Socialcast is a company which provides social collaboration solutions for the enterprise. It is widely referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise." Socialcast was bought by VMware in March 2011. In an interview at VMworld 2011, Tim Young, former CEO of Socialcast and now VP of Enterprise Social, discussed the vision of Socialcast and how he hopes to continue its mission as part of VMware by changing how work is done. Young stated, "What they really need today is a more flexible communication dynamic that goes beyond email and goes beyond mobile."
Jon Furrier, Founder of SiliconAngle.com, brought up the point of how start-ups have limited resources and becoming part of VMware gives Socialcast a whole new federation of resources to work with. When asked how virtualization is enabling Socialcast's transformation, Young responded by explaining that for companies who still require things in their own private cloud and behind their firewall, they can run Socialcast's product securely on top of the Vsphere layer. He added, "That flexibility of deployment of being able to run a social platform behind your firewall virtualized or run it in a public cloud and be able to go back and forth in that hybrid scenario is really attractive to customers." He noted that the virtualization layer allows companies to maximize utilization of their resources, whether for computing or human capital.
When asked what to expect from VMware this year, Young observed that the big theme is how to help companies unlock the potential of their human capital. Now that the computing cloud power has been unlocked, the next step is to work on the human cloud. The strategy is to help companies understand there's a new way to work for employees and to help unlock the potential of their employee base. Young believes that the social platform needs to be in the flow of work. He reiterated that they are not trying to create a parallel Facebook inside the company, but rather using the social graph of employees and relationships to accelerate business processes by enhancing employees' abilities to have the right conversations with the right people as fast as possible. "Everything in business is conversation at some point," Young said.
Young gave an example of how Socialcast is integrating with traditional business software with a product extension called Reach, which has the ability to embed real-time conversational streams inside existing business apps, such as SalesForce, SAP or Sharepoint, similar to Facebook Connect. For example, on a Yahoo story, you can see all your friends who have read it. Similarly, you can see all conversation in context, who the experts are, who works on it and collaborate around those issues in that app rather than going to a silo place.
Young's goals are to work on the expansion of the Socialcast product and its distribution in the market. One such product extension, Strides, helps companies understand their social graph. Young firmly believes that social software can help productivity boom, and he is committed to accelerating human capital.
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Tim Young, CEO SocialCast | VMworld 2011
Socialcast is a company which provides social collaboration solutions for the enterprise. It is widely referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise." Socialcast was bought by VMware in March 2011. In an interview at VMworld 2011, Tim Young, former CEO of Socialcast and now VP of Enterprise Social, discussed the vision of Socialcast and how he hopes to continue its mission as part of VMware by changing how work is done. Young stated, "What they really need today is a more flexible communication dynamic that goes beyond email and goes beyond mobile."
Jon Furrier, Founder of SiliconAngle.com, brought up the point of how start-ups have limited resources and becoming part of VMware gives Socialcast a whole new federation of resources to work with. When asked how virtualization is enabling Socialcast's transformation, Young responded by explaining that for companies who still require things in their own private cloud and behind their firewall, they can run Socialcast's product securely on top of the Vsphere layer. He added, "That flexibility of deployment of being able to run a social platform behind your firewall virtualized or run it in a public cloud and be able to go back and forth in that hybrid scenario is really attractive to customers." He noted that the virtualization layer allows companies to maximize utilization of their resources, whether for computing or human capital.
When asked what to expect from VMware this year, Young observed that the big theme is how to help companies unlock the potential of their human capital. Now that the computing cloud power has been unlocked, the next step is to work on the human cloud. The strategy is to help companies understand there's a new way to work for employees and to help unlock the potential of their employee base. Young believes that the social platform needs to be in the flow of work. He reiterated that they are not trying to create a parallel Facebook inside the company, but rather using the social graph of employees and relationships to accelerate business processes by enhancing employees' abilities to have the right conversations with the right people as fast as possible. "Everything in business is conversation at some point," Young said.
Young gave an example of how Socialcast is integrating with traditional business software with a product extension called Reach, which has the ability to embed real-time conversational streams inside existing business apps, such as SalesForce, SAP or Sharepoint, similar to Facebook Connect. For example, on a Yahoo story, you can see all your friends who have read it. Similarly, you can see all conversation in context, who the experts are, who works on it and collaborate around those issues in that app rather than going to a silo place.
Young's goals are to work on the expansion of the Socialcast product and its distribution in the market. One such product extension, Strides, helps companies understand their social graph. Young firmly believes that social software can help productivity boom, and he is committed to accelerating human capital.
