Enterprise collaboration market is one big beast – more applications you have, more you need a collaboration tool to integrate them within your project/company.
If they (i.e. collaboration tools) come free, you exploit them and that results in another clutter (e.g. wikis). And you need another one to clean the clutter!
While this space has seen enough companies selling ‘we will reduce your clutter’, there is a scope for a lot more players to come up with innovative solutions.
Pebble Talk, a startup from Wipro employees is a communication and connectivity suite of product that enhances communication, improves productivity and enables social interaction among colleagues.
PebbleTalk helps enterprises by:
- Keeping their employees stay connected: PebbleTalk brings twitter style microblogging to enterprises. Teams can form groups on PebbleTalk and use web interface, mobile or outlook to stay connected by posting tweets within their enterprise.
- PebbleTalk has a outlook addin, which allows team members to view email topic and responses in a discussion thread view, tag emails, share emails instead of forwarding them. Provides a easy to use search interface.
- PebbleTalk also provides a company directory and noticeboard.
The product has twitter like interface which is integrated with backend systems (like SAP etc) and also with Outlook (as an add-on).
The product is available as SaaS as well as on-premise model.
While this might sound like India’s Yammer, enterprise collaboration space is nicely fragmented and has enough room to accommodate a lot of players (it’s about sales, one’s insight about enterprise pain-points and has nothing to do with technology).
Moreover, an application like this is a behavior change, so value delivered has to be fairly strong.
To me,enterprise collaboration is a lot about management discipline and less about tools – would be interesting to see how PebbleTalk fares in the market.
What’s your take?
As its a twitter / yammer like application for enterprises, I would be interested in knowing what their business model is. Given that twitter does not know how to monetize its large user base, how does Pebble Talk plan to accomplish it.
I think its a very interesting product. When I was working with a company, I realised a need of such a product. (I used to explain my manager what twitter is and how can it help us!). The only gap is ‘simplicity’. While twitter is very simple, PebbleTalk gives too many options to user which can be confusing and also time consuming for wroking professionals.
@abhilash: Companies can manage the enterprise space after purchasing it for a small fee also alternatively PebbleTalk can be deployed within the enterprise augmenting their intranet.
@Anshul: Yes, agree that the power of twitter is in simplicity. However, within an enterprise a twitter by itself serves only a limited purpose. For more elaborate conversations, for discovering colleagues and to post events/notices, we have additional features built in PebbleTalk beyond just microblogging. So, for those who love twitter, they would love PebbleTalk’s SmallTalk microblogging app, and for those who want to use it for more elaborate conversations, there are additional features.
Good tool but as you said the value delivered have to be very very strong