Innovation

Move over Facebook, social networking is growing up.

Squirrel Hill’s Vivisimo, the fast-growing enterprise search software company, has taken the best of social networking and worked it into its Velocity Search Platform giving companies a powerful new tool, the ability to tap their own collective ingenuity.

“I think more and more organizations are beginning to understand why people are using Facebook and other Web 2.0 technologies,” says Stacy Monarko, product marketing manager and company social search expert. “It’s a good way to communicate with people that you don’t interact with on a regular basis. Companies come up with better products and better slogans by connecting people, data and intelligence.”

Unlike blogs or wikis, Velocity gives employees tools to search and tag  social content in a secure environment inside a company's firewall. In other words, an attorney who wants to better understand a client can use enterprise social search to check with colleagues in offices across the country and learn key information that may assist a case.

For large companies like Procter & Gamble and Airbus, it’s a way to document and share collective IT and intellectual property that would otherwise sit in a storage silo.

“There’s an old fear that if I share knowledge I won’t be as important to the organization,” Monarko adds. A key to the platform is that individuals' ideas are identified by their tags. “We’re focused on how to get that knowledge that’s sitting in someone else’s mind and sharing it across an organization.”

Vivisimo continues to report strong growth, employs 100 people and has expanded into international markets including Europe and Latin America. This month the company was named to the Econtent 100 magazine’s eighth annual list of “companies that matter most in the digital content industry.”

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Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Stacy Monarko, Geof Becker, Vivisimo

Photograph copyright Brian Cohen