Enterprise 2.0 shootout
Posted on by ak
Panel of E2.0 companies sponsored by Telligent and Small World Solutions
Question: Why did you start this?
Michael Wilson (Small World): Both parents were deaf and he grew up understanding how much people were reliant on their communities. He wanted to defragment latent communities for corps.
Guy formerly at MS: Wanted to create products that better reached an audience (he spent a long time at MS)
Guy formerly at Fidelity (Now CEO of Telligent): wanted to sold a genuine need that customers had (he said that Fidelity was a hotbed of innovation “not”) and present some ROI
Question: What is your least favorite Web 2.0 term?
Candidates:
- Enterprise 2.0
- Web 2.0
- Coopertition
- Crowdsourcing
- Cloud computing
Winner was Cloud computing. Web 2.0 was close second.
Question: Is social networking always a good technology for the corporation
Consensus: no, it depends on the corporation
- If it is right for them, they are already playing with it
- Some companies are “anti comments” and command-and-control
Question: What technology do you use and why?
Small World: LAMP: cost advantage, and highly scalable: Facebook use it
ex-MS guy: .NET/SQL Server/ASP: He knows and loves it, and customers trust this platform, especially as most deployments are inhouse ones
Telligent: Powerpoint! (teasing MS guy)
Jive: Java: big scale enterprise deployments: IT crowd like this as it works well for inhouse deployments.
Question: Which Industry does E2.0 seem to serve best
Consensus: not service companies (law, finance, acct etc) as their demand is file centric, not content centric
More product companies: there’s always a product release that has to be on time
Offline companies in declining markets
The most “dangerous” clients are tech-savvy web-based ones who welcome the technology, but think “they can do this themselves”
Question: What about Change Management?
Build it and they will come is a dangerous fallacy
Sales: Fill a need vs create a need
Services group is important
What about Pricing?
Rob published all his pricing:ÂÂ
Free
5k/server
20k/server
Sam (CMO of Jive): Pricing is per seat for internal use, up to 50k
Implementation fee, setup fee, then monthly fee
Some customers (eg Disney) bought more support (ie more moderation)
Small World: Fixed fee, plus capacity fee if they exceed a generous page-view limit. (AK: no customers have exceeded this, according to the BizDev guy)
What’s your sales/mktg exp:booked revenue ratio? Also, how long does it take for you to acquire a customer?
Only Jive answered this.ÂÂ
3-6 months on average to acquire new customers, some as short as 1 month, some as long as 15 months.
Cost of acquiring new customers is thousands of dollars each: training, education, travel, webinars etc.
What questions do you hate from prospects?
What if someone says something bad about us?
How can I monetize this thing?
I want this in 24 hours
I want a source code agreement (Small World)
Other snippets:
Forester estimates E2.0 will be a $4bn business by 2013, of which Enterprise Social networking will be half.
Early industry, stovepiped. Customers asking for features, such as:
Interfaces to other systems
Openness
Participation from fellow employees
API
Rationale for development of this space was that most college kids are using facebook now and will demand similar tools when they start working. They can only see this space increasing in size/value.
Comcast are believed to be monitoring twitter for complaints about Comcast, and deploying customer service to deal with these
Eating own dogfood: important for CEOs of E2.0 networking companies to write blogs etc.