BroadVision Offers Platform For Social Media In The Enterprise

BroadVision is introducing a new version of its Clearvale product that makes it possible for businesses to set up a social network for their employees and customers. The platform brings together communications tools such as instant messaging (IM), e-mail and voice, but also allows a company to develop additional services to sell to those customers.

BroadVision's Clearvale platform allows companies to build their own networks among employees and customers, just as Facebook enables its 500 million subscribers to each build their own networks of friends, family and colleagues, said Giovanni Rodriguez, BroadVision's chief marketing officer.

Version 2.0 of Clearvale, introduced Tuesday at an enterprise collaboration conference in Santa Clara, Calif., replaces version 1.0, which was introduced last May. Clearvale creates a portal at which an enterprise's different communications feeds -- e-mail, IM, updates on its social network and even Twitter feeds -- can be viewed in one place. This feature is called "My Streams," Rodriguez said. Besides aggregating the content, Clearvale also filters this multitude of data streams, sorting it by priority, for instance.

As such, it's comparable to unified communications systems for enterprises already offered by companies such as Microsoft, he acknowledged. In addition, companies can create additional services to provide free or sell to their customers, which BroadVision calls "Clearvale Paasport," because it's essentially a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. "The social environment becomes the layer upon which you can sell services," Rodriguez said.

Softbank Telecom, the giant Japanese telecommunications concern, is an early customer of BroadVision Clearvale and is expected to roll out commercial services to deliver to customers on top of its corporate social network -- such as e-mail, other productivity apps, customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) -- sometime in the first quarter of 2011.BroadVision has revised its pricing model in Clearvale version 2.0 by offering a pay-per-use model. BroadVision charges corporate customers based on how many users actually log in to the social network rather than charging a flat fee or on presumed usage, the company said. Also, when companies add paid services on top of the Paasport platform, BroadVision gets a cut of the revenue raised, Rodriguez said.

"[Paasport] is a way for a company to use a platform-as-a-service to become another company on the Web, to build a business in the cloud," he said.

Other companies compared to BroadVision include Jive Software, which bills itself as offering "the new way to engage employees, customers and the social Web," and Chatter, an offering from software-as-a-service vendor Salesforce.com.