Person Career

London - Working in the cloud has never been more exciting. SambaStream, the newest company to ascend into the cloud, will be revealing SambaJAM, the first extensible collaborative content management platform in the cloud, at the IMS 2009 Exhibition. The exhibition takes place at the London Olympia from 1st to 3rd December and this will be the first chance for visitors to see the future of cloud content management.

With businesses increasingly working with distributed teams and external partners, the demand for secured information sharing services has never been greater. SambaJAM provides secure workspaces that allow teams to collaboratively create and share content such as documents, rich media, wikis and calendars. Built on a powerful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, SambaJAM brings together rich Web2.0 collaboration tools and social networking on top of a powerful, extendable ECM platform.

The three founders of the venture worked in Accenture Information Management Solutions as experts in collaboration software before pursuing SambaStream. “We were delivering complex and expensive collaboration solutions for clients that weren’t getting the adoption rates and ROIs promised,” states co-founder David Gildeh, “we took the lessons learned and produced SambaJAM. No more complex roll-outs and an AJAX user interface that ensures users easily pick up the application and actually save time using it”.

So what makes SambaJAM so different from all the other cloud start-ups fighting for a stake in the collaboration market? “You can build bespoke custom solutions on top of SambaJAM exactly the same way as an on-premise solution” says co-founder Alessandro Giannone. “Customers get the rapid deployment and cost savings of using a cloud solution, without losing the extensibility and customization of an on-premise solution”.

This would allow customers to quickly roll out SambaJAM for immediate business benefits, but easily extend the platform as their business requires to provide a powerful alternative to more expensive and complex solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint.

After a year of passion, ingenuity and commitment, the three entrepreneurs are ready to create a storm in the clouds. As co-founder Clarence Sittampalam says “We hope to become the SalesForce.com of ECM in the cloud. The market is rapidly maturing and we are poised to capitalize on this with SambaJAM.”

SambaStream will be located at stand 283 at the IMS 2009 exhibition in London Olympia. To learn more about SambaJAM, please visit www.sambajam.com or contact us.

I just realised I never followed up on our trip to the US so thought it was about time I rectified that. Well as I mentioned on our blog while we were out there, going to the US was eye opening. The approachability of people out there, and the insights and the way they operate, puts the UK Entrepreneurship scene to a lot of shame!

One example of how approachable US Entrepreneurs are compared to the UK, is Gist.com founder T.A. McCann. Two days before we were due to fly out to Seattle, Clarence sent me a link to their site to show an interview they did showing their product. I'd never heard of them, but I thought the product looked cool, and when we saw they were in Seattle we thought why not get in touch? Within 10 minutes of emailing them, T.A. had emailed us back and we had a meeting arranged for the following Monday.

And just in case you thought he had nothing better to do than meet start-ups he'd never heard of from the UK, when we turned up, he was in the middle of a team meeting and had just received $6.75mil. in VC funding a couple of weeks before! This is a busy guy, and we really appreciated him taking the time to meet up with us, talk about what we were doing and give us some extremely useful advice.

T.A. wasn't a one off on our trip either. People out there really appreciate the importance of openness, helping each other out with good advice, and its something dearly missing from the UK start-up scene. In later blogs I'll mention so of the other great people we met on our trip.

As for Gist.com, he signed us up for the private Beta they're running, and its Great! Now that I have to start the very nerve-racking task of cold calling companies to get our product out there, I've found Gist is the perfect tool to give you all the information you need to do that! Once you send someone an email, they automatically get put into your list of contacts and when you click on their name, it aggregates - automatically - all the information about them on the web such as their Twitter account, Google searches, websites...it does what I would have to manually take 30-60 minutes to do properly so I can at least know a little about who I'm calling before I pick up the phone.

Make sure you definitely check out Gist.com, its getting some great buzz and is a truley useful tool for anyone that lives by networking. Maybe T.A. founded Gist.com for that reason, he obviously believes in the power of making new connections and his tool is all about helping people do just that!

This week myself, Ale and Clarence are in Seattle for the NetHope summit at the Microsoft Headquarters. Tomorrow we head to San Francisco to meet up with some entrepreneurs and other start-ups in our space to share our product, ideas and get feedback from some of the leaders in the SaaS/Collaboration space.

Myself and Clarence arrived on Saturday in Seattle and were fortunate enough to be introduced to Kabir Shahani from Appature and Ken Kamada from HELM Capital Management through my friend Sri who I worked with in Accenture before I left. We also met up with a very up-and-coming start-up called Gist on Monday morning.

All of the people we met have provided excellent advice and feedback on our start-up and have all been completely willing to sit down and spend time with us during our trip. For example Ken spent almost his entire Monday afternoon looking at SambaJam and advising us on our business direction. T.A. McCann from Gist didn't even know who we were until we emailed him out of the blue last Thursday, allowed us to come to their offices last minute just to say hi without any particular agenda. The next week in San Francisco looks to be the same with a few key people already lined up that have never heard about us before.

It has been humbling for us that so many successful and busy people have taken the time to talk to us and give us really useful advice, and after we have spent almost a year networking around the London start-up community, it is a HUGE difference in attitude. I have to say the advice and people we've met in the last 2 days have been far more approachable and helpful than much of the start-up community back in the UK.

I think this is a key to the success of start-ups here in the US, networking just happens, it is natural and people are open to it. Back in the UK, while we're getting better, I still feel we have a long way to go to match this attitude of openness and approachability that we have seen here the last few days.

What's also surprised us is that many of the entrepreneurs we've met, even in a recession, have started to make money simply selling "paper". They have all got sign-up and even up front cash from companies simply by prototyping an idea on paper before committing any funds to development until they get it right, and through the entire process treat their customers as partners, not clients to push a product on to. I think its hard for people to appreciate that people will pay money for good ideas on paper if they see sustainable value in it for them. It also allows start-ups like ourselves to boostrap our company without requiring huge VC funds to build a product that potentially no one will use in the end.

So far this trip has been well worth the time and money, and we have received some very positive feedback from potential partners we will start to work with collaboratively over the next few months. Next week we'll update you on how our trip to San Francisco goes.