Palo Alto based Wiki startup SocialText, founded way back in 2002, is announcing version 3.0 of its software this morning. The upgrades are designed to put a little “social” into the enterprise (and to sidestep, as much as possible, the recently relaunched Google Sites, a direct competitor).
SocialText sells Wikis to companies, for the most part, although they also offer an open source version of their product. They offer customers a choice between a SaaS version and a higher end appliance, although the only real difference is where the server sits (your location or theirs). Founder Ross Mayfield says that of their 4,000 customers, 80% use the SaaS product, but 80% of their revenue come from the appliance.
The new products, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People, are being demo’d now and will become available to all customers within 60 days, Mayfield says. The products are effectively extensions of their normal Wiki product.
SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki - total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.
All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.
Users also create profiles (see below) and add “friends” within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter.
For a lot of enterprise employees, having a single dashboard with secure company information alongside fun or useful outside services on a single dashboard is exactly what they need. It also makes SocialText the center of a worker’s day, which means they far less likely to ever lose the customer.
It’s clear that SocialText is forging ahead and trying to find a path that doesn’t make them sell against Google Sites, at least yet. Hopefully by the time those enterprise customers start to think about integrating some or all of Google’s productivity suite, SocialText will already be a daily part of employees’ lives. Then they can keep charging those attractive user fees.
SocialText has raised just under $12 million over three rounds of financing. Last November, Mayfield moved into the Chairman/President role to make room for a new CEO, Eugene Lee. The company has 50 employees.
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This seems a lot like Google Sites competition - especialy after adding the dashboard with widgets.
Sam (Lawrence) must still be sleeping–otherwise, I’m sure he would have pointed out that Jive Software’s latest ClearSpace release already includes a personalized dashboard and social networking.
It’s interesting to see all the different folks who are trying to provide “Facebook for the enterprise”. Who will win? Private label social network providers? Collaboration vendors? Or Facebook themselves?
If the statistics provided by Ross are accurate, SocialText is either profitable or very close and is generating ~$20M a year in revenue. I’d like to see some Crunch on their finances and exit opportunities. I can read a press release on any site.
Oh, one more thing I just noticed. Crunchbase lists 4,000 customers for SocialText as of November 2007. Above Ross says 10,000 customers. That’s a very impressive 250% increase in 6 months. Maybe you can do a follow-up on this amazing sales growth?
I guess FB has no interest (until $ which is already something…) to go on corp tracks. They have been fight about privacy and Beacon, and there’s some waves to come next. We have to keep a borderline between “corp” tools and social ones, like, in my opinion, FB ; it’s not a tech limit, but ethic one I think.
L.
Hmm, be interesting to see how enterprise wiki competitors like Atlassian’s Confluence respond too.
strange product. i doubt it works in the end. Just my 2 cents.
@steve I sent Mike a correction for their CrunchBase details
Ross, thanks for the follow up. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
list on appliance: 10K a year - let’s say you sell for 8K
2,000 appliance companies - that $16M
if that’s 80% of your revenue, then you will do $20M this year
even with heavy discounting you should see >$15M. Now, with 50 employees, the burn is high, but congratulations on building the business.
Social into the enterprise….
“FASCINATING”
(sorry)
I think it is a step in the right direction and a great move for SocialText - very much looking forward to getting this upgrade on our workspaces.
Still, I am a bummed that JotSpot’s original vision and direction was lost - there were some great ideas in the system that were lost when it became google sites and I haven’t seen anywhere else.
That said, I saw a demo of what IBM is doing with Lotus Notes 8, and it is the closest thing I have actually seen to the supposed ideal of Facebook for the enterprise.
Flexibility and extendability are still the key differentiators IMO, so basing the architecture on Google Widgets makes a lot of sense.
Problem is that so many companies are running on tight budgets these days (at least the one that signs my paycheck is) and in many cases the decision makers for purchasing a product like this would be challenged to see the value of Socialtext without a clear explanation of how it could help their company to overcome their internal communications challenges and applying that to some meaningful ROI data. Personally (an professionally) I could really use something like this, but I fear that I may be the exception.
I don’t understand what socialtext has spent $24mm on? On a wiki?
@Dont Understand: Interesting to see developers chime in thinking all money goes to technical product development without any understanding of what it takes to sell into the enterprise.
@morethantechdev
thats right. selling to the enterprise cost $24mm. thats right. you have to spend money to make money, right?
Thats right…….raise $24mm…..to sell to the enterprise……..only to make a $24mm over 5 years? Now thats efficiency.
what a joke
You must be an MBA douchebag who despises developers.
The site looks quite “spacey”
I would have to agree with steves comment
See the corrections above, and go easy on poor steve
This is yet another worthless exercise in dredging the social-media boatwreck out from the fetid waters of web 2.0
This is pointless.
This is utterly useless.
I couldn’t begin to document the technical errors, let alone the GUI-related ones that are evident in this abomination and with this buggy product in general.
This can only end in more FAIL.