Every Friday, I’ll be reviewing a vendor in the emergent collaboration space and will provide an overview on that vendor which includes aspects from leadership and vision to technology and market focus. If you are vendor and would like to participate, please contact me (my email address is in the sidebar as is my Twitter link). The goal of these posts is not to bash or praise vendors but to simply offer an objective view on what various vendors offer so that YOU can decide if they are a good fit for your business. Every post will cover the same elements for each vendors. If you have ideas or recommendations for other items to be covered in these reviews, please let me know and I will consider them. Other collaboration vendor reviews can be found here.

This week I’m taking at look at Telligent which has been in business for around 8 years and is headquartered in Dallas Texas with offices in Seattle, Chicago, Paris, and Australia.  Telligent has taken one round of funding thus far and has had profitable quarter.  I spoke with Wendy Gibson the CMO and Rob Howard, the CTO and co-founder.  Telligent describes themselves as “social community software for the enterprise.”

Integration capabilities

Telligent believes in the “Social Layer”, that social isn’t just another bolted on application or silo that you create in the organization; social layers across an organization’s entire IT investments.  Telligent can integrate with a host of other applications and solutions such as: Microsoft SharePoint, Lync, FAST, CRM integration (Salesforce), CMS integration (Sitecore, SharePoint), InnovationCast (idea management), among others.

Support

Telligent offers three types of support: standard, premier, and developer.  Standard support includes live phone an email chat with support engineers, 24/7 access to the developer community and business and technical resource portal, and direct access to your own personal relationship manager.  Premier support includes everything from standard plus 24/7 live email and phone support and weekly summary meetings with the relationship manager.  Developer support includes everything from standard plus live phone and email support for custom developed modules.  As far as pricing for support goes, this is something Telligent didn’t want to disclose at this time.

Pricing

While Telligent didn’t share their exact pricing with me they did say that they serve the small to very large size enterprises.   Their pricing is based per use case (internal vs. external) and deployment method (on-premise vs. SaaS) and the fees vary –  small companies around a couple of thousand per month to large Employee Networking deals (based on # of users) which get into the hundreds of thousands.

Maintenance & Upgrades

System updates and security patches are implemented on a monthly cycle with critical system patches and updates reviewed out of cycle and applied as soon as possible. Telligent software updates are applied during a coordinated maintenance window.  The multi-tenant solution (a capability added after the acquisition of Leverage Software) means that customers can now automatically receive updates instead of waiting to upgrade their communities, which is just another way to make it easier for them to deploy and maintain Telligent.

Overall direction and strategic vision for the company and industry

Telligent made a series of announcements recently such as the acquisition of Leverage Software and the recent partnership with InnovationCast for ideation.  They are spending a lot of time in the software as a service delivery model.  Customers still want to have a choice of on-premise or cloud based solutions.  Analytics is another core area where Telligent is going to focus on.  The third area of focus is going to be around the continued investment in the platform and pulling in and integrating the social layer everywhere.

Telligent believes we are in the beginning stages of a lot of enterprise systems today.  With the shift in how enterprises use technology there will be an increasing demand for companies to become more open.  The fact that SharePoint has some social tools is not going to be good enough.  Organizations need to be more even open and more even more social and accessible.  Telligent also believes that social will be the glue that ties various enterprise systems together.  Some companies have looked at what is happening today as a revolution but Telligent seeks this as an evolution of business.  Social is becoming a fundamental part of strategy for organizations and the future is going rely heavily on analytics and understanding and predicting behavior.  We are heading to information evolution akin to what Amazon.com did for products but this will be for information.

Key differentiating factors from competition

• Customer service/experience
• Social layer not portal 2.0 or a destination
• Social group hierarchy, allows you to model and build your community against of hierarchy of how you want your information to flow
• Social platform, base of capabilities that enables the social layer, set of services and apis you can build on top of. (Telligent provides a social community platform, versus a set of standalone or disparate social media applications. This is key for ease of use, easy community management, integration abilities, scalability issues, the ability to create new applications and more.)
• Innovation around the product and integrations
• Social community expertise

Customization
With support for CSS targeting, you can create both site-wide and page-specific styling by adding custom CSS rules through the theme’s configuration page in the Control Panel. Telligent’s Widget Studio also allows for a fully customized user experience without any need for custom development by enabling the management and authorship of any widgets directly within the Control Panel using a version of the Velocity templating language. Telligent also maintains a Marketplace for new widgets developed by our customers, partners and independent developers, further enabling platform extensions.

Time to go live

This varies based on the community, but Telligent has seen communities come up very quickly with their quickstart Community-as-a-Service offering.  Other communities take longer to launch (a few weeks), depending on the scope of project and strategy.

Overall technology

• Built 100% on the Microsoft stack
• Integrates with any open application. Telligent has a strong heritage with Microsoft that extends back to our founding in 2004, but we also recognize that our customers have diverse technology investments. To satisfy a broad set of integration needs, Telligent provides extensibility of the platform via our platform APIs.
• Scales globally to expand the reach of businesses. Large global brands such as Dell and Microsoft trust Telligent to deliver engaging community experiences to millions of users worldwide.

Industry/vertical focus

Telligent powers social communities for more than 3,000 companies worldwide and boasts clients such as Dell, Microsoft, Cadbury and Reader’s Digest.  A broad range of organizations build their online communities with Telligent, including technology, consumer goods, government, non-profits, associations, and more.  Telligent is tracking 26 industries in their customer database.  At least 60 percent of these verticals have more than 10 customers per vertical.

Capabilities (customer, partner, employee collaboration)
Employee, partner, community

My take

I’ll throw out the disclaimer here and say that I didn’t get the full demo from Telligent which I had hoped to see (so that I can view a life walk-through of the platform) which makes it a bit hard for me to write a detailed review about it.  But from what I was did see (screenshots) and was told, Telligent offers everything you would expect to see from an enterprise class vendor.  I also don’t have details on pricing which makes it a bit hard to compare with other vendors.

I received the live demo of the product and was very impressed with the UI and design of the platform.  It’s very intuitive, clean, and sleek.  It’s actually one of the better products out there I’ve seen from a design/UI perspective and definitely has a modern feel to it which I’m sure many customers appreciate.  I had some time to browse through their “Marketplace” as well which has some interesting add-ons.  The “Marketplace” itself is not yet as robust as some of the others out there but I think they will be building this out (or at least I hope they will!)

Telligent appears to offer the full suite of collaboration features for companies that are looking to work with their employees, customers, or partners.  With their recent acquisition of Leverage Software and their relationship with InnovationCast their platform has become quite powerful and robust.

Telligent did mention something which I found interesting (but not the first time I heard this from a vendor) and that was they are going to be really focusing on analytics and understanding behavior. This is going to lead to the next evolution of collaboration vendors which I call “smart platforms.”  I like that Telligent has had some profitable quarters already which again is not something we typically see from some of the larger vendors in the space.

Is Telligent a vendor you should take a look at?  Probably.  Yes.  I suspect their pricing isn’t going to be that far off from what you would expect to pay for a competing vendor so it’s certainly worth your time to look at.

You can find out more by visiting Telligent.com

Screenshots

UPDATED 2/24

Every Friday, I’ll be reviewing a vendor in the emergent collaboration space and will provide an overview on that vendor which includes aspects from leadership and vision to technology and market focus. If you are vendor and would like to participate, please contact me (my email address is in the sidebar as is my Twitter link). The goal of these posts is not to bash or praise vendors but to simply offer an objective view on what various vendors offer so that YOU can decide if they are a good fit for your business. Every post will cover the same elements for each vendors. If you have ideas or recommendations for other items to be covered in these reviews, please let me know and I will consider them. Other collaboration vendor reviews can be found here.

This week I’m taking at look at SkyDox which was founded in 2009 and is currently headquartered in London with around 20 employees.  The company has developed a cloud-enabled file-sharing and collaboration platform that allows companies to view, comment, search, store, deliver, manage and collaborate on over 200 types of files.  Skydox has spent two years in product development with input from enterprise development customers in media, finance, creative, and professional services.  The management team comes from a diverse background, holding senior level positions in enterprise software, high availability data center infrastructure, SaaS, and document comparison technology areas.  I spoke with Ali Moinuddin the CMO and Dan Von Weihe the VP of product management.

Integration capabilities

With SkyDox, companies need not replace their current software in order to harness the benefits of the cloud.  SkyDox integrates with enterprise content management and office productivity tools, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PPT and Sharepoint, as well as Documentum and IBM’s filenet. It provides plugins for the MS Office Suite (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) that integrate out-of-the box and into the users’ native application.  These plugins bring SkyDox platforms’ functionality into the application, so users do not have to launch a bowser to benefit from SkyDox’s cloud-enables platform, which includes, activity feeds, IM style commenting, meetings and conference calls, and presence indicators.  The two-way integration is out-of-the- box, allowing companies to upload and extract data and documents from the SkyDox cloud platform easily.

Support

For enterprise customers there is a dedicated, 24/7 support line.  SkyDox also offers a knowledge portal and self-help support content for any user with a business license.  A ticketing system (run during business hours) is also available to request support.  Overall, the support system includes: online support, email support, phone support, and user group – all available 24/7.  All aspects of the SkyDox platform may be set up, authenticated, provisioned, purchased, downloaded, installed and administered through self-help user and administrative interfaces.  Content is typically loaded into the system through connections to each user’s personal collection of files.  Larger organisational collections of data can be moved onto the SkyDox system through bespoke projects according to scope and process relevant to the project.

Pricing

There are three kinds of users: business, enterprise, and guests.  Here is a rundown of each

Business (for small to medium sized teams, departments or businesses that collaborate internally and externally).

• $15 / month
• Per seat licensing
• 2G upload storage limit per file
• 500GB total
• Limited functionality
• 30 day free trial
• 3 – 100 seats

Enterprise: Price on Application (for organizations that require scalable document sharing and collaboration tools customised to their business and integrated with third party applications).

• Volume licencing
• ECM and workflow Integration
• Custom deployment
• Flexible storage options (Per user and total)
• Up to 99.99% SLA
• Private Cloud deployment
• 100 plus seats

Guest:

• A Guest login is available free of charge to people who have been invited to a file or folder by an Enterprise or Business user.

Maintenance & Upgrades

As a SaaS vendor, upgrades and support are built into the enterprise and business license fee, with no additional costs.  SkyDox normally releases a product upgrade around once a quarter.  They develop upgrades based on a combination of following their product roadmap while also integrating customer feedback and development requests.

Overall direction and strategic vision for the company and industry

The company’s vision is to make secure enterprise collaboration simpler and easier by creating a single platform that harnesses social business, file sharing, storage and synchronization tools to deliver a user- and content-centric collaboration experience.

Not all technology makes life easy, so SkyDox always thinking about how to get closer to the business user to make their life easier.  They looked at Box and DropBox and thought of ways to make those types of technologies better and combining them with emerging Web 3.0 technologies.  SkyDocs put a strong focus on simplicity and ease of use, while also looking to integrate profile-type of information for employees.   They are looking to explore partnerships to handle the remaining internal social networking features that some of the other platforms have.

They will continue to focus on document- and user-centric collaboration management and rely on others for the rest of the functionality.  SkyDox is looking to raise more money in 2012 and expand the team to focus on the product, marketing, awareness and visibility.  They believe the cloud collaboration market is still in its infancy but they are mainly seeing demand for adding new social business functionality to legacy ECMs and DMS.  There is a lot of interest in new tools, but also lots of reluctance to abandon old tools.  SkyDox believes that we will definitely see consolidation in the freemium space.

Key differentiating factors from competition

1. Secure file-sharing and content management

SkyDox allows users to create workspaces and multi-level folders for secure online storage, access, sharing and collaboration. Extended file-format and file-size support enable users to upload and view virtually any file type or file size depending on a service-level agreement (SLA).  Version control, drag-and-drop upload features and file synchronisation simplify the collaboration experience for both online and offline work.

2. Document-centric, secure collaboration and communication

SkyDox offers a folder and file-centric collaboration experience. Users can upload, review, make content-specific comments, and update documents based on specific user defined permissions. Additionally, the rich collaboration functionality includes file-level presence indicators, real-time and personalized activity alerts, activity feeds, Web-based meetings, screen sharing, and social media publishing.

3. Administrative controls and insight

System administrators can oversee account activity and settings using the SkyDox account management console. They can add or remove users, edit user details and change account settings. Administrators and users are provided with graphical insights about system and file access and uploads, as well as file-level tracking and audit trails. Branding features allow SkyDox administrators to create a unique look and feel using custom wallpapers and logos.

4. Mobile access

SkyDox supports over 20 mobile operating systems, including those for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone and Nokia.

5. Flexible deployment options

These include a private hosted cloud exclusively for the use of one organisation or community; a highly secure public hosted cloud that is non-geographically specific and can be accessed wherever there is an Internet connection by individuals, public and private sector organisations; and an on-premise behind-the-firewall deployment.

Customization

SkyDox built custom plug-in applications for Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint and a deep two-way integration into SharePoint, bringing the cloud and social business tools, networking and collaboration functionality to Microsoft.  They support nearly every major file types from popular productivity applications, including video, spread sheets, pictures and PDFs.  Enterprise customers can set up workflows and or request customization as required. These are fully supported by the SkyDoxDev and implementation teams.

Time to go live

Sign up is self-provisioned – as easy as registering a profile on Facebook , taking less than a minute.   When ECM (enterprise content management) integrations are concerned, the time to go live may vary from one week to three months.  This depends on the scope of customization and workflow requirements and regional roll out plans as well as the information architecture of an organization ( centralized or distributed).

Overall technology and security

SkyDox has data center partners in the U.S, Europe and Asia.  They store data in Switzerland because they have the most stringent data security laws, allowing SkyDox to meet European data location legislation.   All data centre partners are ISO 201/SAS 70/FDA/HIPAA certified.

Regarding user authentication, all transactions with SkyDox must be executed from within the context of a personal, authenticated user account.  Access to view or edit content stored or shared with the SkyDox platform is only possible once users have been authenticated by creating unique passwords and verifying their email addresses.

SkyDox encrypts personal information and digital content before it leaves the user’s computer with 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to ensure that no one else can read it.  As for application layer security – SkyDox stores all files in a proprietary, binary-fragmented format rather than the original format.  This means that files are unintelligible except to users and guests who have gained authenticated access through the SkyDox platform.

SkyDox has an open source philosophy that enables them to enhance their platform with new functionality as the market evolves.

Industry/vertical focus

Companies that have an abundance of knowledge workers, and ‘knowledge based’ vertical sectors, which include:

• Creative services (PR, Marketing, Advertising , media bysing services)
• Professional service
• Financial services
• Technology and Telecommunications
• Government and Education
• Legal
• Healthcare /Pharma.
• Not for Profit

Capabilities (customer, partner, employee collaboration)

Employee and partner (can share information with customers but not develop managed customer communities)

My take

You know, I’m really starting to wonder how some of the vendors I’m reviewing aren’t as big as some of the mainstream vendors out there (of course I know the answers is mainly marketing).  It’s actually a bit frustrating to see really great vendors which are not as widely known as the “bigger guys”.  This brings me to SkyDox.

The best way to describe SkyDox is sort of like a Box, Google Docs, Wiki, and Gotomeeting mix.  SkyDox really focuses on content and information management and collaboration but it isn’t what I would call a collaboration suite.  For example you wouldn’t really use SkyDox to find subject matter experts within your organization, submit ideas to a general community, or use it for Q&A platform.  You may technically be able to do some of these things but that is not the focus of what SkyDox is.  For full “social” functionality SkyDox is better used when integrated with something else such as a Sharepoint or Jive (as is Box).

As far as I can tell SkyDox has most (if not all) of the features of Box.  I say most because I wasn’t sure about things such as Google Apps integration, Desktop sync, Ipad access (which I’m assuming they don’t have since I didn’t see an app in the app store), or public sharing of files (for example send a link to someone not in the application who can view, download, or edit a document).  Enterprise customers do enjoy a few extras though such as meeting and web conferencing directly within SkyDox (which is not something that Box offers along with synchronous editing which SkyDox does have).

UPDATED

I was just told that SkyDox can be used via the Ipad with all the same functionality.  Although an app doesn’t exist it can be accessed via the mobile version of the site.  Also, links can be made public to share files with others.

The flexible deployment options are great and the pricing is very comparable to what other vendors are offering.  The integration with MS Office is something I also think has been very well done, you can actually access and see SkyDox right from your Office applications.  Finally, I really like that “guests” don’t require a separate license to use the platform which means that if I have a client I want to invite to work with me on a strategy document, they can do so free of charge.

The one thing I wish Skydox had was a slightly different look and feel.  To me, some of the icons and visuals feel a bit dated and old and could use a more modern refresh.

Overall SkyDox is a platform which should be considered for any size company that is looking at document and information management and collaboration solutions.  I can tell you right away that if you are looking at a vendor like Box, you should also be looking at SkyDox.  I can’t believe the company is only 20 people and I’m expecting some very interesting things to happen if/when they secure another round of financing.

To find out more check out their website at SkyDox.com

Screenshots

This week I’m taking at look at HyperOffice which has been in the business of cloud based business applications for the past seven years.  HyperOffice is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland and currently has around 30 employees.  It is privately funded and profitable.  I spoke with the co-founder Farzin Arsanjani and Ross Savage (although I was never given his formal role or title).

Integration capabilities

HyperOffice offers extensive integration with Outlook and all Outlook modules (calendars, contacts and tasks).  HyperOffice also includes push and sync capabilities for most ActiveSync, SyncML and other popular mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.  Basic phones are supported with push email to SMS.

HyperOffice supports integration with Active directory and LDAP.  Although out of the box integration’s with platforms such Sharepoint is not available they can still be done with some customization. The HyperOffice technology is quite modular and extensive APIs are available to embed HyperOffice components and applications within other platforms. Third party web-based applications can also be integrated within HyperOffice using single sign-on.

Support

Free technical support is available for all customers with live telephone and chat support.  This distinguishes HyperOffice with many prominent competitors who have only admin support for “critical” issues or others who charge additional support costs for this type of service.  HyperOffice also has a ticketing system and support community with a good collection of articles and videos.  They also have a professional services team that offers additional options such as training, migration, customization and strategy development to get organizations up and running with HyperOffice.

Pricing

HyperOffice ranges from $3-$15 user (depending on the number of modules customers are interested in using) with an average cost of around $7-8.  Discounts are available with longer and large engagements.

Maintenance & Upgrades

HyperOffice does 3-4 major product rollouts every year – around one a quarter.  Patches don’t follow a definite schedule but come out on a need basis.  There are around 5-6 patches a year on average. HyperOffice makes extensive use of customer feedback in its product development cycle and many features in the product reflect that.  HyperOffice utilized a “feedback” button integrated right into the platform along with a “User Voice” as a forum where users can suggest features and enhancements and vote on them.  Popular suggestions are made part of the product roadmap.  HyperOffice also enters into high level OEM type partnerships, where its technology can be licensed, branded and deployed by large partners to their own customer bases.  HyperOffice can be deployed as a private cloud/public cloud or via third party data-centers.

Overall direction and strategic vision for the company and industry

Being one of the early players in cloud based business solutions, HyperOffice understandably has big beliefs in the benefits of the cloud.  There are a lot of great point solutions available today, but managing closely related activities with a multiplicity of tools has the potential of having a degrading effect on productivity over time – what HyperOffice calls “collaboration sprawl.”  Convergence of collaboration tools driven by business needs is what HyperOffice sees as the inevitable future of the market. This is why HyperOffice is focused on an integrated environment, and positions this as one of its key benefits.

Mobility is another critical component of collaboration in modern teams and is another key cornerstone for HyperOffice’s strategy and future direction.  HyperOffice offers extensive native support for major mobile platforms, and has a tablet interface to serve the growing demand of tablet computers in businesses. To build on its mobility capabilities, HyperOffice and has major plans of entering the mobile “app” market later this year.

“Social collaboration” forms a big part of HyperOffice’s future product direction where they want to focus on more social and open environments where employees can interact and work with each other.

HyperOffice also plans to make improvements to its UI to make it easier to navigate and understand. It will also allow social dashboard views for companies who collaborate in more social and open ways. However, HyperOffice believes that there is no one right way to collaborate, and depends on a company’s policies and culture. In line with that, the new UI will be an option for the customers instead of a replacement.

Other HyperOffice initiatives include entering foreign markets through localized partnerships and local language versions. They already have localized deployments in Japanese, Spanish and French. HyperOffice also plans to make it APIs richer and more open for better integration with 3rd party apps in popular categories like CRM and ERP.

Finally, HyperOffice is a great believer in having proper strategies and detailed planning going into the cloud era.  Sales cycles for cloud solutions have shrunk drastically, but it has lead to complacency. Companies hazard into implementation with unrealistic expectations and without planning, and this lack of effort up front later leads to problems and abandoned initiatives.  Just because the tools are easy to deploy doesn’t mean that business considerations shouldn’t be addressed.  Tools, especially in an area of strategic impact as collaboration need to be aligned with business objectives and have supporting business practices around them.

Key differentiating factors from competition

• Integrated suite
• Wide feature range
• Rich platform with extensive customization functionality
• Extensive native mobile support
• Built for small and medium size businesses
• UI is unique and intuitive
• Support is better than most

Customization

HyperOffice includes a robust site publisher tool with drag and drop capabilities which allows companies to build customized intranet and extranet landing pages without HTML expertise.  Users can create web forms for their site visitors and collect that data in HyperOffice or use it to kick off workflows which integrate into Hyperoffice.

From an administrators point of view multiple layers of permissions and access control can be implemented at the group, folder, subfolder or object level. “Profiles” allow administrators to apply permissions to groups of users – top management, suppliers, field workers and so on. Users can customize their HyperOffice login pages and embed them on their own portal.

Time to go live

Technically you have access to HyperOffice functionality within seconds after you fill out a form.  Implementation time depends on the size of the organization and ranges from an hour or weeks based on complexity.

Overall technology

HyperOffice is integrated suite of applications built on a shared services platform. It is designed to be massively scalable for service delivery from the cloud (database and file-system segmentation). It is built on an any-node-any-request architecture that allows it to ensure redundancy and high performance, and an incorporates a mobility framework for extensibility. Its web interface is built in Java and AJAX technologies.

Industry/vertical focus

Small and medium size businesses but have a lot of enterprise customers as well.

Capabilities (customer, partner, employee collaboration)

Employee, partner, and customer communities (private)

My take

I must be on a roll with vendor reviews because somehow the  past few companies I have been interviewing are either all profitable or break-even and self-financed.  This is a bit amusing because the larger vendors in the space are not anywhere near profitable while the little guys are quietly churning a profit behind the scenes, something I love to see.  The first thing you will notice right away is that the UI is unlike any of the other platforms out there.  The navigation bar is vertically placed on the left side of the screen.

The platform itself is quite robust and offers  a lot of functionality ranging from contact management, group creation, ideation, project management, and event web forms which can be placed on public sites which kick off workflows.  Keep in mind though that HyperOffice is ideally geared for small and medium size businesses so integration with other platforms such as Sharepoint doesn’t come standard. Even though the functionality is there the biggest issue I see is with a fragmented UI.  If you look in the sidebar you will notice that there are several tabs which the user can access but the platform feels like more of a way to manage an individuals work then it does collaborating with  others.  Although HyperOffice is adding more social features into the platform the fact that the user needs to click around on multiple tabs to access different features can be a bit cumbsersome.  The good thing about many of the current UIs for collaboration platforms is that much of the functionality can be accessed and viewed from a single screen without having to navigate through different tabs.  This causes the work and the experience to feel a bit isolated and disconnected even though a robust feature set exists.  I also feel as though the UI is a little bit dated and could use a more modern refresh.  I was told an update to the UI is coming soon so we will see what that looks like.

I love the superior mobile support that HyperOffice has, in fact it’s a strong focus for their current roadmap.  Their support package is also probably the best I have seen to date among many vendors.  Integration also seems to be a bit of a challenge so although HyperOffice as a platform has a robust feature set the reality is that many companies out there are already using an existing platform and would want a way to integrate and combine the various solutions.  Currently this is a bit of a tedious process.

I really do want to like the product because I think it has amazing potential but for me personally the UI issue needs to be resolved and there needs to be more an ecosystem built around HyperOffice that allows for better integration with other systems.  The company is profitable so I think it has a lot of potential as it continues to grow and evolve through 2012 and beyond.

HyperOffice is worth taking a look at especially if you are a small or mid size organization that is just getting started with collaboration (in other words not already using something).  To find out more check out their website at HyperOffice.com.

Screenshots

This week I’m taking at look at XWiki which is marketed as a “next generation wiki” for enterprises complete with enterprise class features to make wikis easier to use (Wysiwyg editor, Office importing, PDF export, etc..).  XWiki is open source so there is a community behind it which continuously supports its development.  The company has 35 people and is based in France and Romania.  In 2011 XWiki did 1.5 million euro in revenue.  Most  of this revenue came from France but 40% of it came from international clients.  I spoke with the CEO of XWiki Ludovic Dubost.

Integration capabilities

XWiki integrates with search engines such as the Google Search Appliance or Sinequa (and several others).  There is also an integration with LDAP and Active Directory, Kerberos or CAS Single Sign Ons and Google Apps.

Support

XWiki is an open-source product so there is a community behind it that continues to build and extend the platform.  XWiki does offer professional services as well as a Cloud offering.

Pricing

The product itself is free so XWiki charges for support and services

Maintenance & Upgrades

XWiki runs on a three-month cycle for the open source version.  The cloud version gets upgraded twice a year.

Overall direction and strategic vision for the company and industry

The plan for XWiki is to develop and further market the “app-store” like functionality they are building out to support the product and to allow standard users to develop their own applications and wiki customization’s.  XWiki is a private company that is 95% owned by current employees and 5% owned by past employees.  Their goal is to keep the company growing without additional investment but they recognize that this means they can’t always move as fast as they would like.  XWiki has been around for 7 years and has hit break-even every year.  Additionally they want to focus on their partner programs and focus on developing them internationally.

XWiki believes that there are two big areas in the social software space around discussion and content.  These two areas will integrate closed together but for now this is hard since standards to not exist. The Cloud will become more and more pervasive as well as “app-stores” where customers can purchase modules and additions to their platforms.  Many companies are already using wiki type tools and XWiki believes this will also continue to grow.  In addition they seek wiki usage expanding with new capabilities built into the wiki tools and the addition of “wiki apps.”

XWiki believes there is a lot of space for open-source vendors.  Ultimately these types of companies might see lower revenue but they usually have a much greater reach.  According to XWiki only larger vendors will survive in the proprietary space but open source competitors will remain and become more relevant.

Key differentiating factors from competition (Atlassian / Sharepoint / Mediawiki)

• Much more enterprise oriented and easier to use (wysiwyg, rights management, etc..)
• Versus Atlassian, the key differentiator is the capability to organize information in more and better ways
• Ability to structure wiki pages with meta data and allow for better navigation
• Easy editing of information for non trained users.
• Open source
• Development capabilities (both user and advanced)
• It’s still a wiki

Customization

With XWiki you can customize anything since it is open source.  There are three levels of customization: configuration, scripting, and modifying the actual tool/software itself.

Time to go live

The cloud version can go live in 5 mins, custom projects depend on the company and can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

Overall technology

Built on the Java platform and open source modules from Apache.  Uses HTML and web standards.  WCAG compatible.

Industry/vertical focus

Any company in any industry but focused a lot on sales, support, project teams.

Capabilities (customer, partner, employee collaboration)

Employee collaboration but can be used in open communities (education, end-user communities, public document wikis)

My take

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see anything specific in terms of features that made me think XWiki stood out from the crowded collaboration space, but that’s not meant to be taken negatively.  In fact with so many vendors in the space all doing the same thing it’s not that often that one really does stand out.  What does make XWiki unique is their open source model which is not something that we see in the space very often.  It actually reminds a bit of what Acquia is doing with their open source Drupal platforms (again where you pay for the service).  Honestly XWiki looks like a team of people who are having a lot of fun with the work they are doing so good for them!  They are a private company and have always broke even which is more than what many vendors can say which are taking heavy loses and raising more money to pump into marketing.

I really like their approach of building an “app-store” which is actually the same direction that their competitor Atlassian has been going in as well.  Right now it appears that XWiki is really doing well in France where they are based and are starting to get into some other neighboring countries as well.  Their largest U.S. based client is EMC which is a huge win for them.  The challenge for them of course is going to be able to grow and scale as quickly as their competitors and with no outside funding that is going to be challenging.  XWiki might not be the best fit in terms of a stand alone collaboration platform since it doesn’t have all of the features.  However, it could make for a great addition to an existing collaboration platform which is a bit weak on the content or document management piece as well as the document collaboration piece.  I also get the impression that while XWiki may have some large clients these deployments are not necessarily across the enterprise but instead being used by functional teams within organizations.

XWiki could be a good solution for a company of any size keeping in mind that while the product is free, their will be maintenance and support which will have to be purchased (or managed internally).

To find out more visit their website at XWiki.com

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Every Friday, I’ll be reviewing a vendor in the emergent collaboration space and will provide an overview on that vendor which includes aspects from leadership and vision to technology and market focus. If you are vendor and would like to participate, please contact me (my email address is in the sidebar as is my Twitter link). The goal of these posts is not to bash or praise vendors but to simply offer an objective view on what various vendors offer so that YOU can decide if they are a good fit for your business. Every post will cover the same elements for each vendors. If you have ideas or recommendations for other items to be covered in these reviews, please let me know and I will consider them.  Other collaboration vendor reviews can be found here.

This week I’m taking at look at Atlassian which has around 430 employees and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and San Francisco, California.  Atlassian offers confluence and JIRA as a part of their collaboration suite.  This post will mainly focus on their Confluence product which is their main collaboration platform. I spoke with Matt Hodges, the product marketing manager and Daniel Freeman, the VP of product marketing and sales.

Integration capabilities

Confluence has over 400 add-ons; most are free but some are paid.  Out of the box Confluence has connections for Sharepoint, Box, Salesforece, Google apps, LDAP, active director, and others.  If you’re looking for an integration that doesn’t exist, then you can build one through a very intuitive SDK (software developer kit).  Confluence is very versatile can literally work with anything and any application.

Support

Atlassian began as a support company 10 years ago so there is a strong corporate culture of great service.  Standard support includes free email support and a free online community of users that help each other.  When customers purchase Atlassian’s “download” software,  the first 12 months of support is free.  After the first 12 months support, the price is equivalent to 50% of the first year price.

Atlassian’s OnDemand offering support is always free and includes upgrades (in the SaaS subscriptions).  Atlassian does deliver phone support if that is the best method to solve a problem a customer is having.  This request is initiated via email.  Atlassian support centers are in multiple geographic locations including: Sydney, Malaysia (Asia), the west and east coast in the United States, Brazil, and Amsterdam.  This means that customers can get support issues handled anytime.  Support response time depends on the severity level which is rated on a scale of 1-4, based on this scale responses range between 1-24 hours.  Free support is also offered for all product evaluators.

Maintenance and upgrades

Atlassian releases a new major release every 3-4 months (for on-premise).  Small feature upgrades occur weekly for on-demand users but major upgrades are released around 1x month.  All of this is included in support cost (all included for on-demand).

Atlassian also has a public instance of JIRA (their other product mainly used for project and management) where customers can suggest a feature request that is then voted on by the community. The popular ones get added first.  At this point it’s safe to say that there is a 50/50 split for product ideas which come from customers and from the Atlassian roadmap.  Another unique aspect of the company to highlight is that they have all feature requests and bugs publicly available for all to review at jira.atlassian.com; making them a very transparent company.  It’s a good way for them to inspire trust among their customers and prospects.   Further, all on-premise customers get full-source code access.

Pricing

For up to 2k users companies use the on-demand version of Confluence, anything over 2k users and the company must then switch to an on-premise or managed hosting solution (managed hosting is done via hosting partner and is not done with Atlassian, pricing for this is negotiated with the hosting partner).  Their product pricing is quite simple to understand and a breakdown of it can be found directly on the Atlassian site.

Overall direction and strategic vision for the company and industry

Unlike most other vendors in the collaboration space Atlassian is a profitable company which just hit the 100 million dollar annual revenue milestone.  In the future they are interested in positioning themselves as a platform vendor, in other-words they want to do for the collaboration industry what Apple did for music.  This means focusing on building out an entire ecosystem that extends beyond the base product and allows companies like Gliffy to build their businesses based on the Atlassian platform.  Currently, Atlassian is not interested in becoming a platform like SharePoint or Jive but instead interested in being used at the same time as those platforms and integrating with them.  A key theme of development is going to be around mobile for 2012 as will a continued improvement in the editing experience of the product.  Moving forward Atlassian is going to really focus around discovery and engagement of content and people.  For example, being able to quickly comment on posts or “like” content.  User interface updates and a refresh of the look and feel of the product will also take place within next six months.  Another big focus will be on onboarding and helping new customers and clients get started with things such as creating templates.  Atlassian has a very strong expert ecosystem with over 400 system integrators globally.  Partnerships will also going to be something which Atlassian will expand upon in 2012 by expanding and strengthening that ecosystem to help them sell Confluence.

As far as the industry goes Atlassian is seeing a greater and greater fragmentation of markets where there can be many healthy vendors.  Their belief is that there is room for several players as long as they can continue to make excellent products.  Task collaboration appears to be a growing area where new vendors are being created and they are seeing some interesting things happening in this niche.  When asked about the future of email I was told that they are not sure if email will ever be replaced but it possible that in the future, rather then starting your day in email you can start it in something like Confluence and e-mail can just be a notification system like a pager.

I also asked their opinions on the ROI of collaboration to which their response was that it is nebulous.  In fact, Confluence doesn’t even have a strong focus on analytics for the product because customers are not really even asking for it.  As far as Atlassian goes, ROI doesn’t need to be a huge part of their message; instead they want to focus on customer success stories.  The approach that a lot of vendors are taking is that they are trying to make users feel comfortable by copying the UI of popular social services such as Facebook but this is not the Atlassian approach.  The believe that the biggest challenge for vendors is going to be overcoming company culture in organizations and the ways that people do work inside of companies.  Finally, they believe that collaboration is definitely a growth area that is picking up.

Key differentiating factors (main competitors are free open source) nothing that directly competes.

• Superior editor, rich free form content editor
• Flexibility and extensibility in terms of plugin and add-on ecosystem
• Flexibile API
• Ease of use and simplicity

Customization

Confluence can pretty much do anything.  On-premise customers get full source code access but Atlassian can’t support it if a customer makes significant modifications.  Out-of-the-box customers can change the look and feel, and customize authentication and layout.  Supported customization can also be done via the expert program.

Overall technology

Confluence is a server-side Java application that can be installed on Linux and Windows environments and runs on an application server with a relational database for storage of content.  End-users do not require any client-side software.  They can access Confluence via their web browser.

Time to go live

For on-premise, the installer takes 2-3 minutes.  On-demand deployments take five minutes.

Industry vertical focus

Any vertical that has a product or technical team within the organization.  50% of confluence customers use it alongside JIRA and the other 50% are business teams.  Atlassian products can be used by any industry, and companies of all sizes.

Capabilities
Partner and employee

My take

I met the Atlassian team at their offices in San Francisco (I was ashamedly 20 minutes late!) and immediately I could tell that there was something interesting happening at this company.  Prior to the meeting, I wasn’t up -to-date with Atlassian and what they have been working on (it’s hard to follow all the vendors) and I completely forgot how large the company is.  In fact, they are larger than Jive by probably a good 50+ employees.  The team is extremely passionate about the product and the company which is something I always love to see.

The product itself is very easy to use and offers a vastly superior document editing experience compared to pretty much every other vendor on the market.  You can tell that the Atlassian team has spent a lot of time making their editing experience really kick ass, and it shows.  While many vendors tend to focus on offering a host of solutions, Atlassian doesn’t take the same approach.  It’s a not full-scale platform with many of the bells and whistles that some other vendors might offer (such as rich profiles, video conferencing, and rich analytics), but it also doesn’t need to be.  Atlassian is a great example of what happens when a company focuses on a core set of features and does them really really well.  The core of Confluence feels (and is) very much a wiki and they stayed true to that.  And with the 400+ add-ons you can really make Confluence do anything you need it to do.  A simple way to think about it is, Atlassian is a bit like WordPress which, at it’s core is a content management and blogging platform that can also be used to build entire websites on.  Confluence is the same way; the core is a wiki product which can be customized and manipulated to look and do pretty much anything (including using it to power your website).

It will also be very interesting to see what the content and people discover and engagement enhancements will look like but it sounds like there may be some elements of gamification involved, with a strong emphasis on discoverability (finding new and relevant information and people to connect to and interact with).  It sounds like some more common “social” features that we see on sites such as Facebook and Twitter will also be added.

Keep in mind that Confluence isn’t meant to replace some of the other platforms out there (although it could) but it is instead meant to integrate with them.  Their pricing model is simple and easy to understand and also quite affordable.

A key thing to mention about the company is that they recently hit the 100 million dollar annual revenue milestone which for those of you playing at home should ring the little IPO bells.  Yes, I believe we can expect to see Atlassian going public sometime in 2012 or early 2013, and keep in mind this company is profitable.  Their approach to becoming more of a platform by building out an ecosystem is something that I think Atlassian can execute on better then anyone else.

This is definitely going to be one of the vendors to keep an eye on in 2012 (and beyond).  One of the things I find interesting about Atlassian is that they aren’t spending a ton of money on marketing (like several other vendors who are buying ads in every imaginable place) yet are doing a phenomenal job of generating revenue and growing their business (they recently had to move into a larger space to prepare for even more growth!).

I think any company looking to invest in collaboration solutions needs to take a good look at Confluence (and JIRA).

You can find out more about Confluence and JIRA by visiting Atlassian.com

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