On Wednesday afternoon I spent a bunch of time with ePlatform’s CEO, Ramana Kovi. He called me up and told me that now that we’re interested in services that I might be interested in seeing what his team has been building for the past few years.
And, wow, does he have a ton of services. More than 70 at last count.
He’s run away from the Web 2.0 look that other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are going with, though. He’s built a services portal (he calls it an integrated digital lifestyle service) and made it look similar to Outlook 2003. Why do that? Cause he says he noticed that most of his target users use Outlook and in his testing they were more comfortable with a set of services that look like Microsoft’s offerings. Smart, although I think it could use some more polish.
It’s in alpha testing right now, he expects to release a beta within weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s out. I played with several of the services and they were well done. He tells me that his team has been working on this for years and has written about 20 million lines of .NET code to build this set of services and the host container for them.
Definitely another Silicon Valley company to watch.