Somehow, which I will explain, Connectbeam has been successful yet stayed under the radar and remained cutting edge at the same time - roughly akin to me trying to juggle even one ball. Since they’ve been under the radar more or less for their existence, I’ll bring out my sonar instead and enlighten you as to what they do and who they are and why they are so important to the CRM 2.0 space. They provide an enterprise strength social collaboration application that comes in two flavors - a software only version and, the thing that puts them on my list - an integrated hardware appliance that can handle up to 150,000 users. The services are what you are likely to come to have expected from social software - industrial strength social tagging and social bookmarking capabilities integrated with ranking, comments, and ratings. They have hooks to integrate with Google, Sharepoint, Confluence, Outlook and Jive Clearspace. That means, for example when you do a Google search, not only will you see the search results, but also the related tags, the related bookmarks and the importance of the related content according to the “collective intelligence” of the enterprise/users behind it. They do this in an elegant way too, with some customizable capabilities, such as limiting the tag cloud results to the content that created over the last, say, three weeks. You can expand or constrain it. Connectbeam management has a good management team and board of directors behind it. Led by CRM (Oracle and PeopleSoft to be exact) industry veteran Puneet Gupta, they have also had the input from Web 2.0 legend Thomas Vander Wal. This meant they have what is likely the best social tagging engine that exists today. One thing that perplexes me, given the CEO’s CRM background is the lack of integration with any CRM applications since this set of tools and the integrated appliance is made for companies using CRM who want to extend to CRM 2.0, or, at least, add social tools/networks to their CRM toolbox. Their pricing is reasonable $29/user per year (yes, per year). Remember, if you’re wondering why so inexpensive, they are aimed at the big boys - large enterprises. That’s why they scale to 150,000 - because they can and they target those kinds of companies. Watch them. They will start to radar up (I made the phrase up) in 2009 - and they should.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
