When the dot coms began selling back in the 1990s it was an expensive operation.  At AINEO, we paid $30-50 dollars a year to purchase each of our domains from (the monopoly called) Network Solutions.  Things do not seem to have changed much since then at NetSol. 

Five or six years ago a new kid came on the block.  A company named Godaddy offered domains for essentially $10 USD a year.  They offered the standard dot com, dot net, and dot org domains for that price.  If you buy one of their non-domain services (not recommended) along with the domain, you can get the domain for $1.99 in the first year.  These guys at Godaddy are marketing masters.

Where did Godaddy come from?  Godaddy was founded and is owned by Bob Parsons.  He is either a marketing whiz or has surrounded himself with a great marketing team.  Clearly, Mr. Parsons is a smart guy.  He has gone from nothing to number one in a few short years.  Mr. Parsons is no stranger to building a company.  In the past, he had a Bible software company called Parsons Technology.  He evidently sold that off to some business folks some time back before Godaddy.

Godaddy seems to be a great company.  They now have several thousand employees and are the best at what they do.  Their customer service is excellent.  Their staff seems to be mostly young college students in the Arizona area.  They are well trained and courteous (the folks at Comodo could use some help there) It is very nice to have native English speakers to service native English speakers.  A stark change for a customer service division in general which is usually outsourced to someone in the Philippines, India, or some other English speaking nation.

Every call that you make to them you are asked to do an online survey.  They are constantly tweaking their services and products and watching the market around them to be cost effective and sell volume.  Unfortunately, Godaddy has some weaknesses.  The glaring problems are

-the overall control panel is disjointed (along with their product offerings) and hard to navigate around for the average user

-they seem to nickel and dime you on every service.  Webhosting is inexpensive but you have to pay extra for email, mailing lists, etc (lots of etceteras)

-their system is so heavily customized that it isn’t really something you can migrate your data to easily from a more standard service such as Cpanel.  Another example is their SSL certificates are cheap, but don’t work if you want to use it with a mail server and smartphones, for example.  Verisign would work out of the box in this instance as every smartphone has Verisign verification built in.

-They have finally released a version of IMAP, but from our testing it only works on a Windows Machine, you cannot connect from any Mac via their IMAP

-Godaddy:s default settings are a bit illogical at times.  For example, when using their webmail, you have to go in and set the system to save your sent messages.  Save your sent messages?  Who wouldn’t want to save the messages they have sent when using webmail.
Overall, they are a pretty good service.  However, here is advice that would benefit them greatly.

Suggestions for Godaddy-

1) Lose the sleazy ‘sex sells’ advertising mentality.  We’re all tired of seeing busty women bouncing around in tee-shirts trying to sell domain names.  Further, Godaddy’s attempts to be controversial to get more attention (ie. Superbowl commercials) ; make Godaddy come across as cheap, unreliable, and unprofessional.  That is unfortunate misrepresentation of such a good company.

2) Now that you have the lion’s share of the domain market, focus on a system that is more focused on packages and services that peoples needs.  The incessant ‘how about this’ or ‘how about that’ when you place an order is a huge turn off for any good customer.

3) While you are rebranding, changing that dreadful logo might be a good idea as well.  The balding guy with the hair sticking up should probably be replaced.

In summary, our conclusion for Godaddy is to stick with them for domain name purchases only.  Their other services are a bit of a patch-work of technology and services that are not industry standard and don’t seem to work all that well together.  They are a great company and have excellent customer service.  Clearly they will continue to grow and develop their product/service lines.

Since early 2008, the media has been pelting everyone world-wide with questions about whether there was a recession or not.  Maybe, not enough stories or news to report?  Well, we thoroughly believe that champions are champions because of their training.  They set their minds to being successful and that is usually what happens.

Looking around Japan, there has been an obvious slowdown in the marketplace.  As of today, 11 Nov 08, the word on the street is the following companies have hiring freezes.

Microsoft Japan
KVH Telecom
SAP Japan
Accenture
Infosys
Savis

That’s just to name a few.  Then there have been those who have vaporized.  Such as NCC, or New City as it was called.  Completely gone and no longer in business.  Evidently, the economy is down or at least people are believing that.

It is sad to anyone struggle in business.  We must never forget, that what our company does affects our whole teams and our partners (clients) as well.  We must have good products and services that enhance our partners businesses.

Why are we so busy at AINEO?
It is supposed to be a bad economy.  Well, we have a saying at AINEO that “good people are always busy”.  We believe that “people who work hard and work smart will prosper”. This is because they are valued by their partners, suppliers, and even friends.
We are thankful to all our partners, those who

-entrust their day to day IT support to AINEO
-rely on AINEO for their groupware, messaging and website hosting
-the hundreds of telephone systems nationwide
-buy all those boxes from us!  We are amazed that those hundreds of thousands in hardware and software orders that flow through our warehouses each month.  It does seem to let up.  Working with AINEO must be an extra blessing in your business! 

As for the economy, it is almost like the media got what they wanted, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.  We are hoping the economy will turn up for us all very soon.  We say, keep your chin up, do the right thing with others in mind, and everything will work out well for you.

Thanks to everyone.  We honor you, our partners, and will continue to work hard for the respect we’ve earned, to keep your respect and trust.  As they say in GAMBARIMASHO!  (Let’s work hard).

In short, it takes a lot longer to write an email in English, and even more so in Japanese.  When using the iPhone touch keyboard there are a lot of errors in selecting the correct character.  We have seen other users on the units tapping one character at a time with their index fingers.  It reminds me of the fairy in the song Little Bunny Fufu.  Where as a BlackBerry user, you can quickly respond to emails on the run as you can thumb in your message very quickly.
The other very important area is security.  If one of your iPhone users loses their phone, good luck!  You have all that company data floating around for someone else to grab.  You should tell your users to set the 4-digit pin on their iPhones and set the system to wipe the memory after 5 missed password attempts.  But nothing beats the blackberry for it’s remote wipe. 

Even Windows Mobile 6, which supposedly remote data wipe does not unless you have a WinMobile 6.1 device.  When this vapourware really becomes existent then maybe windows mobile will be more of a competitor to the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

For doing business, it is a lot easier to lookup a phone number on a Blackberry by typing in S-M- by which time you have all the Smiths coming up on your display.  The iPhone works more like a Rolodex.  If you have a few thousand contacts, it take a while to flip through all the letter S entries.
For now, if you are thinking about mobility this is the AINEO recommendation.  If you are serious about email and security, then BlackBerry is the superior choice.  It is a lot more versatile for the business person.  Questions?  Contact us, any of our team would be happy to help.

August 2008, the first ShoreTel system was installed in Japan.  August brought to life the first live ShoreTel system installation in Japan for Japan.  This was a climax, but really more the beginning of bringing the world’s best IP Phone system to the world’s second largest economy (Japan is number 2 to the United States).

Since July 2003, AINEO had been looking for a system that combined simplicity with high-reliability and reasonable pricing.  ShoreTel was the solution to that missing product in the market.  We identified ShoreTel in late 2006 and began working with ShoreTel in 2007. 

Bringing system is not an easy task.  Menus have to be translated, system prompts have to be recorded, support systems have to be implemented, and gtting the systems connected to NTT’s PSTN (public switched telephone network) has to be localized.  In August 2008, with much help from the development team in ShoreTel’s development team the first system was installed in one of AINEO’s live facilities.

What makes ShoreTel so great is it’s features, simplicity, and pricing.  What used to be the realm of expensive PBX units from the traditional manufactures, has now been shrunk down to the size of small hub-type, rack mount ed switches.

Getting N + 1 redundancy is no longer a major, technically challenging, budget-blowing experience.  Several hundred IP phone users can be easily put into a system that takes 1 unit (1U) on a rack.  Getting users on IP phones or even just PC-based soft phones is no longer so difficult or expensive.  We’ll talk more about the user experience sometime soon.

We’ll be introducing ShoreTel to the Japan market 4th Quarter 2008.  Keep watching AINEO.com and we’ll keep you posted for when the systems will be available.

Coming soon to an office near you!

AINEO Secure is a suite of products and services designed to make IT life easier.  Secure is designed for people who want

-a network built by people with the experience and the policies to keep things running.
-good CS (customer service) when they need or have a questions about anything.
-reliable, up-to-date systems that never go down

We began plans for AINEO Secure in October 2007.  The AINEO team has spent 8 months and countless hours, selecting hardware and software, deciding on infrastructure (electrical) and data center locations, stocking parts and planning for DR (disaster recovery).  Our engineering team spent two months configuring, testing, and configuring systems again so that AINEO Secure systems would be the quickest, most reliable network available.

Why did we do all this?  We did it because companies are tired of IT and the chunk it takes out of their budgets.

We are very excited about AINEO Secure and look forward to helping you get the most out of the service.

Please let us know if you have any questions.  We are always happy to help.

Sincerely,
The AINEO Secure Team

AINEO is known for being BQF.  People like dealing with us because we are BQF.  There is a lot of negative sources in this world; the news, other folks in business, economic situations.  There are many people with many reasons to be negative.

AINEO is a positive force.  We are all about finding solutions to situations.  Of course, we are not a church or a counseling service so we don’t focus on people working out their hang-ups.  But for technology, our whole business has been 11 years of helping people with their technology hang ups.

It is very exciting as we have helped the major dot coms, airlines, financial institutions, banks, pharmaceutical firms, manufacturers, and many government organizations (to name a few) to fix their IT trouble in New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.  Not just Tokyo, but in 2007 we added close to 100 customers nationwide in Japan.

AINEO is all about solutions.  We’re not here to talk about how things used to be or whine about the trouble.  AINEO brings solutions and a positive outlook to any technology situation and many more people issues. 

One site, the world’s largest financial, purchased 3 companies and merged them together with a small core of their own people in Tokyo.  Of course, when you try to create one corporate culture out of four you are going to have some challenges.  AINEO brought 30 locations into 15 locations nationwide.  We worked with branch managers, international IT management, and the local executive board to bring it all together.  It was not easy but over the year of this first major AINEO project in 1996, we set the tone and set the standard.  We left the site with many friends that were asking us advice and even have asked us to help them as they have moved to other companies or higher phases in their careers.

In AINEO’s Tokyo office, we’ve got a positive, can do attitude.  One of our team greeted someone in the elevator.  That person from a company upstairs in our building commented, ‘you guys on the 7th floor are always so happy’.  Being positive rubs off.

Even the janitors of our floor of our Tokyo offices were affected in a positive light.  Of course, janitorial service can probably be a thankless job.  It started that way for the folks taking care of AINEO.  They were not exactly excited about their jobs.  However, after working with the AINEO team, our smiles, our happy greetings, our questions about how they were doing, all broke through.  Our cleaning folks said they started looking forward to cleaning our floor so that they could talk with the Tokyo AINEO team in the morning.

People that AINEO sees every day… happy to work with us!  Of course, we all need to be paid to grow in business, but the wonderful compliments of people working with our team every day are priceless.  Being positive certainly pays off. 

In general, the first websites were made in HTML and you tended to focus on presentation more than content.  It was always a pain to update as graphics and other elements would tend to go out of whack when you wanted to put up something new.  Then people would add “Flash” which gave movement and action to an otherwise static website.  Korea in 1999 was in love with Flash on websites.

The world has moved on to Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 is going away from website built on HTML files and concentrating more the content of a website.  AINEO.com has 50-100 visitors a day from every continent on the globe and over 80 countries.  The average visitor spends 5-7 minutes on our site.  It will become an online window into a new service into groupware called AINEO Secure in June.

With these things in mind, we were reminded of how important our website was. We are a big Microsoft shop.  Meaning, we support Microsoft applications and OS very well; Active Directory, Sharepoint, Exchange, ISA Firewalls, IIS.  We are very happy with Microsoft over the alternatives. Studies have shown that having a standard has brought down the overall price of software for all of us end-users.  Of course, Microsoft is not always easy to deal with as they are so big and not always the best choice (try MS CRM on that one).  However, our current website was built on Apache and LINUX in late 2006.

As we put a lot of effort into Microsoft, until recently we didn’t want to give up precious rack space (our previous data center was much smaller) to a web server.  We opted for using a web server in a US.  Unfortunately, the guys in the US migrated our site to a new server with a different build of PHP and MySQL.  They didn’t bother to tell us or give us any type of notice.  They ended up breaking our site (built on a content management system) and taking it down for 31 hours as we tried to figure out what they did.  Clearly, they were incompetent and should not be in business.  A letter to their president documenting the $2000 USD costs to fix their errors received no response even after two resends.  (He did respond to suggestions on how to improve their services weeks earlier). But if you have ever searched for a web host, you will see zillions of companies in the business.  Most of them should be out of business as they have no support policy, qualified personnel, or systems to properly support their customers.

With a relatively popular corporate website down for 31 hours and no one telling you what the problem was, it was a bit frustrating.  It was clear, our website has become an important part of the AINEO business.  As an IT service provider we could no longer entrust our image, our reputation, or our data to people with no sense of technical expertise.  With new services and a data privacy certification with have no patience with lost of broken databases.  We decided to bring our website into our own datacenter.

Best choice, we’ve ever made.  What did building our own web servers do for team AINEO?
-It gave our system engineers a chance to do more work on LINUX related servers. 
-Put servers in the hands of an engineering firm that already has close to 300 Active Directory (Windows Servers)
-Put our web server in what is currently the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable broadband network in the world.
-Got AINEO on a dedicated server that is serviced by AINEO SEs directly and is so fast it screams.
Moral to the story; if your website is important to you and especially if you are a corporate, please make sure
-you’ve got qualified (BQF) LINUX or Microsoft Engineers with a experience maintaining your equipment.  -they are committed to a service level agreement

Check out their website (is it professionally done and succinct?), their billing process, the way they answer the phone, and the way they set up your accounts.  If you see any sign of being unreliable, avoid those folks like the plague.

The corporate website is no longer an online brochure.  It is a communication window to customers and potential customers.  For AINEO Networks, it is so much more.

Thanks for stopping by!

Avaya communications has been in Japan since the 1990s.  Avaya was originally a division of AT&T called GBCS (Global Business Communications Systems).  GBCS was spun off with the Network Systems Division of AT&T (Central Office equipment) to become Lucent Technologies in 1995 (officially in 1996).  Avaya was again spun off from Lucent on 30 September 2000.

AT&T GBCS -> Lucent Technologies BCS -> Avaya Communications

AINEO Networks has people who have been trained on Avaya systems since 1994.  Working with the systems from the time when they were standard TDM switching (PBX) to the advent of voice over IP and IP PBX systems.  We started with the Definity and have moved on with the Prologix, IP Office, as well as the S8300 and S8700 series systems.

Avaya systems are excellent.  The products are well made, relatively easy to configure, and great to support.  Avaya is the best call center (customer care, contact center, ACD, whatever you want to call it) solution on the market.  This is especially true in Japan where the options have been Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, NEC, Fujitsu, and a number of other Japan-based technology firms.

In the Japanese market, NEC has done an excellent job catching up on making a good ACD.  Nortel’s Meridian and CS1000 systems are great as well.  The problem is Nortel seems to be losing momentum even though their Symposium skills-based ACD solution is just as good and in some ways better than Avaya.  According to the Nemertes Report, Avaya is the innovator.  However, Avaya has some issues in Japan.

There are some flip-flops in strategies.  For example, they introduced IP Office to the market, but within a year had pulled it.  This was not a surprise to us at AINEO (a similar thing had happened with a VoIP system they brought in from the UK).  Although we had been to training, we are used to this type of wishy-washy product introductions in the market and thankfully had not committed much resource to the IP Office product yet as we had anticipated the Avaya withdrawal.

The systems available are excellent, but they are also very expensive compared to other solutions.  There is also an overabundance of distributors usually bidding over a limited number of sites.  Avaya also does some direct sales as well, so this discourages distributors as Avaya is trying to do an indirect and a direct sales model (for very large sites) at the same time. This works in Nortel’s favor in Japan.  Although, Nortel does not have the new sales numbers of the past, they certainly have the largest user base in Japan.

For IP telephony in the multinational market, Avaya is losing big time to Cisco (see chart).  Cisco’s Call Manager has become popular with US investment banks and many other firms.  Cisco’s call center solution is pathetic compared to Avaya and Nortel Networks.  It has a way to go, but we expect with Cisco’s financial standing that will come soon enough.  The problem is that adding voice to a router is a ‘bolt-on’ solution.  IP Telephony should be designed as a telephone system from the beginning to get all the features and reliability of the telephone systems.  The street goes both ways as you see the traditional PBX suppliers (Avaya, Nortel, NEC, Siemens, Fujitsu, Panasonic) add ‘IP’ to their traditional TDM switching. 

A company in the US called Shoretel is the only system in the world we know of that has been designed as an IP telephone system from the beginning.  Evidently, Avaya are threatened by Shoretel as in sales training they tell their people that Shoretel is a private company and you can’t trust private firms.  Shoretel did an IPO in July 2007.  In the meantime, Avaya is no longer public traded as it has been bought out by a private equity group.  Does Avaya’s logic still hold true?

Who is buying Avaya in Japan?  Well, the answer is mostly non-financial multinationals and some Japanese telemarketers.  There are a few exceptions as some Avaya dealers have special relationships with power companies, trading companies, and so forth.  AINEO normally recommends Avaya as budgets allow and as appropriate to the users.  The financial firms have gone full boar with Cisco and an occasional Nortel Networks system sprinkled in.  Nortel has a huge installed based in Japan as they were the first PBX to Japan and went through all the localization pains early in the late 1980s.

Avaya systems are great.  AINEO is very committed with certified engineers, support for many sites, and many years of experience with the systems.  AINEO has engineers with a lot of experience we can put to work for our clients as we have engineers trained in Installation and Maintenance since 1994.  We actually also work with Nortel, NEC, and Cisco systems.  Avaya is the best choice for the call center, however it is not the most cost effective.

If you are looking for skills-based routing then the next step from Avaya is probably Nortel.  They have the largest installed base as a foreign manufacturer in Japan.  Even though AINEO has been the smallest distributor (this is quickly changing as our team is growing), we have continually won Nortel bids against much larger Japanese companies.  Our strength is that we are BQF, which is the main reason AINEO is selected.  People realize it is not just about selecting a platform.  It is about the people behind it and a 5-7 year relationship that starts with the install of the system.

There are many other choices for voice systems.  Unfortunately, there is not a perfect solution for any business.  Our strength is selecting the right system based on the business needs and budgets.  Please contact us (here)and one of our consultants would be happy to hear about your business and make an appropriate recommendation that suits your business and budget.