Feeling the Pulse at Neudesic!
I’ve just passed the two week mark here at Neudesic. As anyone who has changed companies knows, getting up to speed with the internal workings of a new organization can be like drinking from a firehose!
One of the most interesting things I’ve come across to date is an application called Pulse.
In essence, Pulse is Facebook for the enterprise. If you’ve ever used Facebook or another social networking site, the feeds, profiles, walls, likes, follows, etc. will all feel very similar.
One of the main differences however is that because the social network is inside the walls of an enterprise, the possibilities for extending become so much more interesting. Not only can you “friend” other colleagues, but you can also “friend” systems. Like to know when business is won or lost? “Friend” the CRM system, and if someone updates an opportunity, you get a pulse notification. Similarly, if someone joins or leaves the company, the HR system “pulses” about the change. Are the IT Systems going down for routine maintenance? You’ve guessed it… another pulse! I’m sure there are many additional directions that this could be taken – just think of the countless internal systems that we habitually visit every day. What if each of them could send push notifications into a central social network?
Another feature of Pulse is the ability to converse on external feeds. Pulse can monitor external feeds (anything exposed through RSS or ATOM) and bring them within the walls of the company. The beauty here is not the ability just to subscribe to this external information, but the ability to comment on these within the organization. For example, last week, a few colleagues and I were chatting about a post on Engadget. Rather than the “old way” where someone forwards the link via email to a closed group of people, we were discussing this via a thread in Pulse. Not only does this allow the topic to be shared with others, but it also makes it available for future subscribers to find. If someone new joins the company and subscribes to the Engadget feed via Pulse, they can discover the exact internal conversation that happened around that post. This is something that would be near impossible to do with email.
Of course, my favorite feature of Pulse has to be the mobile client. Our product team has done a phenomenal job publishing clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and will have a WP7 version available very soon.
Finally, you may be interested to know that Pulse is not only an internal system here at Neudesic, but is a commercial product that can be used for organizations of all sizes – from a few users to tens of thousands.
If you are interested in learning more, I would recommend going to this site – alternatively just drop me a line, and I’ll connect you with the right people!
really Pulse is great product for any org, it has great features and support on other devices. Best part people are using it for right purpose instead of using it like social networking apps.
thanks for sharing this
Hey Simon,
Great information. I had no idea this product existed.
This is a space of passion for me as well and I am glad to see a competitor to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. This looks like it could be. I wrote up a post on the differentiators I see with this product:
What is really great about this technology over SalesForce.com’s offering are these core differentiators:
– Potential – This is by far the most important aspect here. The potential of integrating a range of solutions rather than just one primarily is a huge differentiator. The information is king, not the enabling technologies. So if there are cloud platforms that lock you into just there information sets and not others it demishes the potential greatly. So solutions that embrace multiple information sets by other vendors like Microsoft will prevail.
– Platform Independence – I have the freedom to choose which platform I want to make social. Combination of vendors, platforms and repositories on premise or cloud based can be chosen. Just like with development technologies, we live in a hybrid world of a variety of different solution enabled technologies. While companies could make big bets on CRM solutions in the cloud we have to ask ourselves if we are going to put all of our socially aware capable solutions there? If not (and I believe this is the case), then we should chose solutions like Pulse that deliver that platform independence.
– Avoidance of Vendor & Platform Lock-In – With technologies like Chatter, you are locked-in to the Force.com platform. While you can integrate to it there is a great deal of flexibility that is lost. Additionally, if one day your organization chooses to move on to the next big technology solution that replaces this capability your feeds, functionality and data are locked in Chatter. Salesforce does have API’s to retrieve the raw data but context and all the application logic you have built will be lost.
– Total Cost of Ownership – Investment for a solution like Pulse is significantly lower if enabled across the enterprise and solutions. I don’t have to make a enterprise license agreement with one vendor to see the benefits of making my enterprise socially aware. This can be a multimillion dollar investment for an organization and is a tough sell for social capabilities, especially if it is the first foray into social.
– Salesforce Inclusive Partnerships – Salesforce just doesn’t have much love for Microsoft or any other vendor not part of the Salesforce buddy system. While this isn’t a reason not to choose a vendor it should be a strong warning sign. Like it or not Microsoft owns the enterprise productivity desktop market today. I can’t count how many business folks I talk to that live by Excel, Word and PowerPoint. As a vendor with such large potential impact on companies it is their ethical responsibility to be aware of this and to reduce the loss of productivity by acknowledging solutions in the MSFT productivity stake and not working against it.
In my mind those are the primary differentiators that really make this solution exciting. This post isn’t to do a formal comparison or to disprove the merits of the Chatter solution but rather highlight new solutions and their unique value proposition in making solutions socially aware.
Full post:
http://www.mikethearchitect.com/2010/12/enterprise-social-player-emerge-with-differentiators.html