Inside DiVitas

FMC matures to become Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC)

A day in the life of a mobile-convergence end user

by Vivek Khuller

Here at DiVitas, we’re eating our own dog food. We’ve deployed “Project Alpo” throughout our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, and now nearly every DiVitas employee is a mobilized worker who is benefiting from the very solution our company has worked so hard to develop.

Eating the dog food serves a variety of purposes. Alpo end users provide valuable, real-world feedback to the product development group. We’re a vocal bunch that continually dishes out suggestions for improving upon the DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) experience. We tell them what’s working, what’s not and we point out any nifty features that we think future DiVitas end users will appreciate. We are helping produce one extremely fine-tuned product!

Better yet, being an Alpo user allows us to realize first-hand how being mobilized can make you a better worker. From marketing to sales to engineers to executives running the company, the DiVitas Mobile UC solution is making us more available, productive employees. 

This blog is a case-study dedicated to providing a glimpse into the life of a DiVitas end user and highlights real-world use-cases for our Mobile UC solution.

First mobile convergence solution available

MMC is Hot

by Vivek Khuller

There is nothing as sweet as a successful product launch. At the same time, there’s nothing as scary. After so many months of developing a solution that is actually pioneering a new technology (MMC), February 21 would be the day of reckoning.

We began holding our breath the morning Jenni hit the send button on her laptop, thus emailing our press release to hundreds of press and analysts around the world. What kind of coverage would we receive? Would we receive any coverage at all? While confident in our solution and efforts in pre-briefing press and analysts, at this point, control was out of our hands. We didn’t take that first breath until …

… and then it came. First a dribble, then a stream and finally a full-on flood of news coverage and analyst feedback.  It was so awesome to read the various spins on our solution. And it was even more awesome to see how many people “get” us. We were in the pages of every major magazine and website whose stories talked about how our product was the first of its kind and that mobile-convergence is definitely the hot trend of 2007.

Exciting, but the best is yet to come. Historically coverage trickles to stop about a week after press release goes out. But thanks to a timely “me-too” announcement from a company probably 10x our size, all of the press coverage started right back up again. This time journalists were looking to understand how this newly announced vapor-ware would work by studying a shipping, live, functioning converged-mobile product – the DiVitas MMC solution.

In fact, in late February we went to France for the NetEvents European Press & Analyst Summit 2007. After that press event we received yet another wave of coverage, and we won Best Wireless Mobility Productaward. Awesome.

It’s not time to rest on our laurels. More is coming down the pike, fast and furious.

Ironically, this past week our office has been swarmed by bees thanks to a bullet-proof hive that refuses to budge. The beehive is near my office window and I can hear them steadily buzzing. Still, the industry buzz about DiVitas and MMC is louder, and that’s why I say, not even honey is as sweet as a successful product launch.

Building the mobile convergence Dream Team

by Vivek Khuller

It’s no coincidence that the DiVitas workplace is continuously buzzing. It’s an exciting place to work, and it was designed to be that way.

A year and a half ago, when I set out to launch this company, I knew my employees well. I didn’t know their names yet, but I knew exactly who they’d be. That’s because my team has been hand-picked for each person’s ability to fulfill the Five E’s that I think are important attributes to have in life: Edge, Energy, Energize, Execution, and Ethics. As a start-up we spend a lot of time together and synergy is everything. You need to like the people who you work with!

Creating this formula, and sticking to it without exception, has allowed me to build a team of people who think outside of the box, who come up with unique ideas, who work to resolve problems, who have a personality that simultaneously lets them laugh at a joke and work overtime to fix a bug.  The DiVitas MMC solution, the first converged system to reach the mobile-communications market, is as unique as the team that engineers, markets and sells it. Our human resources manager (whose job isn’t to engineer, market or sell our product) wears his DiVitas polo shirt every day – to work, to the gym, wine tasting … as he says, “ya know, I represent.”

My best “five-minute” meetings take place on Castro Street when I grab one (or a few people) and we go for a stroll and knock around ideas and issues.

One day that distills the unique DiVitas environment is our ’06 Christmas party. We arranged a 7-hour hike in Muir woods, followed by pizza and beer at a trendy San Francisco pizzeria. Families included. Ties were not an option. The hike would be more challenging for some than for others, but we had a great turnout – not unexpected considering DiVitians thrive on a good challenge (and free food).

Yes, we are a team of 50+ individuals spread among three different countries. But we each have at least five things in common, and that’s what maintains harmony in the workplace.