Tech Check: This Executive Thinks Telecom Providers Are “Stuck In The Caveman Era”

(This post originally appeared on Forbes)

Is your company’s technology up to speed or out of date? What’s hot and what’s not? What technologies are other businesses using that you should be considering?

That’s the purpose of Tech Check. Each week, we’ll do a quick survey of a small businesses to see what technology they’re using because we’re all interested in keeping up with the Jones’s, right? So how do you compare?

This week, we’re doing a Tech Check with Abinash Tripathy, Founder and CSO of Helpshift, Inc. Founded in 2011, Helpshift is a mobile customer service platform for businesses to integrate mobile applications and communicate with customers. It has 130 employees and is located in San Francisco, CA.

Abinash’s primary laptop:  MacBook Pro 2017

Abinash’s primary tablet:  iPad Pro

Abinash’s smartphone:  Apple iPhone 8

Abinash’s favorite mobile applications:  Microsoft Outlook (also a customer), Clash Royale, Google Maps, whatsapp, FaceTime, Apple Health, lyft, Vivino

Helpshift network environment: Ubiquiti WiFi with dual 1Gbps WAN Links

Helpshift company phone system: Polycom with VoIP

Primary company applications:  G Suite, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Atlassian, Hubspot, QuickBooks Online, Trinet

Helpshift email server: Google G Suite

What is your biggest technology frustration?

The telecom providers who we buy bandwidth from.  They just seem to be stuck in the cave man era and don’t get the needs of the modern enterprise or care about delighting customers.   They tend to be huge monopolies that have consciously carved out territory to avoid having to compete for customer money with each other.

What has been your business technology mistake since you started your business?

Building our own custom codebase to host our external customer-facing website. In the long run, the cost/benefit of having full control of the website cannot be justified, since every website change involves a developer.  We should have started with a cloud-hosted MS such as WordPress so that our marketing department could iterate faster without requiring developers.

How has the technology in your business changed in the last 5 years?

As a high-tech cloud-native company, we have a rule that we will never buy a server or run any applications in house.  Every product we buy for consumption by our business must be a cloud-native app with rich mobile access for our employees to be able to use on their BYOD mobile devices.

Our technology-selection process is very “bottom-up”. An individual employee may introduce something that other employees like and bring to the attention of management for company-wide adoption. We do not have a CIO or IT department dictating what the company should or should not use. This is akin to the principle of natural selection in nature where there are few limits to trying new products and successful products rise to the top and win.

What application is most valuable for your business and why?

G Suite, as it enables effective enterprise-wide collaboration.

What are you doing to protect your data?

As a Cloud software provider ourselves, we realize that ultimately the application provider hosting our data is largely responsible for protecting our data, and the only thing we can do is to choose the provider carefully. We must find a trustworthy provider, first and foremost.

We also enforce security and access policies for employees to ensure that the data we have been trusted with by our customers are protected.

What’s the 1 biggest thing you’ve learned about technology since you started?

That it is constantly changing…and we have to be open to change.

Multiple surveys are showing that small business optimism is at a record high level. Do you share this optimism for 2018? Why or why not?

Really?  I disagree with this wholeheartedly.  The foundation of the US economy was built on breaking up monopolies and allowing innovation in a competitive environment where smaller companies could compete with larger companies.

The Internet era led to the consolidation of several markets and created several “Ma Bells” like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—at the cost of large and small businesses.

The Mobile era is consolidating long-tail physical businesses into marketplaces like online delivery, transportation apps, food delivery etc., which in the long term will put margin pressure on the participants in these marketplaces and kill many in the process.