 "Polaris aims for a Facebook rerun in enterprise space")
The Chennai-based company is going full swing with 'Octopus’, a project said to be dear to founder-chairman Arun Jain, to offer social networking solutions in the corporate environment. It started as something to meet internal requirements of the company and is ready to be marketed. The company is in the process of formalising a strategy on doing so.
“We are talking to prospective customers and are in the final stages of discussions,” Shashi Mohan, chief information officer and chief technology officer, told Business Standard.
| DESI FACEBOOK IN THE MAKING |
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Giving employees the same social platform to engage with themselves, teams and seniors has always been a challenge for global companies, especially with youth's early exposure to these early in life. Polaris took this as a challenge and Project Octopus has been running in the company for two years. The management says it has raised productivity and reduced attrition. Octopus is an enterprise social network. The company says with its social connectors, it equips an enterprise for efficient delivery with social team rooms, employee engagement and knowledge proliferation in a unified workspace. It is based on modular apps and consists of several social applications built using IBM’s flagship social enterprise tool, Connections.
According to Mohan, at a high level, Octopus provides functionalities, including public, private and team-based collaboration, with ability to disseminate information to the public, social team rooms and management, apart from tracking and maintaining an artifact repository for projects, customer accounts, pre-sales and business leaderships. The ‘social room’ feature helps a newly recruited team get access to all information within a project, helping reduce ramp-up time.
“With Octopus, Polaris has extended the workplace social collaboration solution to include project management activities,” said Sunil Padmanabh, an independent advisor and thought leader on enterprise solutions strategy. “Sharing and accessing information in real time among geographically spread teams is key and the Octopus solution seems to have addressed the need of embedding social collaboration in managing projects.”
The firm is understood to be test-piloting the product in America. However, it is primarily targeting the developing nations, said a source. Octopus is available on the internet, mobiles (iOS, Android, Blackberry) and tablets.
With enterprises moving to digital, pushed by the drive to adopt cloud and mobility, the use of social media in core business activity is expected to rise dramatically. Globally, IBM’s Connections, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Jive, Microsoft Yammer and SAP Jam are known enterprise social network tools. In the past couple of years, there are companies creating their own social networking sites. For example, Atos, a French information technology solutions provider, has developed a platform called ‘blueKiwi’ for greater team collaboration and to reduce the dependency on emails.
“Today’s generation is the Facebook generation. So, if Facebook has been so successful outside the business enterprise, we believe that enterprise Facebooks will emerge within the organisation. We have developed a platform called ‘blueKiwi’, through which we are driving a big innovation on how Facebook types of approach can be driven for business processes,” Milind Kamat, chief executive at Atos India had told Business Standard in an earlier interview.
According to a forecast by MarketsandMarkets, a global market research and forecasting company based out America, the enterprise social software market is expected to grow from $4.8 billion in 2014 to $8.1 bn in 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 11.3 per cent.