StartUp Beat

Communicado is a Unified Communications Management company that offers software to help businesses of various sizes manage their communications environments.  Its flagship product is its Streamline software.  Based in Santa Ana in Southern California, the company was founded in 2001 as SyncVoice by Kerry and Kevin Shih.  StartUp Beat connected with Kerry Shih, now Chief Strategist at Communicado, to find out more about the company.

SUB: What primary need does Communicado address?

Shih: Microsoft’s focus of current and future releases of Office on Unified Communications dotted the “I”, and IBM’s billion-dollar investment crossed the “T”.  Companies need the reduced human latency and improved process flows of Unified Communications, or UC, to compete.  Companies are looking to their trusted local Value Added Resellers (VARs) to implement Unified Communications for them because it’s a very complex melding of IP telephony and advanced collaboration applications.  They also want to minimize the risk of making this complex new technology mission critical by having VARs with UC expertise manage it for them.  Communicado Streamline allows VARs to remotely manage their customers’ Unified Communications infrastructure.

SUB: How do you make money?  What is your revenue model?

Shih: Communicado Streamline is Software as a Service sold by subscription.  Our revenue-share model allows resellers to move into high-margin Managed Services very quickly and without big capital expenditure.  As a result, adoption of Streamline by the channel is rapid and results in a recurring annuity revenue stream to Communicado.

SUB: How did the idea for the company come about?

Shih: Channel partners asked SyncVoice, the previous incarnation of Communicado that sold call accounting software to Telecommunications departments, to give them a platform for managing their customers’ ever-more-complex converged and unified communications environments.  We renamed the company Communicado to reflect the broader agenda of enabling real-time person-to-person communications.  Streamline combines what we’d learned managing more than 1,000 customer sites with the know-how and requirements of strategic partners to launch Communicado with Streamline as our flagship product.

SUB: How do customers use the service?

Shih: Our Value Added Reseller customers use Streamline to become Managed Service Providers to their customers.  Streamline’s flexibility allows management responsibilities for the end-user organization’s infrastructure to be fully outsourced or shared, depending on the end user’s abilities and preferences.  Advanced end user organizations can even use Streamline’s tools and operational workflows to manage their central and remote converged network environments themselves.

SUB: Who do you consider your competition?

Shih: Streamline competes with a set of products organizations integrate to provide the same functionality.  They might combine the Managed Services enablement of N-Able with two products from NetIQ that provide the ability to assess the network before deployment and a second to manage and troubleshoot the Quality of Service issues that bedevil IP telephony, then add a product from BMC that provides the ability to manage complex interdependent application environments.

SUB: How has the company been financed to this point?  Who are your investors?

Shih: SoftBank Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners invested $11.6 million in Series B financing into Communicado.

SUB: Who are your target customers, and how many do you currently have?