Telligent Systems posted strong results during the first half of this year, landing about 200 new customers. This was particularly notable, as it came during a transitional period for the five-year old company. This past February, Telligent went through a 12 percent reduction in force; in May, it brought on board a new CEO; and in May, it rebranded its product line, including its flagship product, Community Server.
The May change in leadership saw founder Rob Howard handing over the reins to new CEO Patrick Brandt. Mr. Howard, now Chief Technology Officer, continues to focus on his expertise and passion, the vision and direction of Telligent’s products. (We don’t know if Intel Capital’s $20 million investment in 2008 had such transitional strings attached; it wouldn’t be unheard of.) Bringing in a more experienced CEO delineates a new and important phase in Telligent’s development as an organization.
In 1H 2009, Telligent also rebranded its product line. We like this decision as well, even though it’s never easy to give up any degree of brand equity. While Community Sever did make a name for itself over the years, renaming its flagship product as Telligent Community is a good move as the company continues making inroads into the corporate market. (Similarly Community Server Evolution is now known as Telligent Enterprise, and Harvest Reporting Server has been renamed Telligent Analytics.)
Telligent is one of the handful of companies on our watch list with a Vision (with a capital “V”) for itself and its product line. While we tend to use the word “platform” more or less interchangeably with the words “application” and “system,” Telligent is looking for its product to become a platform in the sense that the iPhone, Salesforce.com, and Plone are technology platforms. The company's goal is for Telligent’s products to be at the core of an ecosystem of add-on applications, extensions, and integrations developed, marketed, hosted, and implemented by partners.
The upside can be huge, but it takes focus, resources, technical skill, and business acumen (particularly in constructing mutually beneficial relationships with partners). Telligent is off to as good a start as any toward reaching this vision, as its partners have already built dozens of integrations and extensions, including ones for Facebook Connect, event registration, and more.
(One such partner that's on our radar, Couto Solutions, recently launched seven new plug-in apps for Telligent Community that we expect would have a lot of appeal for many community use cases. Many of these support eCommerce transactions, extending Telligent Community to allow organizations to charge for online support, to offer paid membership to a private community, to accept online donations, and to run a shopping cart application.)
Telligent has continued to corporatize its public face, a side effect of which has been to all but eliminate the information it shares on its Web site, for example, on pricing and partnerships. The goal, of course, is to get prospective customers and partners into the pipeline. But, while this control over the flow of information is how big businesses do things, we’d expect more transparency from a company in the online community and social media space, where open communication is a fundamental tenet.
----------------------------------------
This post a modified excerpt from our PSGroup report Online Community Platform Company and Product Update 1H-2009. For more on this report, see this blog post.
Comments