Managed Services in the New Age: Yousendit.com

Trip back in time for a bit. It's 2003 and you have a 4.7Mb document that you have to email out to a client who has to fly out in the morning. Web-based email could certainly be an option, except that even in those days, most webmail services were giving you 2Mb or less in terms of storage space. You could have logged onto your Yahoo! account and shared the briefcase, but the chance of living in Pakistan and finding a client who knew how to use that specific option was a long shot.

FTP was always an option but since we were still primarily on Dialup internet, the uplink made courier a much more attractive proposition. So when companies began setting up online storage spaces, people who had to move documents quickly, caught on very quickly. The online storage space would allow you to create an account and upload and send someone else the link to the download the files while they were held there temporarily. Some services were free however some began to turn this process into a business.

In retrospect however, these companies were already on the path to offering Managed Services almost a full 4 years before the buzzword hit the rest of the world.

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Trip back in time for a bit. It's 2003 and you have a 4.7Mb document that you have to email out to a client who has to fly out in the morning. Web-based email could certainly be an option, except that even in those days, most webmail services were giving you 2Mb or less in terms of storage space. You could have logged onto your Yahoo! account and shared the briefcase, but the chance of living in Pakistan and finding a client who knew how to use that specific option was a long shot.

FTP was always an option but since we were still primarily on Dialup internet, the uplink made courier a much more attractive proposition. So when companies began setting up online storage spaces, people who had to move documents quickly, caught on very quickly. The online storage space would allow you to create an account and upload and send someone else the link to the download the files while they were held there temporarily. Some services were free however some began to turn this process into a business.

In retrospect however, these companies were already on the path to offering Managed Services almost a full 4 years before the buzzword hit the rest of the world.

But let's look at the real story here -- when the likes of Gmail came on the scene and began to offer 1Gb worth of mailbox space to users for free, Hotmail and Yahoo! also revised their strategies to increase their offerings. Today, users enjoy several Gigabytes worth of storage and transfer for virtually zero cost. So if free webmail users can transfer millions of bytes worth of documents free, the fact that Managed Services which started back in the early part of this decade are giving the shiny, new packaged services some serious competition, is a story worth looking into.

According to Yousendit.com founder Ranjith Kumaran, trends have changed as has the entire outlook of the what web-based services were supposed to be offering. "5 years ago when we started off, everything online seemed like an experiment. In the earlier days, the service was primarily used by consumers but with time, professionals and C-level companies began using it more." And when you have the enterprise user searching for a service, you have to ensure that your feature set matches his needs. Security, for example, was something that Yousendit spent a lot of time on.

But with the Web open to all kinds of innovation, the fact even the first mover advantage tends to become vulnerable. How did services such as Yousendit.com survive the wrath of almost unlimited storage space? Did users really need services such as theirs any longer? Ranjith explains, "Sure you can use any email services online in order to send large files but they do tend to have restrictions. The large enterprises have been shrinking their inbox storage space since the cost of managing them are huge. That's where services like ours helps to reduce their workload. Gmail accounts may have endless storage but sending files over to large enterprises remains to be a problem -- the destination at the enterprise might have a quota restricting the delivery."