June

21, 2012

Enterprise 2.0 Gets Down to Business http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/06/21/enterprise-2-0-gets-down-to- business/ Russ Garland If you build it, they wont always comeat least not without a good reason, or maybe a badge. For a few years, bringing Facebook to the corporate world seemed cool all by itself but now the maturing Enterprise 2.0 movement is digging into the task of getting employees to engage with all that nifty collaboration software by making it simple, intuitive and fun. You shouldnt have a separate social strategy, Nathan Bricklin, a senior vice president who heads social strategy at Wells Fargo, said during a keynote at Enterprise 2.0 this week in Boston. What you have is a business strategy. In developing social tools for the financial companys 265,000 employees, Bricklin said he was mindful that at Wells Fargo, people live in email and that part of successful collaboration is reducing unnecessary collaboration. At the point of daily use, people want it simple, he said. Another keynoter, Bryan Barringer, manager of enterprise collaboration implementation at FedEx, said his challenge is changing a corporate mindset where people tend to protect what they know. Hes developing a rewards program using gamification technology to identify people who have knowledge and encourage them to share it by awarding badges to people for activities such as blogging. Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor Badgeville, a 70-employee Menlo Park, Calif., company that has raised $40 million in venture capital, including a $25 million Series C round in May led by InterWest Partners, has developed technology to identify, track, measure and then reward users on top of existing corporate communications, productivity or social-media tools such as email or Yammer. Behavior change is very challenging, said Badgevilles director of product marketing, Chris Lynch, who previously worked at Socialtext, a developer of collaboration software. Badgevilles software is aimed at customers as well as employees. Samsung uses it

to draw visitors back to its Samsung Nation website by rewarding them for registering a product or submitting a review. Another exhibitor, Mountain View, Calif.-based Moxie Software, which counts Foundation Capital and Oak Investment Partners as backers, has welded together its customer engagement and internal collaboration software to help consumer- facing businesses respond at the speed of a tweet, said Nikhil Govindaraj, its vice president, products. Collaboration as a standalone is really not going anywhere, he said. San Francisco-based DoubleDutch, which in April closed a $2 million venture round from Bullpen Capital, Floodgate Fund and others, is betting the store on mobile software to improve the productivity of Salesforce.com tools by getting sales reps to update their accounts more often, said Chief Executive Lawrence Coburn. The technology, in beta testing now, is designed to reduce the time it takes to log data, introduce a bit of competition into the process, and integrate location and contextual information. SaneBox, a Boston-based start-up that is self-financed so far, is tackling that old standby, email, which seems to be regaining some respect among the Enterprise 2.0 crowd. Dimitri Leonov, a co-founder of the company, said the software works within whatever email platform a customer uses to identify email that needs immediate attention and to store the rest for later. The service, free for the first two weeks and $5 a month thereafter, is especially popular with people who get more 60 to 70 or more emails a day, Leonov said. I think the market is ripening up for a more grown-up version of social, Sameer Patel, SAPs new global vice president and general manager of enterprise social software, said in an interview. The former adviser to the Enterprise 2.0 event said vendors are starting to think about how to integrate with existing business systems and pointed to supply chain management as one area of huge, untapped potential. Its the sort of thing that can move this industry forward, Patel said.