Of all the meetings at Enterprise 2.0, the most impressive success story was the Newsgator presentation. The Denver CO company, founded in 2004 as an RSS system has really redefined their offer to address Microsoft Office SharePoint customer needs for more sophisticated collaboration services. Today, the company boasts 175 customers and over 1 million seats.
Supporting probably a dozen specific modules for addressing enterprise collaboration needs, the Newsgator portfolio extends SharePoint standard capabilities (SharePoint is typically sold with Microsoft Exchange and represents a market of some 100 million seats) with webparts (widgets and plugin software) that enable the social computing class of enterprise applications, as part of a broader Microsoft Office enterprise strategy.
In a future post I’ll review the basics of the portfolio and its applicability in terms of the trends we see in our Web 2.0 research reports. One of the more interesting discussions with Laura Faralley, VP Marketing was around applicability of these technologies for different markets, industries and segments.
