As we round the corner past 2009, it’s looking as if all-things 2.0 and real-time will continue to be the tech-buzz zeitgeist and a major theme of 2010. From real-time streaming media and news, social enterprise applications and more, the envelope is being pushed to deliver anything in its socially relevant format. This sits on the core principle that the importance of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others – i.e, the information these networks contain – has exploded.
Our client InsideView has been driving the effort to put this new social information to work for businesses in some pretty exciting ways. The company’s flagship application, SalesView, works to deliver what they call Sales 2.0 – or social intelligence for the sales profession – leaving behind clunky old legacy data providers like Hoover’s and OneSource for more than 20,000 information sources that work in a more open and fluid world. In May, InsideView rolled out a huge evolution of its technology which harnessed social Web data for any sales person to easily access and act upon within their existing CRM. As TechCrunch said in its coverage of the launch, “InsideView’s service is helpful in filtering business information and news that lives on social media platforms to help enterprises create a knowledge base around a potential sales lead.”
It’s an approach that hasn’t been lost on InsideView’s customers. As BNET‘s David Weir wrote last week, “There was a time that all you needed was your Hoover’s, your Dun & Bradstreet, and access to the latest SEC filings in order to keep up. Those days are gone … disruptive technology companies like InsideView look to me to be poised to eat their lunch.”
As hundreds of companies are looking for smarter CRM, leading enterprise solutions provider NetSuite chose InsideView as a premier partner in its effort to bring all enterprise platforms – beyond CRM and into the world of ERP, HR and billing – to a more social and productive place. When ReadWriteWeb wrote on the news, they agreed that this is an “unfolding trend” which will “create a more measured look at how Enterprise 2.0 applications fit with back office functions.”
Other writers like Dan Woods from Forbes.com, or thought leaders such as Andrew McAfee (coiner of the phrase ‘Enterprise 2.0′ itself) agree. As Woods recently wrote in his Forbes article titled Tracking a Million Conversations, “The big-picture value comes from putting a technique to use in the context of a business. InsideView enables a sales person who is evaluating which leads to pursue to make better decisions by seeing more information on the background and context of the company.”
InsideView is a game-changer, diving into the social Web, digging in to the real-time inner-workings, and then providing a practical and enterprise-wide solution (whether it’s in salesforce.com or on-premise suites from Oracle/Siebel – the company works with all major CRM vendors) that anyone can start using.
Now that’s real social intelligence!