Richard Davis came by the Vuuch offices the other day to have a look at what we are doing. Richard is well know by the CAD and enterprise software worlds as he has followed these markets closely for years. Although this was the first time I had ever meet Richard I certainly knew his name from my CAD days.
It was a real honor to have a few hours of his time and be able to delve into his views on enterprise social software. At a high level I would say he has not simply jumped on the band wagon and while he believes social will enter the enterprise he feels it will be very different than what we see in the market today.
We discussed our view of the market which seemed to move him from skeptic to beleiver. We see three types of applications being presented by enterprise social software companies – Social Interation (Yammer), Socail CRM (Jive Software) and Social Operations (Vuuch). This break down is also well supported by many industry analysts. The skeptic in Richard is well aligned to a recent article by Deloitte “Social Software for Business Performance: The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements” and the fact that social MUST be more than typing a message into some system other than email.
Richard puts out a monthly news letter and wrote about Vuuch in his November issue in which he wrote about Vuuch on page 4 and 7. Just below are his comments from page 7.
I’ve had a nagging problem with the emerging social communications tools like Chatter, Jive, and two dozen other efforts. I can’t figure out why these things won’t devolve into white noise of a mass of inbound messages. I met with Sudbury, MA-based startup Vuuch last week, and they sure seem to have figured out the right strategy. Instead of plastering employees with the social media equivalent of a bunch of “reply alls,” Vuuch’s Social Enterprise software focuses, organizes and collects communications based on a project rather than a more generic “like” or “follow” that you get with the vast majority of other Social Enterprise systems. This might sound like a subtlety but it is not; businesses don’t revolve around people per se, they are constructed to complete projects and solve problems. That’s how Vuuch is designed. The firm is a long ways from challenging Chatter or Jive, but after the bloom wears off the current crop of Social Enterprise Communications tools, Vuuch could emerge as a winner from the rubble. Stay tuned and we’ll find out. Approximate size: <$20 million in revenues.
[...] There are companies like Jive Software that started as social CRM and now says they are Facebook for business and other companies like Yammer which started as Twitter for your company and now position themselves as Facebook for your business. See any parallels? But how can Facebook for business work? At work people connect based on sharing work on deliverables, not because they are friends… Take a case when a group of people will come together to solve a customer complaint logged in Salesforce. These people are not friends and certainly it would make no sense to blast out to all your friends you have a customer problem. Before Facebook there was Myspace, not to mention the dozen or so other networking sites to make their way into the online sphere, but only Facebook is Facebook and it stands to reason that many of these business social tools will become the Myspace of enterprise social softeware. Richard Davies writes about the potential Myspacing facing enterprise social software companies http://www.vuuch.com/social-media/chatting-with-richard-davis/2011/12/15. [...]
[...] Facebook changed the way generations stay in touch. Linked-in changed the way business people stayed connected and found jobs. Now enterprise social software such as Jive software, Yammer and Vuuch are changing the way employees stay in touch and how companies broadcast business information to their employees. The objective behind the creation of business social software is to improve employee efficiency, organizational productivity, innovation and knowledge capture. Jive software and Yammer deliver Facebook and Twitter functionality and call themselves a business version of Facebook and they work just like Facebook or Twitter in that employees friend each other, create discussions, view status updates and exchange files. Also see comments by Richard Davis http://www.vuuch.com/social-media/chatting-with-richard-davis/2011/12/15. [...]