Spigit Brings SAAS Social Networking Tool to SMBs

Spigit, a startup whose social networking application helps enterprise employees work together on specific goals, is moving downstream.

The company Jan. 19 launched WE by Spigit for SMBs of 500 employees or less to work on specific projects within the Spigit construct, which ranks contributors' reputations. Spigit users create a community and begin contributing ideas, which are hosted on Spigit's servers and delivered via the Web as a SAAS (software as a service) solution.

The technology is part of an industry shift by businesses to use Web-based software that helps employees not only connect but more efficiently work with one another on important tasks. Such software helps knowledge workers save the time and resources it would take to find like-minded individuals to achieve goals.

Spigit employs algorithms to track ideas and assign users' value scores based on their reputation as judged by participants in an idea community. The software also assigns points and currency to individuals based on their reputations.

Contributors can take their currency and dump it into prediction markets, or buy goods in real stores. Spigit customer AT&T funds projects forged on Spigit to help move them forward, Spigit CEO and Co-founder Paul Pluschkell told eWEEK.

"The idea is that by getting people to collaborate around these topics, you're getting more meaningful data, which is then recalculated by a million metrics," Pluschkell said. "We moving from real-time decision making based on historical data to more predictive analysis with using new fields of input."

Spigit currently sells the enterprise version of its idea management platform to 3.5 million users at Pfizer, Southwest Airlines and nearly 100 other companies. Employees use it as an alternative to sharing ideas and content through e-mail, spreadsheets and other collaboration software.

While these technologies form the crux of multi-billion-dollar businesses for Microsoft, IBM, Google and a legion of smaller businesses, they can become unwieldy when so many people are trying to work together on a knowledge-based project.

Spigit rivals include Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, as well as other startups such as BrightIdea and SuccessFactors.

Pluschkell said he realized he needed to create an SMB offering when he saw that thousands of employees at Spigit's enterprise customers were using it to form several communities of 500 contributors or less.

However, while many companies take enterprise-grade products and pare the feature functionality to sell them to customers at lower price points, Pluschkell said WE employs the same features and analytics the company offers in its enterprise version.

Pricing for WE by Spigit starts at $500 per company, per month for 50 users, scaling to $2,500 for 500 users. That amounts to $6,000 to $30,000 per year

Spigit launched in 2007 and has banked $14 million in funding and employs 40 people.