With workforce becoming younger across enterprises – the Facebook generation, which is more used to tweeting, texting and chatting rather than writing emails, companies are now aggressively looking at social capabilities to improve employee engagement and ensure the staff communicate their point and open up to the business perspective.
To cash in on this demand, Pramati Technologies Limited, a Hyderabad-based company engaged in enterprise software and Web 2.0 application development, has developed Qontext, a real-time enterprise 2.0 social collaboration platform for enterprises to use the power of social networking within business applications.
“Social conversations would be the unifying strata of the future enterprise and every application should be connected to a common workplace social network to bring business-focused conversations into the mainstream. Without contextual collaboration, most business-process conversations would remain outside the social network and continue to use other channels such as email or phones,” says Pramati founder and chief executive officer Vijay Pullur.
Forked off into a separate subsidiary, Qontext is designed to bring conversation streams (application feed) into the main flow of conversations in a corporate social network, increasing its effectiveness as a collaboration platform. The platform rides on security and permission mechanisms already deployed in the organisation, striking the right balance between information guarding and open participation.
“We have integrated four applications – including Oracle HR and product document creation – with Qontext. Features like making calls and placing recorded calls on this social media network will be integrated in the near future. We are piloting the product with 20 customers, largely in the services industry including hospitality, IT, BPO and airlines,” he says, adding the company is exploring filing a global patent for the product.
Forrester Research estimates the global market for social tools for enterprises to reach $5 billion in the next three years from less than $1 billion now
Pullur says though the Indian market is still at a very nascent stage, the interest is very high as Indian companies are looking at having the first-mover advantage in adopting such enterprise 2.0 applications.
“The services sector seems to be the most dominant one for us and our first target is the English-speaking market. Qontext is multi-lingual capable. However, we are not in a hurry to address the European market now. Though hard to predict the first year revenues from Qontext, our goal in the first year is to touch 50,000 users and make it a self-sufficient subsidiary, and eventually touch $10 million in revenues in the next three years,” he adds.
