Open-Mesh is dead. Welcome Altiwi!

Every blog post should have a picture. So I snapped one of my development devices. And YES, it is already running our firmware :-)

Everything started a week ago, when we deciced to break up from the Datto prison. As some of you probably might know, Datto, owner of Open-Mesh, decided to stop selling Open-Mesh product line of cloud managed network products which was unique by offering “lifetime” license of their cloud controller, Cloudtrax. “Sunsetting”, is the corporate newspeak used for such a thing. So we decided to build our own. This blog is our story.

Today we’ve sent this e-mail to our fellow distributors around the globe, with whom we were were in kinda frenetic contact last couple of days…

Note: Some parts were redacted, as we removed some personal info.

Hello everybody!

We, all, met a very uncomfortable circumstance — abrupt announcement from Datto, that our beloved Open-Mesh is not sexy enough for them en route to higher profits, predictable revenue stream, and, believe it or not, probably not a good gem in their crown for an eventual IPO.

This e-mail is, however, not a criticism of Datto/Open-Mesh, though there is a lot we have to say to it. We will certainly do in some upcoming blog posts, as we believe that it will shed a light on how we perceive the way business should be conducted and hopefully get some of you on the same boat. But to the point:

We, all, probably spent most part of this month by trying to get some answers from Datto, looking around for a product, which would be able to replace our current Open-Mesh offering and also for a solution to offer to our current customer and reseller base. Which, again, pointed out that Open-Mesh and their Cloudtrax was quite unique and there WAS a reason we selected the product to our portfolio couple of years ago.

Let’s face it: The beauty of Open-Mesh was not in the technical capabilities and devices, there was nothing that special on it, other vendors can do the same (or at least similar) things. And, the beauty was not in the cloud controller itself, though it was one of the main reasons we went on board couple of years ago.

The beauty of Open-Mesh was the Cloudtrax controller with no monthly fees attached to it.

So what are we looking for? We are looking for a vendor with similar portfolio as Open-Mesh (and honestly, WiFi access points would be enough), with cloud management provided for an affordable, preferably one-time fee. And there would be another nice to have — the vendor should be relatively small with or at least no established brand in our country. The last thing we want is to get into volume added distribution, where we, as a small company, cannot win. The number of vendors we found so far: ZERO.

There are two groups of vendors we found so far (and according to our preliminary negotiations they were quite busy talking also to you :-) so I will not present a names here, but you probably know.

1. First group of vendors are device manufacturers who also offer cloud management. Some of them offer cloud management even for reasonable prices, though nobody has a cloud controller “for free”.
2. Second group of vendors offers the cloud manager only and is capable to accommodate various devices from different vendors. From apparent reason, their pricing is something similar to Datto’s offering, which generally means that you will pay the price of your device more-less in every one or two years, depending on the purchasing price. When they offer something like “lifetime license” the price is not the one we want to pay for.

And last but not least — what to do with our current customer base? They already paid their “lifetime license”. The issue is not with the Cloudtrax support for existing networks, the issue is following:

1. As Datto will stop selling the devices after 31th Dec, there will be no possibility to purchase replacement device shall any of your current devices fail. Only way to handle it is on us, distris, to make a stock of devices to such reclaims in case of in-warranty failures and also for expansion of current networks. What shall we tell to our customer (real world example), who already purchased 30 APs to cover around a third of his premises and is willing to expand to another 50 devices in next two years? “Throw your 30 APs, we are now selling XYZ?”.
2. Not only myself, but most of our resellers appreciate the fact that they have their managed networks under one roof. One dashboard, no need to look into docs just to see where to connect to set the password.

Wow, that was a long read, thank you if you made it up to here. Now comes the exciting part :-)

We decided to build our own cloud management platform. It’s name is Altiwi.

The main aim is to provide solution that:

1. Will accommodate our Open-Mesh customer base. We already have our own firmware running not only on the OM2P line but also on OM5P and Axx, including the latest A42/62 family, which is a bit tricky, because those devices are locked.
2. Will be open to third party devices equiped with our firmware.
3. Will be damned easy to set up for non-IT people. Cloudtrax was simple in my own terms, but as a tech support person, I could see how unclear and struggling it could be for, for example electricians, to grasp what’s going on, ended up with multiple accounts etc…
4. There will be an automated way to import and also re-flash your current Cloudtrax network with all the current config. If everything goes well, it would be possible to do so directly from the web dashboard.

Whole thing is exactly one week old as we started with development last monday after it become clear, that there is no way to satisfy our customers on the long run with what is available on the market. But as of today, we support following features:

1. Testing firmware runs on OM2P-HS and A42 to prove that it will run on “legacy” and also “new gen” devices.
2. New user signups and automatic Wizard like configuration of their first network works fine.
3. Right now we support only Internet Only networks and also bridged private networks. Both with no authentication or WPA2-PSK. No WPA Enterprise and no splash screens yet :-)
4. As of now this is the totally minimal basic set of features and now are we focusing to get this from a workbench to a public alpha console, which means mainly building the infrastructure on AWS, making nicer UI and also make the firmware downloading and flashing as user friendly as possible.

Main features to come first:

1. WPA Enterprise with RADIUS
2. SSID VLAN bridging support
3. Splash screens and Facebook WiFi
4. Mesh support — (Is it important for your customers? Honestly, this was the feature which might have sold O-M to some customers but I always hated it :-)

Business model and pricing

This is something which is TBD, but what we know right now are those guidelines:

1. There will be one-time with lifetime fee for new devices. The price would be constructed so the sum of device+cloud license would be similar or better than original Open-mesh device.
2. Shall we introduce any recurrent pricing, it will not interfere with one-timers, we will not discontinue one-timers as we understand the value of it, as described earlier.
3. For existing Open-Mesh devices, the price is already decided — one time fee less than 10 USD.
4. The business model would be multi tier — Altiwi -> Distri -> Reseller -> end customer. We, as Europeans, apart of the Americans, understand the granularity of the world and strongly believe in the value of local companies, shall they be a distri or reseller. Again, this is probably a topic for another post.
5. Public beta will be free, of course, same as free trials when we get out of the beta stage. But the pricing will follow the guidelines above. We don’t want to catch anybody and then tell him the sweat secret “you will pay, because we own you” :-)

Questions towards you:

1. Most important — are you interested in our offering? We will certainly do it as we need it to handle our own situation but we feel, that it might be appealing to other partners around the world. If so, we are free to make couple of demos how it looks today. Just expect to see a very rough presentation and mainly discussion with you. Remember — it’s a week old baby. Though it would be great to find a common time to meet all of you, it seems that there would be more than one webinar presentation due to the fact that the globe is round :-)
2. Which current Cloudtrax features are important for you? We need to prioritize, please, think about it, we have enormous list of “nice to haves”, but we need to pick up only the essentials first.
3. Do you have any particular hardware in mind we should support?

To keep you informed on how the things are going, we plan to blog quite a lot about the development and also on our views on today’s cloud-is-everything business which, will hopefully, resonate with your own views. We are not a fancy hipsters, we as co-owners and partners are both well in our forties and are running our (one) own business for more than two decades. We are long runners by heart!

Hope to hear from you soon

Rob