Enterprise Communications2pagerTalkingPointz Research

2Pager Freemium Research

by Dave Michels

logo-HEADER2Did you know ‘freemium’ isn’t in the dictionary? One of those words that most of us know and use, but there’s some ambiguity about what it means, though not so much within IT circles. Many associate Freemium with consumer services – the old loss leader trick. But it’s more than that. Freemium can be an effective business model. In telecom, Skype selling for $8B is a great example.

Free-based business models are not new. There’s actually four proven models. The four models are:

  • Cross Subsidy: Buy 3 rooms of carpet cleaning and get one room free
  • Third Party Pay: Someone else pays for the free service, usually associated with advertising. Google services, Facebook, television…
  • Gift Economy: People work for free to contribute and build communities. Bloggers, Wikipedia, etc.
  • Freemium: Base-level, usable, free service offered to establish relationships

There’s a tremendous amount of business-oriented freemium services. Evernote, Mailchimp, Twitter, Hangouts, LinkedIn, Fuze, Dropbox, Yammer, Microsoft BI, IBM Watson, etc. There’s a whole new emerging category of enterprise communications using freemium: Cisco Spark, Slack, ININ Collaborate, Hipchat, and many more.

Freemium works because of modern Internet Economics: A double-whammy of “Oh-My” with low cost Distribution and Production associated with digital goods and services. Freemium doesn’t work so well with physical goods.

TalkingPointz 2Pagers™ are 2 pages of  bullets on current topics in enterprise communications. You can access the first four 2Pagers here (that’s 8 pages of content!). There are two 2Pager flavors (so far): company and product.

2Pagers available now:

  • ALE (company 2Pager): The new Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise emerges, post Alcatel-Lucent spin-off
  • Cisco Spark (product 2Pager): Cisco is attempting to spark a change in enterprise collaboration
  • Surface Hub (product 2Pager): Microsoft has a big idea for conference rooms that is integrated with Skype4B
  • ShoreTel One (company 2Pager): ShoreTel’s intent to radically transform itself means changing its entire portfolio at One Time.

Turns out you can say a lot in 2 Pages. Download a TalkingPointz 2pager and check it out. If not completely satisfied, your money back.

Let me know what you think.