Content Circles

Cardinal Venture Capital, a small Menlo Park venture capital firm (http://www.cardinalvc.com), recently decided to re-evaluate its IT needs and ended up generating significant savings by adopting Content Circles.

Cardinal was looking for a secure team collaboration and content management solution that was cost effective and simple to manage. Cardinal ended up selecting Content Circles because it allowed it to streamline its network, while maintaining complete security and allowing for easy team collaboration. The firm now maintains only one server – a Mac mini with Content Circles software running on it – for providing a secure, encrypted 24x7 file sharing and collaboration mechanism for all of its members without a VPN or firewall, and as a disaster protection solution.

In a thank you note to Content Circles, Cardinal’s Derek Blazensky praised Content Circles service saying, “Transitioning to Content Circles has transformed our small business, saving us at least $1500 per month in recurring costs and thousands more in server hardware, security software and other capital expenses. Not to mention that this system is easier to use and manage.”

We love to hear stories like this one - if Content Circles has helped your business, please let us know!

Last night I was notified by a customer that he wasn't able login into Content Circles. I immediately tried to login myself and found out that it was true. Our engineering folks then looked into the issue and found that our SSL certificate (for secure authentication of Content Circles users) expired yesterday. Our internet service provider did not inform us that it was expiring but it was completely our fault for not keeping track of the renewal date. We sincerely apologize to all of our customers for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Fortunately, Content Circles has the "work offline" mode which worked beautifully under the circumstance. When my client failed to login, it offered me the "work offline" option. I just had to type in my password and voila, I had access to all of my files. More importantly, I was able to connect with other people and work as if nothing went wrong, thanks to the power of Content Circles' hybrid cloud/p2p architecture! In essence, the system switched to a pure p2p mode (after authentication via re-confirming password) and allowed me to work while the cloud was down!!

This is our first major outage since we launched Content Circles in early 2009. Needless to say, I'm not happy about it at all. However, I'm very pleased the "work offline" mode worked as envisioned. Tommy Tam, one of our engineers, actually covered this feature of Content Circles in an earlier blog posting titled Outage in the cloud when Google and others were having outages. I re-read it today and I encourage you to read it as well.

In the meantime, rest assured we are working hard here to re-enable our "cloud" portion as quickly as possible.

Update 03/29/2010 12:25pm: Our SSL certificate has been renewed and we are back fully operational.

Two weeks ago, I attended IDC Directions 2010 event in Santa Clara. It was a very good event with many interesting presentations and panels. Frank Gens talk on cloud computing was particularly interesting as it relates to what we do at Content Circles. I thought I’d share some of Frank’s thoughts here.

First Frank re-iterated what he said last year about cloud computing still being “in the chasm” and that it still has ways to go before it will be widely adopted, especially by enterprises. I think we all agree with this but the most interesting parts of Frank’s presentation were IDC’s enterprise survey results that give a clear indication of what enterprises expect from cloud computing. Key results are summarized below:

Top 3 “benefits” of cloud/on-demand model:

• Pay only for what you use
• Easy/fast to deploy to end-users
• Monthly payments

Top 3 “challenges/issues” of the cloud/on-demand model:

• Security
• Availability
• Performance

Top 3 “services” expected of cloud service providers:

• Competitive pricing
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Option to move ‘cloud’ offerings back on premise

I was pleasantly surprised at these survey results because finally a reputed research firm such as IDC confirmed what was behind our thinking – in fact, we took a hybrid cloud/p2p approach to implementing Content Circles service to precisely address the 3 “challenges/issues” listed above! Of course, we provide the "benefits" and "services" listed above as well.

I was also enthused to see “option to move cloud offering back on premise” (or what Frank called a “private cloud”) as a key service expectation of enterprises going forward. Once again, we envisioned this requirement as well and built the “Content Circles Store-and-Forward Service” for on-premise enterprise deployment.

Frank went on to predict big rise in demand for “private cloud” offerings going forward starting in 2010. I think Frank is right and 2010 is going to be the year of the “private cloud”. What do you think?

Ever wonder where your data really goes and who has access to it in cloud-based applications? The reality is that you can never be sure. Take the recent fiasco with Microsoft, T-Mobile and the Sidekick data that evaporated out of the cloud (pun intended). This episode reminded me of the famous Abbott & Costello routine of Who's on First: a true example of the blind leading the willing.

On a more serious note however, cloud-based vendors want everyone to believe that their applications are bulletproof and secure. With all of the examples of identity theft and corporate data loss out there, few actually believe this fantasy. If you don't control your data, you don't really know what is being done with (to) it.

That's why we took a completely different path at Content Circles. We believe that the most reliable place for your data to be is under your control at all times. We use peer-to-peer technology to move data directly between members of a work group. We don't take our customer's data and upload it to a random cloud-based application that then in turn gets mirrored to some unknown number of sites around the world.

Customers don't have to pay for someone else's bandwidth or storage, because they simply use the resources that are already available. Content Circles customers don't need IT support because the application is incredibly easy to use. Don't take our word for it: read what our customers have to say.

Give Content Circles a try with our free Personal Use Edition.

What do you think?

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

Our customers keep telling us we got it right.

It's actually pretty simple. Don't pay to store your documents somewhere else; always control your own files.

The Vicious Cycle of Content Management (VCCM)

The economics and the capital structures of cloud-based content management solutions just don't make sense. If you have a cloud-based system, you have to pay someone to host your data. Server farms aren't free, no matter how cheap the costs of storage. The more people that use your system, the more you have to pay and the more you have to charge. You have to charge for storage overall, storage per user, bandwidth overall or bandwidth per user. Because the bottom line is you have a variable cost of goods that scales with usage. So the more content customers put on the system, the more they have to pay.

Your numbers have to look better to attract investors, but you have a high operating cost structure. Either you have to buy your own servers and bandwidth and incur high Capital Expense (CAPEX), or incur high variable costs for ever increasing server and bandwidth requirements as customer usage and content grows. Your business model is a VCCM.

Talk about value-based pricing. The value is in the size of the disk on the server? Actually, no.

For traditional ECM, here come the in-house servers, IT staff and Support

Want to run a sophisticated ECM on site? You had better have a large organization and a budget to match. Traditional ECM solutions can be great for enterprise organizations, but the costs and limitations can be serious impediments. In this case, you not only pay for licenses and ongoing maintenance of the software, but you have to buy the servers and hire the IT staff to deploy, maintain and support that software.

What if the content management solution doesn't store the files?

We love this. The Content Circles philosophy is very simple. We don't want your files. We provide customers the ability to share, collaborate, track and manage files that are already stored on their systems. We don't charge for storage because the files are already on your desktop. It's just that simple! We don't charge for bandwidth because you are already using your existing network.

Content Circles simply maintains an index or metadata that contains information on registered users, workgroups and the disposition of all files that are placed in and shared with the workgroup. We keep track of who has opened the files, edited files, and/or created new files, and who has been added to, or removed from a circle. With a layer of powerful security developed by experts with decades of content management experience, your files only go where you want them to go and nowhere else.

Yes, it really is a great idea! For customers, the files are dramatically more secure because they never go to a third party.

Redundancy can be smart, fast and efficient….or not.

You choose. Utilize a system that uses your existing network and existing disk storage, transmits files over your existing network. Every member of the workgroup has a circle that is always in sync and replicated. Someone goes offline, no problem. Up to date data can come from another workgroup member or from a store and forward server that operates as a member of the workgroup. If your laptop ever crashes, no problem. All of your files will magically re-appear when you login to Content Circles on your new laptop.

And what about our company financials?

Even the structure of our company is more efficient. Our value-add is the ability to offer all of this capability with a low overhead. Since we only track the metadata and never the actual files, our server load and IT costs to run Content Circles are an order of magnitude smaller than vendors who take, store and hold the files. This makes us extremely capital efficient and allows us to effectively compete and thrive even in this recession.

Do let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

When Content Circles was formed in 2007, our goal was to address some major gaps in the current state of Enterprise Content Management systems. In particular, these systems assume:

• ECM requires large expensive systems that are purchased, installed, and managed by central IT
• Users will adhere to a rigorous upload/download discipline for keeping the central repository up to date
• All users who need to collaborate on a project can access the central repository
• Users work primarily in the office and do not need remote access to their repository

The result of our efforts is Content Circles which was launched in January 2009. It is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) combined with a hosted web service in the cloud and provided as a subscription SaaS.
Content Circles enables:

• Collaboration in Circles where content is only shared with the specific members you have invited
• Uses P2P synchronization so no content is held in the cloud to further enhance content security
• Works across firewalls and cross platform so there are no barriers about who can participate
• Direct access to popular ECM systems including Microsoft Sharepoint, Xerox DocuShare, and Alfresco
• Online and Offline access to your content since you always have the latest copy synchronized to your desktop
• Automatic tracking and audibility of content so you know what everyone is working on in the Circle
• Instant messaging is integrated with the app so you don’t have to leave the tool to chat with other members

Everyone here was excited to see the announcement of Google Wave last week at the Google IO conference. Even though Google set out to redefine how email and instant messaging work, we find many similarities between Google Wave and Content Circles including:

• A Wave and a Circle are defined as a set of users working on a specific project who always need the latest state shared amongst all members
• Focus is on the workgroup and the work they need to complete rather than the constraints of a traditional ECM system
• Support for Mac and Windows based users
• Commenting and Instant messaging integrated with team collaboration around the documents
• Change tracking with the ability to track the history of project from the beginning to current day
• The results of collaboration in one Wave/Circle can be published to another
• We envision a rich ecosystem of extensions built on top of our APIs to expand the use of the system beyond the current implementation

The differences between our approaches include:

• Google Wave is a pure cloud / browser delivery whereas Content Circles is fog computing
• Google Wave has direct, character by character editing of shared documents by the multiple participants in the Wave
• Content Circles allows continued use of your desktop applications rather than having to move everything to the cloud and browser based interfaces
• Content Circles integrates with existing ECM systems to preserve corporate investments and allow access to historic content and ongoing projects
• Content Circles allows offline productivity since you always have your content with you and can synchronize updates when you are back online
• Content Circles is available today for production use

We look forward to helping users break out from the constraints of traditional systems and leverage the power of these innovative new systems like Content Circles and Google Wave to better address the needs of the modern workgroup. Together we can change the document collaboration world for the better. Catch the wave.

From nice-to-have to mission critical!

This is the ultimate challenge in the business software market for new solutions. ‘How do I model my customer base to both make my products unique, effective, affordable and desirable within a viral network’.

At Content Circles, we started with the idea that workgroup collaboration and content management happens today despite the available technology and not because of it.

Speed, agility, security, one-to-many and many-to-one relationships, the ability to add and delete people in a workgroup, low cost, TCO, ROI are all fundamental requirements that are limited by the artificial constraints of current enterprise systems. These systems are just not flexible enough in their ability to adapt to the needs of today’s distributed and mobile workforces.

We have cracked the code on all of these issues, and we are now seeing the viral expansion that comes from new users being exposed to new solutions and technology by trusted peers. An invitation to join an existing circle, brief experience on the ease of use, reliability and low cost of the solution, all lead our new members to quickly imagine new applications for Content Circles with completely fresh and unique use cases.

One such unanticipated new application is large file transfer. Although many of our customers are using Content Circles to share and collaborate on content as anticipated, many are just using it to send and receive large files as they find it easier and much more cost-effective than burning and shipping CDs and DVDs; maintaining and using FTP servers; or even using web-based file transfer services that are available today.

Another such unanticipated new application is secure file transfer. Many customers, especially CFOs and HR managers, are using Content Circles to send and receive highly sensitive files such as files with social security numbers in them. We are finding that many states have laws that require encryption of such files before they can be sent via email or other electronic means. The fact that Content Circles automatically encrypts all files and the fact that even those files are never stored on any computers other than the intended recipients' computers, makes it an ideal communication tool for these customers.

We would love to hear from you about how you are using Content Circles. So please let us know how you are using Content Circles in ways that we have not yet discovered.

Over seventeen months ago, we started Content Circles with a singular mission – To revolutionize the way people collaborate and manage content across companies.

It seemed silly to us that after spending millions of dollars setting up secure enterprise content management (ECM) systems, firms would provide nothing more than e-mail to their employees for collaboration with their extended teams. As we all know, e-mail is neither secure nor adequate for the purpose.

Addressing this extended team collaboration problem with a web-based content management solution, like many others have done recently, is fairly easy to do. However, we do not believe it is either economical or practical to ask any firm to entrust all of its documents, including confidential documents, to an outside service provider.

So, we chose a "distributed" content management approach to solve the extended team collaboration problem. Distributed content refers to documents that reside not only on enterprise servers, but also to documents which reside on individual computers within an enterprise and to documents that reside in other enterprises. Content Circles simply enables cross-company collaboration among trusted peers by providing access to distributed content in a controlled and auditable manner without ever having to store that content on its own servers!

The end result, as you are certain to experience, is a very easy to use, secure, scalable and cost-effective "Collaborative Content Management" solution that works the way you and your team members work – anytime, anywhere, right on your desktops! Please try it and you will start wondering how you ever got along without it.

I was making dinner tonight, getting down with a vegetable peeler and some thumping Techno (not necessarily a good combination) when - silence. Deep Mix Moscow Radio apparently forgot about Glasnost and my dance needs and went back behind the curtain, taking their internet stream with them. Reminding me yet again why it's a really dumb idea to depend on the Internet to deliver anything, consistently. I scouted the list of Techno internet radio stations and most were "not available now." I'm happy to report that I finally found a consistent stream (FG Underground, if you're interested) and dinner got taken care of, but like I said, foolish me, getting caught out on a cold night with no tunes.

Loss of streaming Techno while making dinner might not seem like a big deal, and it's not. But loss of access to my business content at a critical point of my day is simply a non-starter.

Maybe I still have some residual resentment at having had to do an in-depth analysis of Google Apps over the last few days, when a sane, objective glance at the concept is enough to convince me - DUMB IDEA! I love Google, I love to type in search words and have all sorts of surprising results come back. But there's no way I'm going to trust them to format, store, manage and deliver my business content. It's like trusting the US Postal Service to bring me my coffee in the morning - thanks, but that's way too important a task to mess around with. It's like trusting SuperCuts to give me a killer haircut right before that big date. It's like handing my bags to the official-looking woman at the airport in Bangkok and trusting she'll have them delivered to my hotel for me. Dumb Dumb Dumb.

And it's unnecessary. There are solutions already out there that millions of people use every day. Those solutions are not perfect by any means, but we believe our software will make a big improvement in the process. We do NOT think the right answer is "Start from scratch and change everything." I have a word for that approach and it begins with "D," which may not surprise you. People don't like change. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "If it's slightly broke and you expect me to change my ways to help fix it, then don't fix it." In almost every process that relies on people, change comes slowly, if at all.

We know that things can change, and change quickly. Work practices and attitudes can be radically altered by disruptive technologies such as the internet. But Google Apps isn't one of those disruptive technologies (unless I'm speaking personally, in which case it's definitely disrupted my week). Maybe in a few years, if Google brings the quality of the tools up to the then-current standard of Microsoft Office. Maybe if they somehow can guarantee uptime and accessibility under all circumstances. And most importantly, if they can deliver something extra on top that makes the whole deal so much better, faster, easier and cheaper than the alternatives. THEN, maybe, they'll get professionals to abandon their old tools and processes.

But we're not hanging our hat on that happening in the immediate future. Meanwhile we see a critical need TODAY to improve the way people collaborate on and share information that already exists on their hard disks or enterprise servers. Content they're creating using desktop applications, not Google Apps. Our goal is to solve this Here & Now problem with some smart applications that work with your Here & Now computing environment. Oh, and our apps are really handy for accessing your music files too...

In their book “The Starfish and the Spider” Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom highlight the differences between traditional enterprises (“spiders”: rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership) and the new breed of enterprises (“starfish”: distributed leadership and peer relationships of power). Peppered with great examples, it’s a fresh read – especially if you’ve already canned that new year’s resolution and are looking for a legit-looking tome to curl up in front of the fire with.