Companies to Watch at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara: The Launchpad Four

At each Enterprise 2.0 conference, participants select one of four new or upcoming applications as the Launchpad winner of the event. Baydin, a quirky e-mail-centric startup, won at the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston last summer (see our coverage) and enterprise collaboration suite CubeTree won at the event before that. Read on for our take on each of this event’s four nominees, and to vote in our own poll on the applications.

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Flowchart.com

Flowchart.com is exactly what it sounds like: an online, browser-based flow charting tool. The application is still in beta and you’ll need an invite to use it. I can’t drum up much information on this company, but it seems to have been around since at least 2008. It competes with Gliffy and LovelyCharts. This is probably the most surprising company to make the cut.

Itensil

Itensil sells a product called Knowledge Apps, a cloud based, wiki-centric business process management suite that Forrester has called “novel and creative.” Gartner listed the company in its 2009 Cool Vendors in the High-Performance Workplace report. According to an interview with Enterprise Web 2.0 , CEO Keith Patterson spun the company out of a Silicon Valley advertising agency (presumably Adscience LLC, where, according to his LinkedIn profile, Patterson was President). Knowledge Apps apparently began life as a project management solution designed for the ad agency.

Process management was a hot topic at the last Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, so this one is definitely one to watch.

Meetzi

Meetzi is a web based “meeting management” application. It features a meeting timer, action items and a review system so that participants can gauge how productive a meeting was. It was created by the Dallas, TX based consulting company The Garland Group. Considering the insane pressures on workers to be productive and the near universal antipathy towards meetings, this could be a winner. Baydin won the last Launchpad contest with a single tool that solved a big problem.

Moxie

Moxie, formerly known as nGenera, just announced a new version of its social CRM solution today at the conference. Moxie was highlighted in Gartner’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Workplace Social Software report . Although Moxie didn’t make the final cut, Gartner praised the vendor’s software and its consulting track record.

Like Jive, Moxie is a full-featured social suite including internal and external community sites, wikis, idea management, microblogging and more. Ben Kepes is not particularly impressed by Moxie. He lists the things Moxie told him in a briefing set it apart:

• Pointers to people (think rich profiles and the like)
• Rewards for participants (thinks badges and stuff – yawn)
• Going where the people are (single sign on and enterprise integration)
• A compelling UI (code for “we look like Facebook”)

I was was basically told the same thing in my briefing, and I agree that most of this is all pretty common place – except maybe badges, which aren’t a big deal. Moxie’s representatives did tell me one other way the company hopes to distinguish itself: Moxie hopes to compete with Jive on its speed to deployment.

Our Poll

Our poll has absolutely nothing to do with the actual Launchpad competition and will not affect the outcome.

Discuss