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Posts Tagged ‘Enterprise Platform’

MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?

Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.

MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.

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MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform.

It’s also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department.

What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications.

MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups.

Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment.

MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications.

This is MindTouch’s first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.

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Voxeo raises $9M for voice communications business

Voxeo said today it has raised $9 million in funding for its voice communications business.

The Orlando, Fla.-based company is focused on making open platforms based on what it calls “unlocked communications,” such as voice-over-Internet-protocol on mobile platforms or unified messaging and voice communications. It essentially helps companies run their phone systems using modern web-based technologies. The investors include North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. The company will use the money for acquisitions and other expansions.

In the past 14 months, Voxeo has acquired three companies. This is the first investment made by the Florida Growth Fund, a $250 million partnership between the State Board of Administration of Florida and private equity firm Hamilton Lane, which has $88 billion under management.

The company’s products include a self-service enterprise platform that lets companies automate their customer and employee communications via phone, text message, instant message, Twitter and more. It also has application servers for enterprises, enterprise VoIP platforms. The company has more than 100,000 developers that use its platforms to create products for 45,000 companies.

Voxeo was founded in 1999 and has 140 employees. Rivals include Genesys, Convergys/Intervoice, and Microsoft’s Tellme subsidiary. The company has seen triple-digit revenue growth for five years and has been profitable for 22 quarters.

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Yammer Adds Microblogging to Microsoft Outlook & Windows Mobile

Yammer is a “Twitter for the enterprise” platform that (to our dismay) won TechCrunch50 last year. A year later the enterprise microblogging space is growing rapidly and Yammer is still moving forward, along with competitors like Socialcast and Socialtext Signals. Today Yammer has announced a pair of Microsoft-centric additions that should be big for business users: an Outlook plug-in and a Windows Mobile app. Outlook is still huge in the enterprise, and a decent working integration with it should be an easier sell than any other kind of desktop access.

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Any enterprise microblogging and messaging apps worth their salt have some kind of desktop app by this point. Most of them, including Yammer, have started out with Adobe AIR. The big advantage with AIR is that it’s cross-platform. But getting users to start using yet another app on their already cluttered desktop isn’t always successful.

With the Outlook plug-in, an extra pane is added alongside the other aspects to Outlook. Users can then message and reply to colleagues, upload attachments, and do basically everything that the AIR app does.

The fundamental difference is that the plug-in takes microblogging to where many enterprise users are already spending a lot of their time. A prime example is how users will be able to CC an email to either their whole Yammer network or to a specific group. As for the other app, Windows Mobile may not be quite as vital as Outlook but it still has a robust presence in the enterprise mobile market.

One of the persistent dilemmmas with standalone apps like Yammer is that (even with desktop and mobile apps) it is never easy to include it in preexisting workflows. It’s always harder to sell an enterprise app that doesn’t play nice with systems already in place. Integrating Yammer with two Microsoft products that continue to hold mind share in the enterprise world is a step towards solving this problem.

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