Mzinga's New CEO on Enterprise Grade Social Software

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Mar 21, 2011

Mzinga's new CEO, Alan Nugent, is no stranger to the needs of the enterprise. He has managed some pretty large development organizations and he knows what it takes to make a company successful in the enterprise market.

All Customers are Not the Same

That's right. All customers are not the same, especially when you are looking at serving the SMB market compared to the enterprise market. There are some very important differences, and, as Nugent told us, having great software is one part of what it takes to get enterprise organizations to sit up and pay attention to you.

Nugent started working in an advisory capacity with Mzinga in April of last year, helping them understand what it will take to deal with large enterprise clients. He doesn't have a social software background specifically, but he said that when it's tech at the core, there are a lot of skills that translate well. His background includes executive vice president and CTO at CA Technologies, and senior vice president and CTO at Novell, so enterprise experience is a given.

And that's good for Mzinga, whose social software solution OmniSocial is pretty much on par with all the others in terms of core functionality (it has it's unique selling points as well).

Getting to the Enterprise

Mzinga does currently have enterprise customers, but they are hoping that Nugent can help them pick up even more. Nugent told us that it's not enough to have an "enterprise" product, but they also need to make the entire organization more responsive, including having a professional enterprise salesforce, strong CRM/support and a great collection of partners. It takes an entire ecosystem to support the needs of the enterprise.

So what exactly are the key differences between selling to the enterprise and selling to the SMB market?

Doing the Work

SMBs are more willing to do work themselves to integrate new solutions. Nugent says that's one way technical teams justify themselves, having more internal talent. SMBs are more open to targeted, point solutions — solutions that don't have a complete set of adapters immediately available.

Enterprises, on the other hand, expect those adapters (or connectors) to be available out of the box.

What types of connectors should be there out of the box? That's the million dollar question, because you certainly can't provide a connector for every possible system. Nugent says the key is focus. You need to address the needs of a small number of markets. Where are the highest opportunities?

In Mzinga's case, they developed some role-based apps (use cases) for three specific markets (Nugent also points out that there are dozens of other opportunities):

Marketing/CRM
Customer Support/Communications
Social Learning

Once the use cases are picked, you have to look at the environments these organizations work in. This will give you a list of partners and applications from which you can then prioritize your integration efforts.

Security

While security is important to an organization, regardless of size, enterprises expect a solution to be able to integrate with different identity management systems. This means that the connectors need to be ready out of the box, quickly eliminating objections because it's ready to go to work.

And again, SMBs are more willing to put the time in to do the integration themselves.