Give your Sales Team a break!

Give your sales team a break!

There are no rewards in sales for “trying hard” and yet perhaps unwittingly we seem to almost have a mental block when it comes to giving the sales team the things they really need to make their lives easier.

It’s almost as if we believe that it if it’s too easy for them, paying them commission would be unreasonable.

It will sound obvious when you write it down or read it, but in many companies we forget that actually we want it to be easy for the sales team to identify new opportunities, to differentiate our proposition, to handle and overcome objections and then to close highest margin deals and the longest contracts possible with little or no competition.

The best possible scenario is that we are paying commissions all the time to sales people who are confident in getting in front of the right people and closing the deals time after time, like “shelling peas”.

We don’t reward people for trying hard. We do reward them for delivering us margin, winning us new business and growing our market share.

Sounds like a no-brainer doesn’t it?

It doesn’t happen though. That’s not because marketing people are stupid or that the CEO is a fool or that the sales VP/Director hasn’t got a clue or even that the sales team are too dumb to demand it.

It’s simply that knowing exactly what is the sales team really need to be successful and being able to provide that to them consistently is something organisations have grown too busy, too complex and too “otherwise engaged” to organise.

So we do it.

It takes just four weeks to get the process going and our clients see benefits from the very first day.

So perhaps with the new Financial Year around the corner, it would make a lot of sense to check out what it is we do and how we could be helping your sales and marketing team to” shell a few more peas” a lot more easily next quarter?

Could do better! Top CIO reveals 5 key issues

If the definition of madness is continuing to do the same thing but expecting a different outcome, then perhaps now, as we start another business year, is a really good time to  review they way you’ve been tackling some of the classic sales and marketing challenges.

Things like:

• Breaking through and engaging the CIO
• De-Risking and Fast-tracking market, vertical or segment entry
• Identifying, addressing and protecting “sweet-spot” opportunities
• Reducing the sales-cycle
• Increasing deal value
• Creating competitor lock-out

A good place to start of course is by looking at what drives your customers and prospects.

To save you the time, we interviewed a top CIO and asked him to tell us candidly what he really wants from you.

You can find out what he has to say here.

Can white men sing the blues – or, can horizontal solutions be sold vertically?

Paul Bevan on why it’s important to understand your customer 

A series of articles from the consistently excellent Chris Skinner in the Financial Services Blog on product v solution, horizontal v vertical and understanding banking strategy got me thinking about the difference between marketing and selling a vertical solution, such as a mortgage processing application, and a horizontal offering such as an email system.

In marketing terms, identifying the segment and the ideal customer profile should be easy for the vertical solution. The challenge for horizontal solutions is to stop the marketing people jumping straight to a vertical segment before they have worked out what the problem that they are solving is; before they have described an ideal customer profile and before they discover what segments those customers are in.

The next challenge is to stop marketing “verticalising” some inherently horizontal solution by adding specific features or functionality. You immediately add cost, and not necessarily value, and restrict your ability to replicate sales widely across all segments because you should already know that customers have the same issues across multiple verticals.

What is needed for both vertical and horizontal solutions is a clear understanding of the business drivers and external forces affecting the vertical, and the customer, you are selling into. I’m quite sure that Google didn’t just turn up at BBVA HQ and say “have I got the enterprise solution for you!” They would have taken time to understand the absolute need to reduce costs in the banking sector and were able to articulate the political, technological and social trends pressing in on the bank and demonstrate how Google apps could reduce costs and improve productivity and agility.

In other words, they took time to understand the customer and learned to speak directly to their business issues . It can even work for the much-maligned product sales and marketing people. We know … we have made it work. You can sell horizontal solutions vertically just as white men, from John Mayall to (improbably) Hugh Laurie can sing the Blues.

Do I need to worry about SOPA?

Dark days: Wikipedia joined several other big sites in going dark to protest at SOPA

US proposals to crack down on copyright are a timely reminder of compliance issues, says Kate Bevan

Social media is awash today with discussion about SOPA, the US Stop Online Piracy bill, and its sister bill, PIPA, both of which are making their way through the US legislature. Indeed, many websites including Reddit and Wikipedia have gone dark today in protest at the potential passage of the bills.

Most of the voices are against the bills, which, broadly speaking, would put the responsibility for policing copyright infringement squarely on to websites. Big websites, such as Wikipedia and Google, and small websites – like yours.

But wait, you cry. I’m not based in the US, and it would be an American law. However, if the bill in its present form passes – and that seems unlikely, given that some of its more draconian provisions have already been watered down – you could well have another compliance issue on your hands.

Broadly speaking, the bill would require any website hosting or linking to material that infringes the copyright of a US entity to take down the dodgy material, or risk a lawsuit. So for example if you’ve put up a video of your chief executive talking at a conference and dubbed, say, a spot of REM on top of it to give it a lift, you could well be subject to a lawsuit from the copyright-holder.

Let’s be clear: you should not do that anyway. Nor should you just help yourself to images from the web to illustrate your annual reports or your company blog, or your main website, nor indeed should you help yourself to any content created by someone else without checking what its licence terms are. Copyright infringement is the bane of the web, and the bane of anyone who creates any kind of content on a commercial basis, whether it’s a freelance writer like me, a photographer, a band, a software developer large or small, or a big Hollywood studio.

The problem is that since the early days of online bulletin boards, it has been easy to pass around digital copies of content. Back the day, sysops maintained a library of stuff to share, including software, setting up the expectation that other people’s work was freely available online.

A great deal of content remains free: amazing software such as the Gimp, which reproduces much of the functionality of Photoshop, for example; the various flavours of Linux; out-of-copyright e-books. People devote time and energy to developing such resources and we should be grateful to them.

But the rest of us have to make a living, and we do it by selling expertise or content. There are of course problems with the way copyright is framed and policed online, and here in the UK, the Gowers review threw up some interesting conclusions and responses to the question of how we deal with copyright in the 21st century.

DRM, the entertainment industry’s answer to the problem, has been clunkily implemented and is easily circumvented. You don’t have to look very hard to find any number of sites hosting links to torrents of copyright material, and as fast as they’re taken down, others spring up. For now, DRM is a very flawed tool, but that, combined with the law, is pretty much the only protection copyright-holders have.

So what’s the problem with SOPA? In its aims, the answer is: nothing. It seeks to protect American copyright-holders by making it much harder for websites hosting or selling pirated material, both inside and outwith the US. However, what’s proposed is the problem. As it stands, the act would  allow the US Attorney-General seek a court order to require “a service provider (to) take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site”.

Until last weekend, that included the possibility of requiring American ISPs to block access to infringing websites via DNS – but that proposal has been canned as a result of fears over the infrastructure of the internet. However, it could require internet behemoths such as Google to take down links to infringing websites – and that is a huge task.

The more vocal opponents talk darkly of threats to free speech, and to the world wide web as a whole. Certainly there are concerns about some of the options: DNS blocking at ISP level has worrying overtones of the kind of censorship imposed by the Great Firewall of China and the restrictions to the internet by other repressive regimes.

Big internet companies complain that they shouldn’t be required to police the web, and they have a point. The debate about requiring UK ISPs to block porn websites touched on the same issues. And the practical issues are immense: nobody has yet come up with a foolproof way to block parts of the web – the tech world is still pointing and laughing at Australia’s A$84m failure to stop porn, which was cracked swiftly by a teenager.

Those big internet companies have a lot to fear from the bill as it stands. The open letter to Washington (pdf) from the founders of big companies including Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia and others, speaks of the “chilling effect on innovation” and urges Congress not to undermine the web. What that really means is “please, don’t place an expensive legislative burden on us”.

But a business, whether it’s monster-sized, such as Google or Facebook , or small, such as yours, has responsibilities and compliance requirements. To ignore issues of copyright as a business is foolish – you might be flying under the radar now and getting away with “borrowing” the odd photograph or piece of music, but that’s unprofessional, to say the least. And the landscape is changing. This bill might well not make the statute books – it’s too flawed – but that doesn’t mean the legal requirements won’t get tougher in future.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at your attitude to copyright and see if it could do with scrubbing up a bit cleaner.

How not to sell to IT

Paul Bevan, Sell2IT director, wonders what to make of a sales pitch

This email just landed in my inbox. Names have been obscured to protect the guilty, but if I had been trying to construct an example of bad marketing practice, I couldn’t have done any better than this

Paul,

I’m sure you’ve observed “Platform-as-a-Service” rising to the top of many enterprises’ to-do lists. It may be a priority in your organization as well, or perhaps it’s already been accomplished. Wherever your organization stands in regards to Platform-as-a-Service, I wanted to suggest a conversation between yourself and a (redacted) engineer, to expose you to some of the advancements we’ve made in our platform.

We’re confident that we’ve built the most powerful Platform-as-a-Service stack available on the market. We’ve had this confirmed to us through independent studies, various platform vendors, hosting companies, but most importantly… customers. Real Fortune 500 customers, leveraging the (redacted) platform to manage their application portfolios across their existing (and I mean ANY exisiting) infrastructure.

Please let me know if you’d be available for a quick chat, where you and an engineer can examine whether our platform could be a valuable addition to your enterprise. Alternatively, if you’re interested in seeing the platform in action right away, you can sign up for a personal GoToWebinar demo.

Hope to hear from you soon, and I look forward to your exploration of the platform.

– Josh

Bemused? I certainly was. Had I been an IT specialist I might have had some understanding about Platform-as-a-Service, but I’m a business person and Josh hasn’t given me any compelling business reasons why I might want consider “exposing” myself to the advancements his company has made with its platform. The fact that this mail came to me at Sell2IT means that the company either hasn’t properly segmented its market – we will never be a target for Platform-as-a-Service – or it hasn’t taken the time to understand what segments we operate in. Either way it is very sloppy.

I’m sure that there is a great product that brings tremendous business benefits to some companies lurking in there somewhere, but you wouldn’t know it from that email.

The challenge for marketing is to identify the fastest, most cost-effective route to finding those companies and then to communicate the compelling business reasons to buy, effectively and consistently.

Hmm. Given that is what we help IT companies do, maybe I should give Josh a call.

Never mind waterfalls, now’s the time to get agile

Everything is linear: Blondin crossing Niagara Falls

Adrian Fellows says it’s time to abandon the waterfall approach to IT project management

The IT industry is littered with project failures – we’ve all seen them. From giant projects such as the disastrous NHS computerised patients record system to the small ones we’ve all watched implode but which never get reported, they’re a fact of life.

Why? It’s because people get very excited by large projects that will solve the world’s problems, but the world has an annoying habit of not standing still.

The “waterfall approach”- the classic approach to systems development that assumes everything is linear – is surely the heart of the problem.  This assumes that everything can be perfectly specified upfront, the solution constructed on an IT island and implemented with a final bit of user testing.

That’s all well and good when it comes to on time and on cost – but that’s the wrong measure. And if there’s only one thing worse than not measuring, that’s managing the wrong measure. And so it’s amazing that any project actually succeeds.

Think about it. If you were building a dream kitchen, would you focus solely on the time and cost? You care about those, of course, but that’s by no means the most important, nor indeed the only measure of success. Does the kitchen look like your dream kitchen? That is the most important measure.

So the waterfall approach is an oversimplification, yet it persists in IT project management.  Quite apart from anything else, the waterfall approach can’t handle change – and yet we live in a volatile world, where we have to confront change every single day.

Charles Blondin took the creative approach to one of the biggest waterfalls of all – Niagara – by crossing it on a tightrope in 1859. This feat of agility should be a benchmark today.

And agile is the way to manage IT projects. Agile project management generates enthusiasm and energy and guarantees a great outcome.

Unfortunately it suffers like most advances in the IT world in that it festooned with jargon and mystique and of course, if an Agile project fails (not that I’ve ever seen one) people blame Agile. But if a waterfall project fails, nobody blames the waterfall.

Agile works because the simplest commonsense techniques replace the ridiculous cumbersome waterfall. If you have never witnessed an Agile project go and do it: I promise you will be amazed. You will struggle to work out who is in IT and who is in the business and you will listen to motivated people who know what they are doing and why. I dare you to suggest they go back to Waterfall.

Do you work in a company that constantly talks about the need for IT and the business to work more closely together? Or in a company where most projects deliver on time and on budget but you still wonder what that investment actually delivered? If so, think agile.

Agile really IS the answer, and the good news is the size of the opportunity since few companies have realised it yet. It builds enduring bridges so that the business and IT can live in the same world – more than anything I have seen in 25 years.

Predictions for 2012 – So what?

I don’t expect you’d need psychic powers to be able to predict a rocky-road ahead for the global economy in the next twelve months.  Richard Holway’s predictions in his TechMarket View this year are unlikely to be challenged by many. In short Richard sees:

1. The economy – a challenge.

2. Consumerisation – becoming mainstream

3. Bring your own technology (BYOT) – ditto

4. The bubble to burst on Social Media expansion

5. IT as a utility.

There won’t be any/many surprises there for most.

I wonder though if the bit that’s missing is “So what does that mean for the ITC sector”…

Well here are a few from me:

1. Managed Services Companies will face hyper-competition...like they’ve never seen before as the market is squeezed by aggressive drives from the likes of Google and Amazon and the fact that the Telcos are seeing that they have the power to blow the market apart (keep any eye on Vodafone)  – watch out for even lower margins, lots of  M&A/Death and the toughest competition you’ve seen to date. If these organisations don’t work out how to proposition and sell differently, they’re doomed.

2. SI’s – Will be very hungry indeed in looking for new territory, new markets and new opportunities. Watch the “mid tier” and high end SME appear a good deal more appealing to the big name organisations.  Lots of squeeze and market disruption here.

3. No hiding in the cloud – The concept of cloud is largley accepted. There’s no more room for the early stage BS. Organisations will now start asking and expecting to deal with the bigger, more complex and grown-up questions like, people, process, commercials  and governance (check out what Bloor Research has to say on the subject) …there’s a great deal more to happen here and we’ve only just begun to open up the possibilities. The technology is a given…now watch what that does to the market and (again) the more traditional service providers…wise up or expect not to be here this time next year.

4. Sales & Marketing – will have an epiphany…they’ll need to!   There will be considerably less business around and considerably more hungry and aggressive competitors. Sticking your fingers in your ears and hoping it will all go away is not going to work. Nor will doing what you’ve always done..but this time louder. Those that take the time to understand what’s really happening in the market and what they can really do about it will survive. Those that don’t will fail. Staying focused will be absolutely paramount next year.

5. The 2012 Olympics – will leave us with the mother of all hangovers. Expect a very dark period once the industry and economic  “bubble” around the games has burst. It’s time to prepare now and be looking and planning for where the real business will be once it’s all over.

6. APPS and TABLETS – As consumerisation, BYOT and the cloud delivery become commonplace, more emphasis will be placed on the application end via mobile and tablet access. I expect to see huge moves from companies in the App space, some interesting partnerships and joint ventures and the beginning of the demise of browsers. What was consumer yesterday will be business as usual tomorrow.

I think the pace of change in our sector over the next twelve months is going to be staggering. If necessity is the mother of invention there’s no time like the present. We are going to see some breathtaking advances, some unexpected endings and a very different market place indeed.

Brace yourselves….it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Happy New Year!

Free at last, free at last

Kate Bevan assesses the move to make government datasets more widely available

Blink and you’d have missed it, but during Wednesday’s Autumn Statement, chancellor George Osborne belatedly reaffirmed a Conservative manifesto pledge to open up access to data created by government agencies. He said: “We will make it easier for UK-based firms to compete for government procurement contracts and make new applications out of government data.”

Back in 2010, the Tories’ Technology Manifesto (pdf) pledged: “We will legislate to enforce the freedom of government data. We will create a powerful new ‘Right to Government Data’, enabling the public to request – and receive – government datasets. This will radically increase the amount of government data released – and will provide a multi-billion pound boost to the UK economy.”

It was a triumph for open-data campaigners that this commitment appeared in the manifesto, and it was thanks to work by Adam Afriyie, the Tory MP for Windsor and at the time the shadow minister for science and innovation. Afriyie took his lead from the Guardian’s long-running Free Our Data campaign, which first raised the issue of access to government-owned data back in 2006.

Launching its campaign in 2006, the Guardian described the datasets collected by government agencies such as Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office, ONS, the Land Registry and the Highways Agency, to name but a few, as “the modern  crown jewels”.

The issues raised then remain: no private company can collect the breadth of data that government agencies can; and nor should we rely on data collected by private enterprise to provide a clear picture. Who really believes surveys paid for insurance companies and publicised via PR companies, for example? Data is power, and access to good data is a plank of democracy.

And access to data is good for business. The Guardian noted at the time that it is nothing short of a scandal that businesses have to pay for data that is collected by the public sector and in our name.

So the announcement on Wednesday is, by and large, a very good thing.

There are some areas of concern: as the reform of the NHS steams ahead despite deep concern from almost everyone actually involved with the NHS (rather than those poised to cherrypick the most lucrative parts of it), one note on the detailed guidance published by the Cabinet Office (pdf) specifically references  “fit note” data.  Last month the government proposed removing the responsibility for signing off sick patients and giving it to an independent assessment authority, sparking fears about unfit people being forced back to work – or off sick benefits. So the note from the Cabinet Office that states: “releasing this data would have significant enterprise value as a driver of innovation in employee support, including occupational health, by enabling the development of new products and services to improve management of sickness absence outside the welfare system” will doubtless raise further fears.

And the vague pledge to “consider opportunities for linking welfare datasets to other government and commercial datasets to increase their value to industry” may also set alarm bells ringing: not all commercial datasets are comprehensive and produced neutrally, nor do they provide a full picture – spending patterns researched by banks, for example, are based on data from bank accounts and take no account of cash spending, nor of course of the spending of those who don’t have bank accounts.

Datamining has come a long way since the Guardian launched its campaign in 2006. Access to raw data led to the Wikileaks revelations; and somebody somewhere is doing something interesting with raw data pretty much every day.

Broadly, this move by the government is very much to be welcomed. It’s long overdue, and we should see the benefits early. One example is public transport data: if you live in London you can already get apps for your smartphone that give you live Tube and bus departure times. Once the data is in the public domain – under a new licence called the Open Government Licence – expect a slew of apps that will tell you just how late your train is running and just how slow the M25 is today.

The headline-grabber from the announcement was the shiny new Open Data Institute that’s to be built in east London around the Silicon Roundabout area of Old Street. The government is pledging up to £10m over five years to fund the institute, and they’ve got a top name on board: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web. The fact that the government has only pledged “up to” £10m over five years in match funding from industry is a bit disappointing: that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. And it’s a late and less well-funded replacement for the £30m Institute for Web Science announced under Labour but scrapped almost immediately when the coalition government took office.

Open data isn’t just important in the UK: later today the European Commission will announce its updated open data strategy, which it says is aimed at creating a market in public data that will be worth €32bn.

Despite the lengthy document from the cabinet office, there’s not much that’s actually new in the announcement: it’s a consolidation of intent and pledges. The details on how data relating to individuals might be anonymised are conspicuous by their absence. And just how free the data will be remains to be seen: buried in the small print is a note that the government could charge for some health data.

But it’s a good start. If you care about open data; if you’re a developer; if you’re a number-cruncher who sells those services to industry, then it’s well worth a cautious cheer of approval.

Another battlefront opens in the patent wars

Confused by who’s suing who and why? Kate Bevan explains

Last night a usually grey and ugly tower on London’s riverbank burst into glowing, noisy life as Nokia and Microsoft launched their great white (well, actually, black, and later on, blue and pink) hope in the form of the Lumia 710 and 800 handsets. Dance DJ Deadmau5 performed a live set on the icy night as the tower behind the DJ beamed the Nokia/Windows Phone message across London.

This is a hugely important launch for both companies: Nokia has slipped badly behind other smartphone-makers as its operating system, the venerable Symbian, began to look increasingly tired and irritatingly difficult to use compared to the slickness of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Kantar WorldPanel ComTech reports that Symbian had dropped from a 19.7 per cent share of the UK smartphone market in October 2010 to just 6.3 per cent last month; a collapse of nearly 14 percentage points. Microsoft too has struggled to hold on to a meaningful market share as its functional but unloved mobile OS failed to keep up. Meanwhile, Google’s Android OS had nabbed a 49.9 per cent share of the UK market by last month, up from 28.8 per cent a year ago, says Kantar. Microsoft’s launch last year of its redesigned-from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7 helped it regain ground, but it still has a long way to go.

The smartphone marketplace is complex and moves dizzyingly quickly. And it’s made even more complex by the patent wars being waged between handset-makers, Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The latest round in the battle was fired today by IPCom, a German company that manages licensing for patents, when it ordered HTC, the Taiwanese company that makes absolutely shedloads of handsets, to stop sales and distribution of its smartphones in Germany: that’s around 2m phones a year, according to IDC.

This particular spat is based on an injunction dating from early 2009 that relates to how HTC implements UMTS in its handsets; in this case, one particular handset that has since been discontinued. If that sounds arcane, it’s because it is, but it’s another example of how patents have become expensive punchballs.

Although the complex patent wars have been raging for some time, they only made it on to the mainstream news agenda shortly before the death in October of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, when it was reported that last year he had vowed to “destroy Android”, claiming that many of the features in Google’s open-source mobile OS had been stolen from Apple’s iOS in what Jobs, with an astounding level of chutzpah, described as a “grand theft”. Google of course denied the allegation.

Cue sharp intakes of breath all round, as iOS and indeed Apple itself both have been known to, um, “borrow” features developed elsewhere, starting from the very concept of the GUI itself which, as geek history shows, was developed at the Xerox PARC research facility in the 1970s. Of course, it’s not just Apple that has built on features invented by others; Windows also of course owes a great deal to the Xerox PARC GUI, as does every subsequent device, from smartphones to tablets.

The crux of the matter is that regardless of the open-source (or otherwise) nature of the software running on the handsets, the underlying technology in all the devices we use and rely on today is patented, and there’s a merry-go-round of OEMs paying to license technologies. And, inevitably, fighting to pay not to license technologies.

As Microsoft lawyer Horacio Gutierrez has pointed out, “it’s not the idea or the final outcome that is patentable; it’s the particular way in which the outcome is brought about”. In other words, you can patent a process, and if you can prove that another manufacturer has copied the process you’ve patented, you – and your lawyers – are on to a winner.

Keeping track of who is suing who in the ongoing patent wars is a full-time job in itself: the Foss Patents blog is a good one to bookmark if you want to try and keep up. Thomson Reuters produced this graphic back in August: things have moved on since then but it gives you an idea of the complexity and circular nature of the lawsuits.

The main battle is between Apple, Google and Microsoft, with the hardware-makers the proxies for those big protagonists, although there are plenty of other sideshows involving, variously, RIM, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, to name just a few. Microsoft, which has a big interest in grabbing more of the mobile landscape as the latest flavour of its mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, is also a platform for its SaaS and cloud services, is reported to be seeking $15 for each Android handset sold by Samsung to cover the use of software patents it claims to own; and the giant of Redmond is also reportedly charging HTC $5 for each Android device it makes to cover use of its patents. Apple, meanwhile, has many lawsuits in play against OEMs that similarly claim patent infringements.

One of the more visible lawsuits from Apple is that being waged against Samsung over its  Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Tab, which of course runs Android, has been temporarily banned in a number of territories pending the outcome of assorted lawsuits, and it’s still not available in Australia, which is an increasingly sore spot for Samsung as people start thinking in earnest about their Christmas shopping.

How that pans out is anyone’s guess: a judge in Sydney noted last week that the injunction Apple won last month against Samsung “looks terribly fair to Apple and not terribly fair to Samsung”. However, that case isn’t due to be heard until next year and until then, Samsung is going to suffer in the important Christmas period.

And that of course is the aim of these battles: not so much to assert ownership of the patents in a high-minded moral sense, but to disrupt the sales of rival products.

For all the arcane details, it’s an important issue, one that affects any developer: both large and small companies have found themselves on the receiving end of lawyers’ letters. And it’s one that promises to keep lawyers happy, busy and rich well into the foreseeable future.

Is email dead?

Facebook founder and callow-youth zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed recently that email is dead. However, that pronouncement doesn’t pass the ancient journalistic “he-would-say-that-wouldn’t-he” test, as Zuckerberg has a vested interest in getting more users more locked into using Facebook as their main, if not sole, gateway to the internet.

Zuckerberg was speaking at the launch last year of Facebook’s integrated messaging platform, which pulled in not only messages sent between Facebook users but also texts, emails from external providers and IM content. The aim was to make Facebook even more sticky for its users than it already is.

Reports of the death of email are, however, as Mark Twain would have said, greatly exaggerated. Zuckerberg has a point in that we deal with a number of fragmented inboxes: work email, personal email, texts, IM conversations, Facebook messages, DMs on Twitter, an @ reply on Twitter, to name but a few.

There have been a number of attempts to make those multiple inboxes more manageable. Facebook’s unified messaging platform is just one of them – on most smartphones you can set up an integrated inbox that will collect all your emails and present them to you in the one place; you can add more than one account to Outlook (though only one Exchange account, which many would consider a blessing).

But a couple of points. First, different styles of messaging suit different types of interaction. IM, for example, is a very immediate form of communication – it’s more of an ongoing conversation and can in fact be annoying and intrusive. It’s great for a chatty conversation with a friend at home, or for keeping in touch with friends and family who live far away. It can also be a useful work tool – quickly pinging someone in real time can be an efficient in-and-quickly-out way to sort out a problem or get an answer to a question.

A text is a good way of quickly checking in with someone when you’re on the move; while a Twitter @ is a great way of catching someone’s attention, though it’s not guaranteed to get a response.

Second, not everyone wants that torrent of communication in one inbox. I don’t, for starters. My Outlook inbox, which handles my primary email account, is quite busy enough, thank you. My Yahoo account receives all sorts of notifications – about new followers on Twitter, confirmations of Ocado orders, that kind of thing – that I don’t want adding to the noise in my main inbox. My Twitter @ feed is like a giant pub conversation : something I can drop into and out of at will. Texts tend to be more urgent: they’d get lost in my inbox (I did experiment briefly with sending texts to Outlook, as you can with Exchange 2010; I quickly turned it off).

The only way we can keep on top of information is to triage it. I have a series of folders set up in Outlook that handle incoming emails according to rules – who the email is from, in some cases; ongoing subjects in others. You can do the same with smart folders in Gmail. I keep an ear out for texts and deal with them quickly; email I always eventually get to, but it’s not my priority.

And email itself is by no means dead. According to market researchers Radicati, there are 2.9bn email accounts in the world – which actually sounds pretty low to me, given that I alone have four (well, actually, six, if you count the two that are in the cat’s name) and there are 7bn people on the planet.

Email is a vital business tool: we use it to send information, arrange meetings, cancel meetings, arrange interviews, accept (and decline) job offers. No business can afford to ignore the need to provide a robust and professional service, and that means an email based on a domain name, one that scales, provides mobile and external access and is as bulletproof as it can be.

Each business will have a different solution. Some will go for using Google Apps to manage their email: that’s cheap and provides a straightforward, robust infrastructure. Others might go for a dedicated server, running either Linux or Microsoft Exchange. Still others will look to the cloud – ISPs offer email services; so too hosting companies and registars. Microsoft has recently been touting its cloud offering – Hosted Exchange, which provides all the benefits of the gold-standard messaging and information management without the hassle of needing to maintain a tribe of long-haired techies to look after the physical infrastructure.

Email is a long way from dead. But getting your infrastructure right is as important as getting anything else about your business right. One thing is for sure, though, about the death of email: if your email dies, you’re in trouble.