* The Caveo Group makes COG an offer it can’t refuse
This top-down, bottom-up debate has roused more response – this time from the CEO of a Toronto Secure Sockets Layer VPN start-up with a plan to help the Washington Council of Governments meet the goal of its “Better Work through Telework” program.
Remember, COG was granted $600,000 to help increase the number of Metro D.C. teleworkers in larger companies by 50,000 by June 2005. COG is targeting C-level executives, not managers or individual employees, hence the top-down approach.
When Gord Hogg, CEO of The Caveo Group, read about the initiative here, he sent me an e-mail asking me to forward it to Nicholas Ramfos, head of the COG program. In it, Hogg offers to match COG’s $600,000 with an additional $600,000 in purchase subsidies. The Caveo Group wants to offer COG’s target companies its SSL VPN technology for enabling large-scale telework cost effectively. The way Hogg figures it, such a partnership would cut the cost of equipping a company with full remote access to $20 per employee.
To deploy Caveo’s SSL VPN appliance to 1,000 users costs about $50,000. Instead of having $600,000 to subsidize the expense, COG would have $1.2 million. So by convincing companies to deploy the Caveo SSL VPN, COG can subsidize 40 companies and create 40,000 new teleworkers. Or if COG offers to pay one company $15,000 in subsidies, Caveo will match that, so the company is given $30,000 to put toward the cost of the $50,000 box. The box now costs $20,000 – $20 per employee to telework.
Hogg says the way to reach C-level execs is to take some money off the table. “When we talk to CEOs about how telework increases productivity, they say I’d love to do that, but everybody’s told me it’s too expensive. chief financial officers say, ‘How are you going to deliver concrete ROI?’ CIOs say they’re handcuffed to existing technology by tight budgets. So we say it’s going to cost you $20 per employee to enable crisis management and work from anywhere. That’s the message they’ll hear.”
When Hogg told me his technology was especially well-suited to telework, I was skeptical. But when he described it to me, I was impressed. For 18 months, the company has deployed SSL VPN appliances to smaller companies. When it found scaling up too difficult, it partnered with Sun to license the SSL VPN engine built into the Sun One Portal Server. The box, called AccessAnywhere, enables Web access to the obvious e-mail and Web applications, but Caveo also built in Tarantella’s thin-client technology to enable access to back-end applications and custom-written legacy apps, and an RSA Server for two-factor authentication. So the box is an SSL VPN and thin client server in one.
Hogg says 500 companies are using the Sun One Portal for remote access; which, you could reason, makes Sun one of the top three SSL VPN vendors. Hogg says Sun has no plans to offer its own SSL VPN appliance, but instead now sends customers the want remote access only to The Caveo Group. Smart partnership, Caveo.http://www.accessanywhere.net, or call him directly at (905) 361-6481.
In a follow-up call, Hogg said COG’s Ramfos hasn’t yet responded to his offer. But Hogg has since decided to extend the same offer to our readers, which is the equivalent of offering a 30% discount on the system. Something to consider, no? And of course, we’ll follow up once COG has weighed in.
Hogg says you can contact his company at
