TMCnews Featured Article

Enterprise social networking solution company Saba got a chance to speak to TMC as part of the recent On the Road series in San Jose, CA. TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) spoke to the company about trends in social networking and how it is gaining traction in the enterprise.

Milind Pansare, senior director of social cloud applications for Saba, said that social networking in the enterprise goes beyond chat applications and Twitter (News - Alert). According to Pansare, the power of enterprise networking technologies can be seen through collaboration, security and what Saba characterizes as "social learning."

"We also have enterprise social collaboration that's really changing some of the spaces that we are in and really helping us innovate in how we accelerate some of the business processes that we've helped companies with in the past," said Pansare.

Being able to collaborate securely among groups helps to accelerate processes, speed outcomes and perpetuate social learning, according to Pansare. Real-time web conferencing is enabled through Saba (News - Alert) Central online collaboration. The company is global, with a presence in 190 countries and with 30 different languages represented.

The company's Saba Social solution integrates social business software features like ideas, discussion forums, questions, video channels, expert location and social bookmarking with online collaboration like chat and web conferencing with HD video and audio.

Pansare says the company marries formal and informal processes when it come to online training, working with major companies like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell that are regularly opening new locations and need to train employees quickly. He said the ability to profile individual users or employees is a key differentiator of their solutions, and one of the interesting things about enterprise social networking. Saba looks at property, assets, insight and business intelligence when compiling that profile.

"What we do that's different at the core of it is performance certification," said Pansare. He said a supervisor can verify if an employee has completed a certain training course, or has read a specific policy, by "certifying" it, a capability that is built into the Saba solution. And those types of benchmarks and profiles extend beyond a company's network to their partners and customers as well, creating a very useful database of information.

The Saba Social solution enables rapid innovation for increasing revenue and outpacing the competition. Connected customer communities help to increase repeat business while informed partner communities accelerate the channel pipeline. The solution also enables a social intranet for creating a culture of motivated and engaged employees.

Decreased support costs are enabled through enterprise social collaboration, while customer loyalty is increased through crowdsourcing. Finally, the solution offers faster and smarter product development via direct feedback from customers.