CORAL CEA OVERVIEW
Coral CEA is a not-for-profit company whose mission is to create and grow new knowledge-economy-based companies and jobs. The goal is to help make our member companies succeed in the face of daunting global competition and to accelerate the transition of their innovation from idea to cash.
Using a new commercialization model based on a business ecosystem, the company provides its members with easy to mash-up ‘out-of the box’ technology, enhances partnering processes, and brokers deal flow.
Coral CEA’s business ecosystem is anchored around Communication-Enabled Applications (CEAs), the next generation of Information and Communication technology (ICT). The ability to embed advanced telecom capabilities into business processes will drive overall application productivity, providing a competitive value proposition to members.
To implement this, we are working with five founding members, each which has a key role in making this happen:
- IBM and Nortel, global leaders in IT and Telecommunications, are contributing the required technology and expertise to make complex ICT capabilities available as web services that are easy to mash-up into new capabilities without the need for an ICT expert.
- Eclipse, a large, successful open source ecosystem keystone is contributing knowledge on how to build a healthy, global ecosystem.
- Carleton University, a leader in advancing knowledge about communications-enabled applications, is helping to create knowledge assets by building the capacity of skilled knowledge workers familiar with both ecosystem commercialization and CEAs.
- Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC), the voice of ICT in Cnaada is helping to provide national reach.
- As a keystone, Coral CEA has been set up as a non-profit organization to ensure vendor neutrality - a lesson from Eclipse about what it takes to be successful in ecosystems.
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Coral CEA invests in the overall health of its ecosystem by focusing on 5 key business domains:
- Technology Building Blocks -The two key founders, IBM and Nortel, virtualize complex IT and telecom systems and networks into easy-to-use web services and application programming interfaces (APIs).
- Commercialization Services - By connecting members, simplifying the partnering process, and by providing out of the box IPR and commercial arrangements, Coral CEA helps fill gaps in companies’ capabilities and speed the transition from idea to commercialization.
- Lead Projects - Fill gaps in capabilities of the ecosystem. Coral CEA will co-invest with members to address gaps in capability that will improve the overall health of the ecosystem by supporting the drive for massive innovation.
- Knowledge Resources - Creates required programs to help entrepreneurs leverage ecosystems and find the required skilled resources they need to start and scale their businesses.
- Business Development - Provides a focus for business development - engaging customers and brokering opportunities for the members. If a company has a problem that they would like solved, Coral CEA will assemble the appropriate members to provide a completive response.
Imagine your small company trying to compete against global giants:
- Customers won’t buy because you’re too small.
- Your offer addresses the core of their problem, but does not quite fit their complete needs.
- You require specialized localization, and
- A large competitor is promising your unique functionality in the near future.
Although it might be impossible to address this opportunity alone, as a member of the Coral CEA business ecosystem, you are perceived as a much bigger player. As part of Coral CEA:
- Customers see much less risk because Coral CEA represents a large group of companies with mature processes and differentiated assets.
- You can readily partner with other members of the ecosystem to address the customers complete problem set Coral CEA members bring global reach and knowledge to the offers.
- You can deliver massive innovation much more quickly than any competitor due to the unique partnering with members.