Telligent Gains Leverage on Its Cloud and Mobile Roadmaps

Telligent Systems, Inc. announced on Monday that it had acquired Leverage Software, a competing provider of enterprise social capabilities used to support communities and customer relationship management efforts (see press release). The deal closed at around 10:00am CST, after about two months of discussions and paperwork, according to Telligent’s Founder and CTO, Rob Howard, and Wendy Gibson, Telligent’s CMO. Leverage’s brand and people will be integrated into Telligent starting immediately, and technology integration will occur some time in 2012.

At first glance, this seemed like a straight-forward acquisition with a clear purpose. That initial impression was validated upon speaking with Howard and Gibson shortly after the news broke. Telligent gains several strategic pieces that will strengthen its offerings through the acquisition of Leverage, including cloud, mobile, and analytics technology; people with .NET and iOS development skills; and some marquee customers.

The single largest impact of the acquisition will be an accelerated delivery of Telligent’s cloud offerings roadmap. Telligent Community is available today in a hosted, single-tenant version only. Leverage Software’s platform was built on a multi-tenant SaaS architecture in 2003, so they have extensive experience in the cloud. Both vendor’s products and services are built on .NET and other Microsoft technologies, which should ease the transformation of Telligent Community (and, most likely, Enterprise) to a multi-tenant architecture. Additionally, the rich API set of Telligent’s Evolution platform should speed the integration of the vendors’ offerings in the near term. When asked, Howard noted that Telligent will continue its existing, early-stage efforts to build and deliver functionality on Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure.

Telligent’s mobile capabilities will also receive a boost from the Leverage Software acquisition. Leverage has developed an iOS-native version of Leverage Community, which is sold through Apple’s iTunes Store. Earlier this year, Telligent introduced tools in its Evolution platform that extend Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise to Apple’s iPhone, as well as Blackberry and Android devices. However, Telligent does not offer device-specific versions of its products. With their experience, Leverage’s developers should be able to change that fairly quickly, at least for iPhone and iPad. Telligent has previously discussed plans to build HTML5-compliant versions of its community applications as well.

Leverage Software claims to support 250 communities, with 15% of the Fortune 100 as customers. Well-known brands such as The Home Depot, Pearson, and Wells Fargo have demonstrated the scalability and effectiveness of Leverage’s technology. Telligent’s Gibson remarked that they are very pleased to be adding Leverage’s customers to their portfolio and that they would begin on-boarding them soon after the brands have been united.

Unlike some of its more marketing driven competitors, Telligent has grown its business the old-fashioned way, by quietly delivering a platform and applications that have helped customers meet well-defined, community-centric business objectives. The company has a loyal and highly enthusiastic customer base. Now, with the acquired assets of Leverage Software, Telligent is poised to accelerate its growth, as well as the success of its customers and their internal and external communities.

One other thing has been accelerated as a result of this acquisition – the consolidation of the Enterprise Social Software market. It will be interesting to watch Telligent in 2012, as it will likely make other acquisitions in order to offer additional functionality on its platform. Telligent would also be an attractive acquisition for a larger vendor seeking an extensible, Microsoft-centric enterprise social software platform. Either way, next year will be an interesting one for Telligent and its customers.

This entry was cross-posted from Meanders: The Dow Brook Blog. Telligent Systems, Inc. is a Dow Brook Advisory Services client.

The AIIM Community: Status Quo Prevails, but Change is Happening

This entry was cross-posted from Meanders: The Dow Brook Blog

I attended the AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo last week, in Washington, DC. It was my first AIIM event in 9 years. I had stayed away intentionally, because AIIM and the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) community had stagnated. Business and technology were changing, but the AIIM community remained fixated on things like document capture, storage, output, and archival. Sharing of, and collaborating on, active content was largely ignored.

Lately, I’ve been signs of renewal from AIIM’s leadership and staff, including an active, purposeful embrace of collaboration and social computing as important components of information management. (For example, AIIM published a paper on Systems of Engagement, authored by Geoffrey Moore, in January and a Social Business Roadmap in conjunction with last week’s conference.) So I thought it would be good to attend the event after my long absence, to learn first-hand whether or not change really was occurring in the AIIM community. The verdict:

Parts of the AIIM community remain deeply rooted in the past. The members who are trying to become more current and relevant are so busy talking about business and technology trends that they’ve lost focus on solving specific business problems.

First a word about the part of the community stuck in the past. Wandering the conference show floor made it crystal clear that the majority of the software and hardware vendors present were there to sell to the legacy AIIM crowd. I saw booth after booth touting imaging and other capture hardware and software, management solutions for electronic (and paper!) documents, and industrial-strength printing machines and software. Enough said.

The show floor did include a few vendors addressing the minority of the AIIM community interested in moving toward more lightweight, collaborative content management practices. Included in that group of vendors were Box.net, EMC/Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, and NewsGator.

One other thought about the show floor: the Web Content Management vendors were noticeably absent. It seems that they’ve moved on from the AIIM community, probably for a variety of reasons. I hope they will come back soon and try again to push the conceptual boundaries of content management in both large organizations and small-to-medium businesses.

The keynote speeches and the few breakout sessions I attended were more visionary than the majority of the exhibits. Keynoters reported on high level trends affecting how businesses create, consume, share and generally manage content. The vendors who had bought keynote spots also presented visions of content management that made their respective, revised market strategies seem irrefutable.

Similarly, most of the breakout sessions I went to presented fairly high level pictures of how content technologies are evolving and where they are (or should be) headed. There were some exceptions, including a session that I co-presented with Dan Levin, COO of Box.net, on current, real-life use cases for mobile content sharing. However, sessions that focused on how the emerging breed of content management practices and supporting technologies can help solve newer (as well as old) business problems were rare.

In short, there were two conferences taking place simultaneously at AIIM/Info360. The first can best be described as representing the status quo. The second can be summed up as follows:

SOCIAL, blah, blah, blah, COLLABORATION, blah, blah, blah, COMMUNITY, blah, blah, blah, ENGAGEMENT, blah, blah, blah, MOBILE, blah, blah, blah, CLOUD, blah, blah, blah, USABILITY, blah, blah, blah…

I applaud the changes that AIIM’s leadership and some forward-thinking members of the community are attempting to make. They have to start by finally acknowledging the macro trends that are occurring, then crafting and articulating a visionary response. This year’s conference did a very good job of that. I hope that by next year, presenters (speakers and exhibitors) at the AIIM show will move beyond the high level messages and discuss how managed sharing of active content can help solve specific business problems and enable organizations to take advantage of tangible opportunities.

LinkedIn Signal Demonstrates The Power of Role-Based Activity Stream Filters

LinkedIn today announced Signal, a new feature (currently in beta) that lets members see an activity stream that combines LinkedIn status updates and Twitter posts from other members who have opted-in to the feature. LinkedIn has licensed the Twitter firehose to incorporate all of its members’ tweets into the site, not just tweets with the #in hashtag embedded, as is current practice.

While it is hard to imagine anyone other than corporate and independent talent recruiters will make LinkedIn their primary Twitter client, Signal does have an element that is worthy of emulation by other social networks and enterprise social software providers that incorporate an activity stream (and which of those does not these days!) That feature is role-specific filters.

I wrote previously in this post about the importance of providing filters with which individuals can narrow their activity stream. I also noted that the key is to understand which filters are needed by which roles in an organization. LinkedIn apparently gets this, judging by the screenshot pictured below.

LinkedIn Signal screenshot courtesty of TechCrunch

Notice the left-hand column, labeled “Filter by”. LinkedIn has most likely researched a sample of its members to determine which filters would be most useful to them. Given that recruiters are the most frequent users of LinkedIn, the set of filters displayed in the screenshot makes sense. They allow recruiters to see tweets and LinkedIn status updates pertaining to LinkedIn members in specific industries, companies, and geographic regions. Additionally, the Signal stream can be filtered by strength of connection in the LinkedIn network and by post date.

The activity stream of every enterprise social software suite (ESS) should offer such role-based filters, instead of the generic ones they currently employ. Typical ESS filtering parameters include individuals, groups or communities, and workspaces. Some vendors offer the ability to filter by status as a collaborator on an object, such as a specific document or sales opportunity. A few ESS providers allow individuals to create custom filters for their activity stream. While all of these filters are helpful, they do not go far enough in helping individuals narrow the activity stream to view updates needed in a specific work context.

The next logical step will be to create standard sets of role-based filters that can be further customized by the individuals using them. Just as LinkedIn has created a filter set that is useful to recruiters, ESS providers and deploying organizations must work together to create valuable filter sets for employees performing specific jobs and tasks. Doing so will result in increased productivity from, and effectiveness of, any organization’s greatest asset – it’s people.