BroadVision Debuts Clearvale Platform

BroadVision Wednesday unveiled Clearvale, a social networking service designed specifically for enterprises.

Clearvale gives large businesses the tools, and infrastructures to create high-performance enterprise social networks and expand their presence on public social sites, according to BroadVision. Currently, more than 1,000 large businesses around the world are using 4,000-plus networks on Clearvale to communicate with employees, partners and clients, the company said.

Like consumer-facing sites, Clearvale features blogs, collaboration tools, user profiles, forums, and member directories. In addition, the site offers a document management and file storage system and integrated project-tracking tool.

In the fall, BroadVision plans to launch a developer community and an app store that will offer collaboration tools for creating social networks, the company said. BroadVision soon expects to debut the Clearvale API so companies can build and deliver new services over Clearvale.

"Consumers have Facebook, but businesses want a place of their own -- a network of networks that better meets business objectives," said Giovanni Rodriguez, chief marketing officer at BroadVision. "We've architected Clearvale to meet the most strategic needs of our business customers, many of which need to continue engaging in the consumer web, but recognize the need for a different place to do the things that define business -- to engage, collaborate, and sell more effectively."

Companies can set-up the most basic version at no cost for up to 50 users and pay $1 per month per user for 51-plus users, according to the Clearvale pricing model. At the highest end of the scale, BroadVision charges $12 per user per month, which includes all available features and capabilities such as LDAP integration, community cloning, ecosystem management and single sign-on.

BroadVision worked on Clearvale for more than two years, and beta-tested the solution for about 10 months. Client SoftBank plans to use Clearvale to deliver cloud-based services via mobile devices to its customers in Japan.