Tucows to acquire Boardtown
Now,
this is an interesting development.
Boardtown is the maker of an
ISP billing package called Platypus that's generally regarded as one of
the better ones in the industry (along with Rodopi, Emerald and OptiGold). They also have software packages to handle help desk, mail lists, shopping carts, and spam filtering.
Clearly, Tucows has its eyes set on being a full service provider to the ISP industry, and I'm excited about that. Not that it's a surprise. Elliot has been pretty clear about his intentions
for several months now. In addition to domain registration, they're
offering DNS and managed Email services, and will soon roll out an
outstanding blog-hosting option ([shameless promotion] which you can
purchase today through my ISP, Atl-Connect, at very reasonable prices).
The challenge ahead of Tucows is rolling all of these together into a
consistent branded offering. Hint: Use blogware as the model to the
extent possible. It gets it more right than any of the others, largely
because it was built most recently and benefits from lessons learned on
domains, dns and email.
Boardtown's offerings are unusual in the Tucows quivver in that they're
not hosted solutions, so Tucows will have to make some adjustments to
deal with the software sales aspect (Or will they? Perhaps the idea is
to take the intellectual property and morph it into a hosted
solution.).
Neat stuff, in any event, and lots of fun for some folks at Tucows.
Wonder if they're hiring. 
