javivazquez at eBox

October has been a good month for records, our community is growing fast.

Last month, 163 users have enrolled in our forum, the main site for sharing ideas about the future of eBox Platform and getting free (as in beer) support.

eBox forum will reach 2.000 registered users before December. As of today, we are more than 1.900, from which 725 came in the last 6 months.

Directly from the stats section of the forum, 2009 October’s records:

• 163 new users registered. An impressive 21,6% growth compared to the last top: 134 in September.
• 184 new topics and 931 posts. 167 topics and 773 posts were the former highest, reached in May.

Another record is related to the number of downloads for the eBox 1.2 iso, more that 8.300 during October from the new Sourceforge repository.  Another 20% increase compared to September less than 7.000.

Worth to say that those downloads don’t take into account our under development unstable release eBox 1.3, only for installation through packages, neither eBox deployments from Ubuntu repositories.

Therefore, both new users registered in eBox forum and the number of downloads of our eBox 1.2 iso have grown ~20% in the last month, compared to the former one. It seems to point out we are in the right path.

Having a great product is not enough to make business, everyone who has run a company knows that. If they don’t see you, you don’t exist. Since our company web site showed up a couple of months ago, the number of qualified leads (potential qualified partners) has been growing up steadily.

Geographically, they are coming mainly from US and Spain, although they are other countries such as Italy and Brazil catching up fast. Surprisingly, A company from Mauritius has been the last one in filling up our “become a partner” form…

Having in mind the where the visits to our websites -both eBox Platform and eBox Technologies- come from, Germany is missing despite of being the third country in number of visitors, very close to US (first) and Spain (second). I am puzzled, why don’t we have any VAR or MSP from Germany knocking in our door yet?.

Anyway, things are going quite well. In the next few weeks we are going to make public the list with the first authorized eBox partners, both Service and Training, from countries such as US, Spain, Mexico or Singapur.

Having in mind than we just sign partners who show real commitment -say, those which are able to offer a superb quality service-, and the time we employ with them to define and develop their business plan with eBox, we should reach the number of 15-20 partners during the next 16 weeks.

Looking at the map and how (geographically) diverse is the people who approach us it’s really motivating. More partners and more diversity, more fun.

As one of the top ten finalists at Innovate! Europe, eBox is participating in a trade mission to Sillicon Valley.

Visiting venture capital (VC) funds is not only a way to share thoughts on the business strategy of our young company  -starting relationships that could eventually result in funding-, but also a nice way to see nice sport cars. Those at the parking lots of VC firms…

I am not keen on cars unless they are convertible, just because I love feeling  the wind. My preferences are bikes and public transport, as more eco-friendly transport means. However, sport cars are a good way to illustrate which stage eBox Technologies is currently in:

At eBox, we are already driving an impressive orange-green sport car, it’s called eBox Platform. But we do it slowly,  burning the fuel (seed funding) got last year at the lowest rate possible. Actually, as many entrepreneurs, half time we push it by ourselves to slow down the fuel consumption…

We currently drive eBox through a secondary road. It’s full of potholes and not many fuel stations seem to be in our way. Keep the burning rate low is mandatory while we not reach the highway, something we consider likely to happen in 4-5 months from now.

Once we reach the highway, it will be the right moment to fill our gas tank up, to be the fastest in the non speed limited highway of tech business.

The conversations started with VCs these days have that aim. Who wouldn’t like feeling the wind while driving fast an impressive orange-green convertible?

During the just on Wednesday finished Innovate! Europe hold in Zaragoza, we have enjoyed a couple of days with excellent and experienced people from the IT world, and also raise in our own confidence on eBox as a promising and attractive company.

Not by chance, eBox was selected within the top ten finalists among the >100 initial applicants and the 34 finalists that came to Zaragoza from the whole Europe. Moreover, our company was the only Spanish in that 10 most promising European start-ups group.

However, despite of the many interesting lessons and good advise I personally gathered, I first would like to share one not really that important, but that caught my attention and suggest me to continue with the posts dedicated (more or less intentionally) our foundations as a company. That was working from “home”, or teleworking.

This small lesson, it is referred to coordination among staff who works from anywhere, mostly not together. In our case, we are 11 eleven guys working mainly from Zaragoza, but actually: 2 are based in Ireland and the rest of us work very often from home or any other cities.

In my case, I like going to the office every day, but also I work at least 7-10 days each month from Vigo (my original city, in Galicia), Madrid, Barcelona or any other place I go to visit my family and friends, or just as a tourist. And I am probably one of the guys who are more often working from our HQ…

On the one hand, this situation is something we like and look for: eBox staff is encouraged to work from wherever they want and when they like to. We don’t have fixed time schedules or any obligation to go to the office. On the other hand, it raises some issues: it needs an extra effort to be well coordinated.

Reaching to the point, Marten Mickos pointed out on his talk at Innovate that 70% of his former company MySQL still works from home. 70% of 400 guys of from >40 cities worldwide, with different time zones and the like. And the 2 main things he cited to keep this working, IMO, were:

• Pick people who like working mainly alone, from home. Kind of lone wolfs.
• Reporting, reporting and reporting, with objectives clearly set for every single people in the company.

Here at eBox we rely on tickets (tasks, whatever) and wiki to keep high the coordination among us, being Redmine the  tool selected for it. Some people don’t like that much planning and being accountable for achieving objectives, but what’s more fair and efficient that let guys planning themselves as far as the global objectives of the company are reached?

In a company that pretends to be global by nature as it was MySQL, MySQL itself is the best example to follow regarding work organization.

Listening to one of the last podcast from Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, talks about the importance of a company’s vision.

To scape from the grandiosity of that “vision” word, in many minds exclusive for the big visionaries, Jensen Huang points out “perspective” as a better way to express the particular manner that anyone has to see the world, everyone has an own perspective about the world.

eBox’s perspective is to make eBox Platform globally the best tool for efficient administration of computer networks and to adapt its value offering according to the contexts and needs of each market through the partner network.

However, I would like to share with you another way to tell which our perspective is:

eBox Technologies and eBox platform desire to be for Linux in the server, what Canonical and Ubuntu have been for Linux in the desktop.

Say, to provide a wide set of well known free software server technologies, fully integrated and easy to install and manage through a few clicks: a GNU/Linux server directly out of the box.

That’s our perspective, probably big enough to deserve to be (also) our vision.