SNW INTERVIEW -- Mar 21 -- NewsGator has come a long way since offering FeedDemon. They’ve used what they’ve learned from their years of RSS
information harvesting experience and applied it to the emerging, very
commercially viable, field of social collaberation. Now they include
the likes of Reuters, SAP and USA.gov among their clients. I interviewed the CEO, J.B. Holston to find out more. - Mark Brooks
What is the founding story of NewsGator?
NewsGator was founded about 5 years ago. The company started with consumer RSS
applications, including FeedDemon, the newswire for PC, and an iPhone
application for Mac that Time Magazine picked as one of the top 10
iPhone apps of the year last year.
I was brought in as CEO with the first round of venture financing. The founder of the company, Greg Reinacker, is our CTO and at the time the initial financing was provided, he already had the brand products and revenue.
While we’re still synonymous with RSS, all of our revenue comes from the business to business side of things. We’re increasingly involved in social computing for the enterprise where our flagship product is called Social Sites.
How can your service help webmasters and site operators?
We
have a range of products and services. It depends on whether the target
audience is internal to the organization or external. We have products
and services for both. One is Enterprise software installed behind the
fire wall. The other is SAAS. We have about
150 media, information services, technology and financial services
companies who use our Publisher Suite to bring related content for
their constituents onto the website and then make that available as
widgets and all the way through to mobile devices, on a synchronized
basis.
How about an association, somebody who has a group of say 5,000 people that want to create something like a LinkedIn?
Yes
exactly. There are two different approaches we would take in that case.
If it’s an organization that uses SharePoint for example, we can offer
a complete social computing solution on top of SharePoint that they
could use to interact. Those who aren’t using SharePoint would use our SAAS
based services. In addition, we have a range of mobile applications all
of which synchronize with the same service. Recently we launched an
iPhone application for Variety.
What does a typical client look like?
On
the installed software side we’ve got clients that range in size from
500 seats to 300,000 seats. We have a number of financial services,
pharmaceutical, government, and technology clients in particular. So
our clients tend to have a large portion of high value added
information workers. We also have about 150 clients that range from
media companies like Reed Publishing, and to a wide range of B to C
customers. And then we have a range of financial services, technology
and association, government customers as well to. USA.gov for example. SAP is using our technology for their developer network to aggregate content. Typical customers are Global 2000.
And what’s the typical cost?
If
this is an Enterprise behind the fire wall deployment, the pricing is
per user. We sell on a subscription basis as well but for the most part
our clients tend to license on a perpetual license basis. And there’s
maintenance and support annually on top of that. Anywhere from a few
thousand dollars a month up to tens of thousands of dollars per month.
