| Below is a recap of some of the exciting news here at Socialtext, including us recently being named the #1 Enterprise 2.0 vendor. The timing could not be better, as organizations around the world are looking towards social software to help improve the way people connect with colleagues, customers and content. I’ve included information about our newest deployment option, Socialtext on VMware and several customer stories that showcase how Socialtext is helping their businesses. If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you. Alan Lepofsky, Director of Product Marketing | |
Introducing The Socialtext Virtual ApplianceLeveraging Social Software in Your Private Cloud As one of the leading SaaS providers, Socialtext firmly believes in the importance of cloud based solutions. However, our experience has taught us that some companies have strict IT requirement which dictate that all information be stored behind the firewall in their private cloud. To meet these needs, Socialtext has just introduced our Virtual Appliance on VMware. It complements our existing deployment options, which includes traditional hosting (single or multi-tenant), as well as a secure server appliance. Our new VMware option helps companies leverage their existing computing resources as they scale social software throughout the enterprise. We love giving our customers choices, and the Virtual Appliance is another option in the Socialtext arsenal that we’re really proud of. Read more… |
Socialtext Is #1At the start of April, InformationWeek released the results of their Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey, and Socialtext was ranked #1 in overall performance. It’s important to note that this was not an analyst report conducted via vendor interviews. Instead the results are based on the feedback of more than 600 IT professionals, business people just like you. Our winning performance in this report reinforces our belief that the effectiveness of tools is not based on a checklist of features, but by integrating social software into the core-business processes. We’re proud of our results and would like to thank everyone who relies on our solutions to help make their organization successful. Read more… Customer SuccessThis month we have several new customer success stories to share with you. First is The ClimateWorks Foundation, a global organization that helps prevent dangerous climate change tied to global warming. With teams focused on transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy and more, ClimateWorks needed a central, secure place to harness knowledge and share ideas openly across these sectors. The full story on how ClimateWorks uses Socialtext as their social intranet can be found here. Second is ISS Mexico, the country’s largest provider of cleaning, maintenance and catering services. With 20 offices spread throughout the country, IIS Mexico turned to Socialtext to help them connect people with the colleagues and information they require to get their jobs done. Learn more about the benefits IIS Mexico is experiencing, here. Finally, Forrester Research has just published a new paper highlighting the importance of integration between enterprise systems of record and social tools. In it they highlight Socialtext customer Hayes Knight, explaining how they have integrated Socialtext into the core business processes their accountants and advisors use to answer the tax and auditing questions asked by their customers. Read more about how Hayes Knight uses Socialtext to create a “social layer” across their applications here. Socialtext Cross Country TourOn April 14th, we kicked off our cross country tour in New York City. The goal of these events is to provide attendees information presented by our customers, not sales pitches from us. They hear about real world implementations and learn about proven business results. In NYC, our main speaker was Anand Padmanabhan, CIO of NYU Stern School of Business. Anand and his team has deployed social software to nearly 10,000 faculty, students, and staff at NYU Stern, fundamentally transforming communication between those constituencies. Read more about the event, including Anand’s slides here. Our next event is being held in Chicago. To find out details of upcoming events in a city near you, don’t hesitate to contact me our your account team. |
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News & Events
Socialtext Is #1 and Now Runs On VMware
How We’re Leveraging Scale to Improve Socialtext
At Socialtext, we’re proud to offer a flexible software as a service (SaaS) business model that delivers the enterprise social tools people need to perform their best work — but with the security, flexibility and integration required by IT to make them a strategic asset inside their organization.
As business models in the Enterprise 2.0 world evolve, we’ve examined how we can streamline our sales, trial and provisioning process to get companies up and running even faster. The launch of the Socialtext Virtual Appliance — a VMware image that contains the most current version of Socialtext — created a huge opportunity for us to move in that direction.
So today, we’re announcing two new offerings that build on that vision.
1. The Virtual Appliance Trial
Launching in May, prospective Socialtext customers can select, try, evaluate and buy their Socialtext solution by downloading the Virtual Appliance directly from Socialtext.com. This delivers IT a full private instance of the Socialtext platform, without encountering any of the friction that hardware-supported, traditional, behind-the-firewall deployments usually entail. It also gives companies the ability to host their data as they try Socialtext, something we know the market craves as some freemium models hold IT captive to buy their data back from vendors.
2. Expanding channel partner programs
Today we’re also announcing the ability of a new distribution channel via our partner program. In addition to our referral, reseller and integrator partners, we’ll be rolling out the ability to distribute Socialtext via a network of OEM Partners. In doing so, we’re making it easier for traditional application vendors to make Socialtext a social layer that spans the entire enterprise. To learn more, please e-mail partners@socialtext.com.
As we are now in a position to insert scale and leverage into our business model better than ever before, we have reorganized our resources in the way to best capitalize on these opportunities. We look forward to passing the benefits of scale and leverage on to our customers, and to the exciting work in the months ahead.
At New York Event, Customers Share How They Leverage Social Software to Improve Business Performance
In New York on Thursday, we hosted the first of a Socialtext event series that will be taking place all over the country, bringing together Socialtext customers and IT professionals who want to hear the benefits, challenges and experiences of implementing social software.
Held at the Silverleaf Tavern in midtown Manhattan, our main speaker was Anand Padmanabhan, CIO of NYU Stern. Anand and his team has deployed social software to nearly 10,000 faculty, students, and staff at NYU Stern, fundamentally transforming communication between those constituencies.
Anand discussed how NYU Stern approached social software adoption: Combine traditional, informational portal technologies with the easy, social tools inside Socialtext. The result: A vibrant social intranet where work gets done at NYU Stern.
Michael Idinopulos, our vice president of customer success, also spoke during the event. Michael has coined a phrase that has been very popular in both our customer base and industry followers: Social software in the flow of work. His overall point: If social software exists outside of key business processes and the systems a company has in place, it will be impossible for a company to realize its value. Organizations like NYU Stern, he emphasized, identified key areas and pain points that social software could address, which is why they’ve enjoyed great adoption and value.
We appreciated everyone who attended the New York event and the great conversations that took place. The Socialtext team is looking forward to our next one in Chicago.
InformationWeek: Socialtext Named Number One Social Software Vendor
InformationWeek released its Enterprise 2.0 Vendor Evaluation Survey, an assessment of enterprise technology vendors that deliver social applications inside the enterprise. Not only did the survey find staggering adoption of social software across organizations, Socialtext ranked number one in overall performance, beating out competition new and old.
Alex Wolfe, the editor in chief of InformationWeek.com, authored a summary of the report, and put the findings into context:
“We use two sets of criteria to rank vendors. The first set rates the relative importance of 12 standard benchmarks used for all product sets. The other measures vendors against criteria tailored to specific features and capabilities customers seek in the product category–for Enterprise 2.0 applications, these include the ability to integrate with internal applications, quality of the user interface, and completeness of the feature set. Notably, respondents to this survey favored smaller players like Socialtext even when we delved into very specific Enterprise 2.0 features”
Our friends in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber will debate the methodology, but we like the premise of it: Rather than interviewing the vendors, this report is based on the feedback from more than 600 IT professionals. While Socialtext participates in many analyst assessments of the market, those reports tend to be much more subjective, favoring larger and less innovative vendors that check off features rather than adding real business value. We believe social software is successful when it exists firmly in the flow of work — enhancing, rather than ignoring, the business processes a company has in place.
Our strong performance in this report reflects what’s been a universal goal for Socialtext the past few years: Let’s deliver the simple, social tools that people want to get their job done, while giving IT the security, scalability and flexibility they require — all with the low total cost of ownership that comes with Software as a Service.
During our all-company meetings, Eugene, our CEO, always says the best innovations come from customers (and the vendors who are smart enough to listen to them). For us, this customer-focused approach is helping us deliver social software that enables people to perform their best work with colleagues. This survey is a nice reminder that we’re having some great success.
Press & Analyst Happy Hour in San Francisco Last Night
Last night, outside the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the Thirsty Bear on Howard Street, some of the Socialtext brass met with our friends in the blogger, media and analyst community as part of an ongoing set of happy hours. Eugene, our CEO, reluctantly let me pick out the appetizers, though I failed to take into account the fact we had some vegetarians in our midst (sorry again). Ross, our chairman and co-founder, and Britta, our new chief marketing officer, were also on hand.
For me, I enjoyed talking with Deloitte’s Chris Heuer about how we define the value of social software inside companies, and the semantics of explaining it to people who aren’t ardent industry followers (such as that pesky “Enterprise 2.0 versus social business” argument). We tend to emphasize the former — not because E20 is a perfect term either, but because we find “social business” has the wrong ring to it when you talk to key champions at companies.
We’re looking forward to the next one…
Webinar Recording: See How Two Socialtext Customers Leverage Knowledge with Social Software
Yesterday, Socialtext participated in a KMWorld webinar called “Social Tools for Business: Engage, Optimize, Collaborate.” Alan Lepofsky, our Director of Product Marketing, gave a talk on how social software brings people to the forefront by not only surfacing what content and knowledge is shared across a company, but by which colleagues. He also talked about how social tools enhance key business processes, encourage expertise sharing, and eliminate knowledge silos.
He highlighted these themes through the lens of two Socialtext customers: GT Nexus, a global supply chain company, and Hayes Knight, an accounting firm in Australia and New Zealand. Below are slides from yesterday’s webinar, along with Alan’s commentary. We hope you enjoy them, and let us know if you have any questions.
Social Software Is About People and Business Process
View more presentations from http://www.slideshare.net/Socialtext”>Socialtext
Free KMWorld Webinar Tuesday: Improve Business Performance with Social Software
At Socialtext, we believe that social software implementations are successful when they complement and enhance key business processes a company already has in place. By bringing people to the forefront, social software brings context and awareness to the valuable knowledge and content being shared throughout the enterprise.
Those will be among the topics covered on Tuesday’s KMWorld Webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern: “Social Tools For Business: Engage, Optimize, Collaborate.” (Click that link to register for free). My colleague, Alan Lepofsky, will discuss how Socialtext customers are utilizing social software to improve business performance and key performance indicators (He will name and cite specific case studies). He’ll also show how one company has deployed an enterprise-wide intranet to leverage organizational knowledge and improve context behind that knowledge.
The webinar will be moderated by Andy Moore, KMWorld’s publisher, and will also feature content management speakers. It promises to be an interesting mix of perspectives, and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. There will be Q&A session at the end, when you can field questions to Alan and the other speakers.
A little background on Alan:
Alan has deep roots in the enterprise collaboration world, having worked at IBM for 14 years before he came to Socialtext in 2008. He works very actively with our customers and product teams, and has been a leader in our Socialtext Connect product offering — which allows people to integrate traditional enterprise systems with our social software platform.
We hope to see you Tuesday!
Where Is Everybody? Moving Intranets from Static to Social
Making corporate intranets social is the main theme of Socialtext 4.6, which we announced today. The focus originated from my favorite source of insight: Our customers. I love it when they hit you over the head with use cases that emerge inside their companies.
Starting several months ago, we noticed an exciting pattern amidst many of newer customers: Their usage and adoption rates were accelerating on a curve previously unseen by us, or, frankly, most Enterprise 2.0 use cases for that matter.
Interestingly, several of these customers didn’t have grandiose plans of transforming their intranet. They merely sought to leverage social software to solve specific pain points their businesses faced. They were engaging in what our VP of customer success, Michael Idinopulos, would refer to as “In the flow of work” collaboration. They also wanted to eliminate knowledge and information silos that hampered business performance. In one case, the head of worldwide sales tasked about 200 people from his team, product marketing, and sales ops to improve training materials and product launches. In another case, we saw a broad, horizontal deployment to modernize knowledge sharing across disparate teams and functions.
But after launching these focused deployments, word spread fast.
Why?
Other employees looked at their intranets and realized what it was missing: People.
Pretty soon, employees outside the targeted usage groups at these companies started asking why they couldn’t have the same easy-to-use social applications in their intranet. Why did they have to tolerate the static, frustrating, and out-of-date intranet that was in place?
We’ve seen two results from their requests. Some of our customers have actually replaced the front door to their intranet with Socialtext – particularly with Socialtext Dashboard as the starting point. Dashboard allows people to not only access tools within Socialtext to connect with colleagues and share content, but they can also access other systems, applications and sites across their company. Others, though it wasn’t their intention at the onset, scrapped their intranet entirely and moved to Socialtext. These customers have transformed the look and feel of their intranet by injecting social patterns into it. Employees can share via microblogging, self-publish through blogs, collaborate on wikis, and form groups across organizational boundaries.
Meanwhile, my team also noticed a trend in the language used by our sales prospects. They began hearing phrases like “Our intranet stinks” or “No one can find anything in our intranet.” Just yesterday, I talked with the CIO of a large company who said, “We call our intranet ‘The Junk Drawer.’” Last month, we did a webinar called “Your Social Intranet – The Place Where Work Gets Done.” During the event, we ran a fun contest to see who could propose the funniest David Letterman-style “Top 10 ways you know your Intranet needs updating.” The visceral and sarcastic nature of the submissions we received speaks volumes about people’s frustration with current intranets. (More on that in future posts.)
So the new features that we’ve rolled up into Socialtext 4.6 are really the result of focusing our development and innovation through this lens – helping make your intranet more social. We’re doing as much as we can to make PEOPLE be a first-class object in your intranet. As a result, we can make the intranet be a place where people go to get work done together — not just a place to try to find information, documents, and application links.
Are You Ready To Make Your Intranet Social?
During yesterday’s Making Your Intranet Social webinar , Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee asked attendees to submit their ideas for the “Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet.” We received more than 100, fantastic submissions, and the winner (see below) will receive an Apple iPad and the two runner-ups Socialtext t-shirts. The ideas included references to Star Trek, Facebook, Post-It-Notes, Liquid Paper, blinking text, the water cooler, even Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network!
After a long review, I present you with the top ten as voted on by my fellow Socialtexters:
Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet:
10. The most common question about it is “What Intranet?”
9. Today employees just look for the cafeteria lunch menu
8. The CEO was given upgrade suggestions from their 5th grader
7. The employee directory still lists job titles from 6 years ago
6. You want to level the playing field between the introverts and extroverts
5. Your organization has more silos than on all of the farms in the state of Vermont
4. There are more servers under employees’ desks running wikis and blogs than in the server room
3. When you click on the link to open it, you hear “No, I’m sorry, Dave. I cannot do that …”
2. The CFO thought microblogging was cheaper than blogging
1. You’re not popular on Facebook but maybe you could be a corporate collaboration hero
Think you have a better one? Then share it with us in the comments section below.
We asked the same question internally and here are some of our own ideas:
- To change anything you need to launch DreamWeaver
- A common search result is “Your guess is as good as mine”
- The amount of “forgot password” requests exceeds actual log-ins
- Your still searching for the right person via org charts
- There is a logo that says “Download Internet Explorer 4.0 now!”
- Profile pictures are in ASCII art
- PROFS is one of the menu options
- 404 page says “Powered by Apache 0.8. Copyright 1998. All Rights Reserved”
While this was all in good fun, the fact is that many organizations are in serious need of an intranet upgrade. Some of yesterday’s participants shared with us the real reasons they are looking to update their intranet:
- Because taxonomies don’t solve problems, people do
- So that we can work and communicate more effectively
- An intranet without social is like a phone without a dial tone… missing its true potential
- We are going social to get out of our silos, collaborate, find info faster, connect with experts
- We need our intranet to be more social so that we can leverage our global capabilities and reach our full collective potential
- To help new employees who may not know something like how to book projectors or where to find specialists – they could quickly ask a colleague rather than sitting at their desks feeling despondent
- A more dynamic intranet with help us turn the “light bulb” into a spot light
For more information, a recorded playback of yesterday’s webinar is available. Are you ready to have Socialtext turn your intranet into a compelling and strategic corporate tool?
Socialtext – Where work gets done. Together.
Win a Free iPad at Tomorrow’s Forrester Webinar on Social Intranets
We hope you’re excited for tomorrow’s free Forrester Webinar on Social Intranets. During the webinar, Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee will ask the audience members to submit the “top reason why your company wants to make your intranet more dynamic and social.” The winner will receive a free iPad.
This is meant to be fun. The answers can be fictitious and snarky, mirroring a David Letterman “top 10” format. To determine the winner, the Socialtext staff will vote on the answers and tweet it from the Socialtext handle.
If you have haven’t done so already, register for this free webinar today!
About This Blog
Weblog on gaining business results from social software.
On this blog, Socialtext staffers and customers explore how companies can gain the most business value from their use of enterprise social software, including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis.
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Your Social Intranet: The Place Where Work Gets Done. Together.
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The webinar features a presentation and demo by The American Hospital Association (AHA), an organization that used the Socialtext platform to build a more social intranet that connects employees with the relevant colleagues and information they need. Tim Walters, a senior Forrester analyst, shares his research that highlights what key trends are driving the need for social intranets in the enterprise.
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