SMBLive's product, Workspace (BTWorkspace and Telus ePoint), is a service framework built on Windows Sharepoint service. This company was founded to fill the need of large telecom companies that had previously purchased large number of Sharepoint licenses, with the intent of launching web based applications to sell to their customers. After discovering the immense effort required to implement Sharepoint, most of these licenses were left unused. In comes SMBLive; Coincedently, the salesperson who sold most of these licenses to the telecom companies, is the same person that founded SMBLive; go figure.
Currently their workspace product is at version 2; version 3 was due removed, but as of this date, has not been launched. This does not surprise me. I spent a short time at this company as an Application Architect, under the supervision of the company's CTO, Antonio Chagoury, and experienced first hand their lack of discipline and communication. I had numerous unpleasant encounters with this individual, on the receiving end of screaming rages due to his lack of understanding of the issues at hand. It is my opinion that SMBLive won't be around for too much longer, not conducting business as usual anyways.
Corporate Details:
SMBLive
1960 Gallows Rd.
Tysons Corner, VA 22182
Update: October 8th 2007
I received a call from Matt Soska, SMBLive's CFO, requesting that I remove this blog entry. His reasoning was that I relayed a DATE for product launch, which by his account is considered "privileged" information; I reminded him that this date had been announced prior to my blog entry, and was also available on their CTO's personal blog. So I have edited this blog entry to remove said date, but I do not feel it necesary to remove it altogether. It's not like I went into detail about the fact that I confided to Matt Soska, CFO, and Matt Howard, CEO, that I had felt physically threatened not once, but twice, by CTO Antonio Chagoury, during "Brain Storming" sessions scheduled to discuss ongoing development. Not only was it recognized that the situation was "Unacceptable" and "Unprofessional", upon further investigation, other employees also complained about his attitude and demeanor when forced to interact with him. Both Matt's assured me that they would find a viable solution to this situation, that my position was not in jeopardy, and thanked me for having the "cajones" to speak up, when others had not.
A week later, I was no longer needed.
Not only was that the last thing I expected to happen, apparanetly their "word" expires after 1 week, my wife was also a week overdue to give birth to our daughter! Thanks guys!