What happens in Vegas, ends up on websites.

This is what happens when you focus on other stuff – you miss people talking about things you’ve worked on.  Last week Simon Gwatkin (our VP of Strategic Marketing) made a presentation at the Mitel Partner Forum in Vegas on the Wesley Clover Technologies group (our incubator). A number of our early stage companies use the Mitel channel to accelerate their sales and growth – its symbiotic and works quite well.

Nancy Jamison who works over at Unified Communication Strategies has a good post on our program that i only just got around to seeing. I take a bit of an exception to the parallel to Cisco. Their internal skunkworks projects (they called it ‘ideas from the floor’ back in 2002) has never created a spin off company or a focused vertical product – they partner or buy to create these opportunities. Google’s one day a week program is another example of a company creating products – but again no spin offs. If I wanted to be a bit negative on their processes versus our I’d say they kill the entreprenurs at the root but keep the stalk. Seperatley, I think unaligned incubators, accelerator or whatevers (Ycombinator and their like) don’t bring enough to the table to make a go of a real standalone business (think IP, competive unassailable advantages, etc). But I digress, maybe when i have some more time this summer I’ll expand on these thoughts.

Read Nancy’s article – great props for Benbria in the coverage.