there are others.

2Talk – offers phone lines and local numbers over the internet. Imagine an 04 wellington based number that rings on your laptop or SIP phone anywhere you are and cheaper than the equivalent fixed line offering, particularly if you can unbundle your internet and phone services.

Xero – Handle all your accounting online via your web browser, integrating with your bank for reconciliation and even allowing external advisers to get involved without having to visit you in person or pick up bundles of paperwork.

Google Apps – for a small annual per user fee, you get enterprise class email and a very basic set of word processing, intranet creation and file storage tools. The big saving here is avoiding having to buy an expensive Microsoft office licence (usually the one containing Outlook mail client) for each staff member as well as all the drama, and expenses associated with running your own mail server infrastructure.

It comes with pretty good spam filtering as well, and the word processing tool allows more than one person at a time to edit the same document, although only with very basic features compared to the likes of Microsoft word. Microsoft is offering something similar, which I haven’t had an opportunity to try but does look to be a little more expensive at first glance.

For staff performance management and payroll management there are also quite a few decent offerings some of which integrate with Xero above including Sonar6 and Smart payroll which might be useful if you have a lot of staff to manage. Other interesting tools in areas such as compliance via mangolive and workflow and invoicing products for those charging by the hour like workflowmax .

There are also a few CRM type tools out there such as SugarCRM which are worth a look, but can be a little expensive compared to the New Zealand equivalents – but invaluable if you have a large opportunity pipeline to manage. In the medium term I’m also hoping to add online regulatory and professional assessment to the list, via the company I currently work for Aspeq – but for now watch this space.

Suffice to say, before you run down to your local software shop and buy a bunch of shrink wrapped products for your business – its worth looking at what is available “for rent” online. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised at what they can do, how they work together, and the absolute lack of requirement for an army of in-house IT staff and expensive infrastructure.

Unlike many larger companies with similar technical responsibilities, Aspeq has an IT team of only six people in total. These people are responsible for keeping a network infrastructure not totally dissimilar to an airline (40+ offices) up and running, and also developing and maintaining several quite complex line of business applications.

Being in the business of regulatory assessment – the fees chargeable to our customers (typically those in flight training, under taking builder licensing or transportation licensing) are often set by the government and for the most part are much lower than equivalent unregulated industry assessment charges. So in simple terms, the amount we are able to spend in order to deliver what are often complex technical assessments is much lower than comparable private industry focused assessment providers like Prometric.

This reality means that by necessity we have to get a lot more “bang for our buck” and can’t just go out and buy all the latest development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services. Instead we have a blend of commercial tools (like the lower cost Visual Studio Professional Edition) and open source tools and libraries. Surprisingly this isn’t all bad – in fact in many cases it turns out to be quite the opposite.

For project management, testing and source code control (which allows us to keep track of different versions of software we write as we write it) we use open source solutions Redmine, NUnit and Subversion respectively. Redmine provides many of the features that the more expensive VS Team Services would provide, and NUnit is generally considered to be at least as good if not better than the less mature Microsoft unit testing equivalent. From a source control point of view, Subversion is multi-platform and certainly more reliable than the Microsoft stable Visual Source Safe.

From an architectural and staffing perspective, we have also gained some advantages by using open source libraries. Although we are in effect a “Microsoft Shop” using Microsoft technologies for software development,  my personal view is that often the best Microsoft developers come from the competing J2EE technology background.  J2EE developers are used to doing things “the hard way” rather than using wizards and accelerators prevalent in the Microsoft tool suite – and in my experience they actually understand what is “under the hood” a lot better than those who haven’t had to code things from scratch.

The architecture we have chosen as a result of the J2EE influence of some of our development team is based on Microsoft’s MVC (Model View Controller), which whilst new to Microsoft has been successfully used by other platforms such as Mac, J2EE for some time.  We’ve also chosen to use an open source ORM (allows us to get information easily to and from the database in “object oriented” form) technology called nHibernate – another port from the J2EE environment.

Using nHibernate and a spin-off technology called fluent nHibernate has allowed us to almost entirely focus on designing and building the application – with the database and plumbing to access it all taken care of automatically via set conventions. The time saving concept is that of “convention over configuration” and is used in popular rapid application development environments like Ruby on Rails.

The irony of this, is that Microsoft has recently released a technology called “LINQ to Entity” which seems likely to provide most of this functionality in several years time. At the present time it currently requires extensive configuration and so is considerably less productive than the open source equivalent.  This means using fluent nHibernate has already provided some productivity advantage over the equivalent commercial offering.

On the downside, we have found some of the open source libraries to be a little bit buggy or incompatible with each other. Originally we looked at using the S#arp Architecture which combines together things like Fluent nHibernate, xVal (for client side validation) and Castle Windsor and Microsoft’s MVC. This was an ideal combination and probably something that Microsoft will be likely to deliver in their upcoming .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 release – but otherwise not available as yet.

Unfortunately, the S#arp architecture was built on beta versions of the previously mentioned open source libraries and simply stops working when libraries were updated to production releases. So in the end we had to build our own framework based on these technologies, although being open source we were able to use re-use much of the open source S#arp architecture code to do this. This has increased our initial effort getting the project underway quite considerably, but enables us to manage risks associated with open source library changes or incompatibilities more easily.

On top of these technologies we are also employing a test driven development approach, with 3 week delivery sprints culminating in a demonstration to our business users which we have found to be more effective that attempting to get them to understand detailed requirements documents. The application we are building (a redevelopment of an existing application developed by external software companies for us) is also tested each time developers check in modifications by using Cruise Control to automatically run unit tests, and alert all of our developers if any tests fail substantially increasing reliability.

So what is the end effect of all of these technology choices and approaches? On the down-side, using MVC and nHibernate requires more experienced developers staff – “property assignment” programmers just aren’t up to it. MVC also takes more time to get set up, and limits what can be easily achieved within a user interface compared to Microsoft’s Forms approach. The stability  and currency of open source libraries also needs to be monitored with care and has potential to derail a project schedule if not managed.

On the plus side, the application we are re-developing is considerably more testable in an automated way than its predecessor.  This means it is more reliable and that testing cycles for updates are much shorter than ongoing development. The choice to bring development in-house and into a single project rather than a series of outsourced enhancements , use an agile development approach and a more product ready architecture has also led to a reduction in overall costs to one third of previous application development costs.

The verdict – open source development can a higher level of technical skill and and risk, but if managed carefully can lead to substantial cost reductions and increased productivity for in-house software development projects.

The company I now work for (Aspeq Limited) specializes in regulatory assessment and is expanding internationally and at the same time moving towards being in many respects what most would consider a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider. This is on top of its long established business focused on management of the people facilities used to run exams. In a nutshell if you are a pilot or aircraft engineer in Australia, New Zealand or possibly in India, China, Macau or further afield – you’ve probably sat one of our exams or assessments.

Being a relatively small but focused company, there are a total of only six technical staff myself included (a big change from managing a 350 person ICT services company in Hong Kong and China for me) and a fairly modest technology budget. Coupled with this the team is involved with the support of over 45 permanent and mobile exam delivery centers and custom software development of two fairly major line of business applications as well as the support of earlier versions of the application and company infrastructure.

As you can probably imagine this drives a strong need to innovate and control spending – whilst at the same time ensuring an environment very similar to that of an Airline with scheduled exam sessions and online booking requiring near 24/7 operational availability. This continues to be an ongoing challenge in terms of ensuring that technical resources are not consumed by routine maintenance (and cost management) and instead are focused on delivering innovation to the business and in turn effecting a positive outcome on overall topline revenue or business productivity.

So how do we achieve all this with the limited resources we have and still have time for software development? In a nutshell we have a strategic approach of in-sourcing the strategic items (line of business application development), standardizing all of our systems and outsourcing the commodity type services like email. Implementation of this strategy remains a work in progress, but to date it looks something like this on the infrastructure (maintenance):

• Standardization on Dell PC/Laptop hardware with next business day onsite warranty, with a standard desktop image automatically loaded by CDROM – we no longer need to ship equipment back to our HQ, fix it, image it and ship it back + keep spares
• Reduced internet costs/increased reliability by connecting our head offices in Australia and New Zealand directly by cable to the Verizon Canberra NIC and I-Serve ISP in the same buildings respectively.
• Implementation of open source systems monitoring system (Nagios) and SaaS based Siteuptime.com (for customer facing systems) to page us via SMS when key infrastructure has a problem replacing an expensive and difficult to use proprietary system.
• Standardization of network infrastructure and unification of New Zealand and Australia networks with Australia head office acting as a hub, New Zealand head-office as a backup hub connecting over the internet via secure VPN to keep the costs low. This includes an IP based telephone system allowing us to for example make a call between our Perth Office and Lower Hutt office without incurring any telephone charges.
• When buying hardware we no longer buy “bleeding edge” – particularly when it comes to servers. For our purposes a $4000 NZD 1U Intel server with mirrored disks is fine and probably over spec’d – let alone the fully redundant HP Monsters we were buying previously at $20,000+ each.
• We also previously had a lot of duplicated infrastructure across the Tasman – particularly with two unconnected instances of Exchange Email Server. This has been consolidated into a single instance running in New Zealand where the bulk of our staff are, with Australian staff accessing it via the VPN. With Outlook Cached mode this works well – and as any Exchange Admin can tell you reduces a lot of effort for the IT team as we now only have one Exchange and a unified Directory across all of our offices – not to mention our Australian and New Zealand offices being able to share calendars…  next step is migration of all users to Google Apps to save on office license costs, and reduce our TCO for email.
• Implemented a free helpdesk and asset inventory system called spice-works – it doesn’t quite have all the queue management functionality we’d like but is close enough and allows us to track technology requests – and is now also been used extensively by the rest of the business to track customer requests and issues.
• Developed a mobile exam centre model based on Laptop computers with a wireless 3G router packed up into rock concert style padded transportation “Coffins”. Taking a page from my time at Getronics, these are shipped around New Zealand by a 3rd Party logistics provider as Dell does with its warranty parts program. This means that Aspeq doesn’t need to hire permanent facilities and establish permanent network connections and cabling and results in much higher utilization – and without the need to pay travel expenses for staff to move laptops around.

So we now have a network that is pretty standard, utilizes low cost VPN based connectivity and is centralized rather than duplicating every thing in each new country we operate in. Most of the facilities (including telephone) are also available via VPN on the road or home for our users. To cap it all off, the network essentially runs itself letting us know via an SMS page on our mobile phones if there is an upcoming problem (low disk space etc) or an outage.

But most of all, these cost savings allow us to move the focus of our IT spend from just keeping things going (cost management) to actually innovating with IT. Next week I’ll blog a little bit on what we are doing in that space with a focus on applications development and some of the open source components, and project management tools which are in some cases better than that offered by Microsoft – and a lot cheaper.

A typical website would usually tell a story about someone quitting their job and making thousands of dollars by simply working a couple of hours a day – then for a cost of only $X they will share the method of doing this with you. This is usually backed up by free ebook type offer “for a limited time” (although I surmise not that limited due to the static HTML nature of the site) and pictures and endorsements from fictitious happy customers usually clutching a cheque. As expected these same “happy customers” turn up on other sites with different names attached to the same picture.

Anyway, the gist of the “secret” is to sell some sort of ebook on one of the following needy type subjects:

• How to lose weight
• How to get rich quick

Or similar other topics. The books are usually very short in nature with a lot of obvious stuff in it. In the case of loosing weight, some sort of dieting secret method, and in the case of getting rich quick how make the site with the ebook, or to make money on the difference between cost to advertise on google, and the cost of someone clicking through on another Google or similar link on your site. Essentially you build a site with a bit of content (which hopefully) you can sell, and make some money on the advertising.

How much money, well not much unless you are prepared to put some real useful content on your site and spend a lot of time optimizing for search engines. I did a bit of a test and put together a site http://www.looseweighthowto.com following these principles, and being probably a lot more knowledgable on page ranking and search optimization actually made about $3 USD a month with essentially no content and a lot of links. This plays on the weight loss, and misspelling to get cheap Google referrals, referring onto other diet, weight loss program sites and an external BMI calculator – about an hours work to build.

The links are included in javascript rather than typical href type links so Google hopefully (although it is pretty sophisticated so who knows for sure) can’t see the pages are basically just a list of links to other affiliate type sites.

In contrast my wife has her own cooking site in chinese ( Jamies Rules ) with geniune content and gets over 400 visitors a day and has recently added some amazon links – so it will be interesting to see how the performance compares to my experimental “snake oil” weight loss site over time. Anyway it all comes back to what we always suspected – the only way to make a lot of money on the internet without resorting to something more tangible like selling flights, books or cd’s is probably pornography related.

The challenge in our company application’s case being that some of the components shipped with it don’t come with 64 bit versions which causes some rather cryptic “BadImageFormat” type errors. In theory, recompiling the solution, but configuring the output for 32bit only instead of any CPU in the solution build properties should fix the problem – in our case however this turned out to be a bit of a problem due to a large number of sub projects with customized build output directories. Further confusing the matter was duplicate build outputs of different types in different directories because of a poor solution configuration by the former developers.

It turns out however there is an easy way to fudge this without changing the solution build output options within IIS7 – set the “enable 32 bit applications” option to true within the related web application pool in IIS 7. This runs the application in WOW64 bit mode and will at least get you up and running for development – in my view the jury is still out on running a 32 bit web application in WOW64 32 bit compatibility box.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story, some of the build output directories had hard coded references to sgen.exe in the post build event command line. Two problems here – Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t ship with this utility and you need to copy it from Visual Studio 2005/8 onto your machine unless you have upgraded – apparently the file was missed by Microsoft. The second issue is that on a 64 bit machine the default “c:\program files” becomes “c:\program files (x86)” so you need to use ($DevEnv) compiler variable instead of any hardcoding of directories to find sgen.exe . Probably something you should do anyway as it is pure folly to assume a fixed “c:\program…” directory structure in your build.

A bit of tweaking of the VMWare servers on the machine, firewall settings and the application ran. Although not a lot of documentation on the web currently on these issues so I suspect there aren’t many users of Visual Studio with large projects running on 64 bit development machines (as opposed to servers) as yet.

Firstly, ADSL just doesn’t cut the mustard – especially if you live in a rural area as I do and are a long way from the exchange. In New Zealand, about the best you can expect is in the region of 4mb, assuming you live right next to your local telephone exchange. Its also expensive, with monthly caps or charges for additional bandwith. With the likes of Apple TV (recently enabled for New Zealand) movie download the standard 1GB starter package offered by most local Telco’s here doesn’t go far.

Fortunately there are a few alternatives based on radio or other wireless technologies. In my case I have a line of sight spread spectrum (side-stepping licensing issues) based radio link to a transmitter located over 10 km away based on technology from Trango Wireless. This provides up to 10Mbit which is better than the typical ADSL link that is provided by most telco’s in New Zealand built up areas. ADSL2 is apparently on the way in the bigger cities though.

Couple this with a low cost SIP based IP Phone from webvoize (About $80 SGD at Sim Lim, Singapore and less and half the price of an equivalent linksys supura IP phone) and a SIP account with an internet based telephony provider and things start to get really interesting. Although its early days yet, and I am still evaluating the reliability of SIP based phone for home use – so far it has been working well and I’ve been able to set up phone numbers for both Masterton and Wellington, effectively bypassing any regional toll charges.

If this continues to prove reliable then I am considering cancelling my telephone account with the local telco altogether. This does beg the question what are the likes of Telstra or Telecom doing about this? So far it doesn’t seem like a lot – they are still fairly tied to the phone line and to a certain extent holding New Zealand customers hostage by pricing in such a way that there really isn’t much benefit to having only an ADSL connection without the traditional phone line connection that comes with it.

With SIP as a unifying protocol standard, the next 12-24 months should be interesting with the likes of smaller New Zealand companies 2talk (still a bit buggy in their UI, but getting there), FX Networks, and a few other ISP’s appearing to be gearing up for VOIP. Propriety protocols like skype or VOIP provided by Cisco will provide some interesting competition, but in the longer term I suspect the more open SIP based protocol, which is supported from open source PBX’s like Asterisk to trunking provided by the bigger commercial players will become more predominant.

Latest news reports also talk about New Zealanders leaving the country for Australia or other destinations at the highest rates in years with net immigration even or even negative when immigration to New Zealand from other countries is considered. Couple this with the fact that New Zealanders generally have a good education, fit the profile as “low cost europeans” given the low salary expectations (Tasmania Salaries are higher) , have a propensity to travel – and things don’t look that different from say the Philippines or Indonesian worker export conceptually.

Unlike lower skilled labour however, export of high skilled workers is probably not sustainable – certainly not when you consider that over 1 million kiwi’s live outside of New Zealand, and without paying New Zealand tax can still come back and retire collecting benefits. Conversely less spending power makes New Zealand a less attractive destination for those skilled workers who might want to immigrate there, instead possibly attracting those who would see it as a step up economics wise. If true this wouldn’t help national productivity, and the ability to keep education standards high.

Having said all that – New Zealand still seems to have a lot of innovation when compared to Hong Kong with many promising technology start-ups. One wonders if all those people potentially starting something in Hong Kong may find it easier to just collect a big salary packet at a role within one of the large financial institutions in Hong Kong instead? As far as I know there is no equivalent to the Wellington Cable Car funding pitch on the Hong Kong equivalent – another missed opportunity.

First some background. I recently bought a pre-paid 2G phone number from Three in Hong Kong promising the ability to make and receive international calls for personal use and as a backup for the company phone. Little did I know it would be next to useless when traveling, and that Three Mobile would be so inept at taking my money from me as usually large companies are pretty good a taking your money in exchange for services. The Saga goes something like this:

Charged up the account using card vouchers from 7Eleven in HK before flying to Singapore – so far so good, although the length of the promotional messages on the robotic “press 1, 2 etc”. Arrived Singapore, took a couple of calls from Hong Kong, then a quiet beep and 10 seconds later the call is disconnected presumably because the credit has run out. Then the fun begins.

First tried to re-charge the phone account using an extra pre-paid card and code number. Sorry can’t call out on the mobile to do this, so had to use my company mobile to call the designated number – only to be told my number doesn’t exist. It turns out you need to call a different Hong Kong number (charging my company phone for the call) for 2G vs 3G phones. From an IT perspective you have a unique key or ID in the form of a phone number so the need for two different phone numbers escapes me – but perhaps it is result of the ubiquitous “different department” excuse we hear from Hong Kong companies so often? More on this later.

Then it seems a password is required since I am not calling from the phone the pre-paid account is attached to since that phone can’t call out from Singapore any more. The only way to set the password is in fact to call out from the pre-paid account phone, so it can’t be set outside of Hong Kong with customer support unable to do this for you either. So recharging the credit using pre-paid cards purchased at 7-eleven is not an option outside of Hong Kong. Of course this took approximately an hour on the phone with three/hutch customer support to determine with the usual “sorry not my department, let me transfer you” , ” sorry I don’t know, please hold for 15 minutes while I find someone who may know”, “[recorded message] This months promotion at three is….” and “try this and call us back”.

I even tried asking for a small credit on my account so I can call the number in HK with my phone and re-charge it – but apparently Three’s customer policy is designed to frustrate, inflexible and cost three a lot more in time. Not to mention their helpdesk staff have no initiative or familiarity with how their system even works whatsoever. Finally it was suggested I try to re-charge online via the the three website with my credit card, probably just to get me off the line so they could frustrate another customer.

Sounds easy right – wrong. Firstly having been involved with a lot of commercial website implementations http://www.three.com.hk – I can say this is a typical IT implementation where the end user or even intended purpose of the site hasn’t been considered. Primary example being normally you’d expect things like “recharge my phone”, “pay my bill” or sign up for x service to be easy to find, and probably on the home page. Unfortunately for this site I had to use the barely effective search function to find the re-charge.

Again departmentalism seems to be more important that reducing service calls or even inducing new customers or added value service purchase. Lots of missed opportunity here. Finally I locate the re-charge function after carefully searching on the 2G department of the site and failing to log on using several other logon and password prompt areas of the site – apparently the concept of single sign-on is not something these guys have heard of. Or perhaps the different departments just can’t work together to make it happen?

Unfortunately the re-charge function requires your phone number and a “check digit” – which you guessed it can only obtained by using a pre-paid card with >0 credit balance and in Hong Kong. Being in Singapore (the purpose of buying the pre-paid IDD card) and having 0 balance (the reason for re-charging) looks like I am out of luck. Fortunately for me, three also apparently doesn’t understand security, since I discover the check digit by simply trying all of the only 10 different possible combinations 0-9, getting the right number on my 5th try.

Great – now I can re-charge my phone and receive all those really important calls. Well actually no. Three utilizes a Singapore credit card company (why not Hong Kong?) which rejects the transaction with a message to call their support line. Credit to e-nets in Singapore for polite, speedy help however the issue turns out to be “sorry our servers are busy at this time, over capacity try later along with the staple catch-all helpdesk advice of “clear your browser cache”. About an hour later I get the transaction completed online recharging my phone using my credit card.

Or so I thought – it turns out after another long and frustrating call to Three Mobile Hong Kong helpdesk. My phone will be credited only after 2 business working days – my guess being it is a manual process behind the scenes. So the final solution – buy a Singtel mobile card and get up and running within 5 minutes with clear and concise instructions, advertising free.

So overall an expensive and poor experience with Hutchinson Telecom’s Three in Hong Kong. But from an IT perspective easily fixed I think. Here’s some ideas:

- Revamp the website using a commercial content management system with a low graphic mobile/pda version available. Structure navigation on customer needs, support and markets – not three’s internal business or department structure. Customer’s just want services and problems solved – they don’t care what department’s job it is. Oh and error messages should be helpful, not cryptic and written in poor grammar.

- The concept of 3G and 2G seperate businesses is a waste of time and confusing. Think functionality – for example Video and high bandwidth internet vs just a basic phone and approach it from this angle with a single phone number for support or re-charging and single sign-on on the website.

- Join some sort of pre-paid phone card alliance, so topup while travelling is possible or at least allow customers to give a credit card over the phone for instant top-up.

- Proper integration with a Hong Kong based online payment gateway which has adequate bandwidth to support the transaction, as well as the phone system backend – a 2 business working day wait in this day and age following credit card purchase online is kind of third world.

Sounds like it could be expensive to fix right? Actually probably not – by reducing support calls due to bad and inflexible systems as well as increased uptake of new subscribers plus added value services generated by a better online strategy – I think Hutchinson would come out on top. Not to mention keep its customers happy…