nGenera Corporation Announces CEM Solutions for the Collaborative Enterprise

AUSTIN, Texas and BOSTON - Company sees “Collaborative Enterprise Management” (CEM) as next major wave of productivity and innovation - and offers solutions that deliver real business outcomes

Today at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, nGenera(TM) (www.ngenera.com/) announced four new end-to-end Collaborative Enterprise Management Solutions designed to deliver greater efficiency, employee and customer engagement, and innovation to the enterprise. The company also announced the release of nGenera Collaboration Platform 3.0, a full-featured cloud-based platform that is compatible with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Google’s OpenSocial, and hosts a suite of collaborative applications that power nGenera’s CEM Solutions.

“Over the last few years, the promise of Web 2.0, collaboration and social networking for the enterprise has created a lot of buzz and an avalanche of vendor offerings,” said Steve Papermaster, founder and CEO of nGenera. “But no one has come forward with end-to-end solutions that put all the pieces together and deliver real results - until now. The level of engagement, efficiency, agility and innovative capacity provided by CEM are propelling businesses forward more than any other innovation.”

Collaborative Enterprise Management: Solutions that drive outcomes nGenera’s CEM Solutions (www.ngenera.com/solutions/what_is_cem.aspx) provide a robust approach to driving real business outcomes:

- They focus on higher level ad-hoc management processes that are more enterprise-wide in scope. - They begin with thought leadership and innovative research, providing executives with the knowledge and tools to select and drive the right initiatives. - They are end-to-end solutions to real needs, such as citizen engagement and collaborative channel management, instead of point products, ensuring user adoption by having a well-defined purpose. - Each employs a new breed of collaborative applications on a common platform, so that every new capability leverages the company’s investment in collaboration. - nGenera’s sophisticated collaborative strategy and implementation services provide critical guidance to maximize the results of every initiative.

“Up until now, the focus has largely been on managing collaborative tools, such as wikis and blogs,” said Don Tapscott, award-winning author of Wikinomics and Grown up Digital, and a senior nGenera executive. “The breakthrough of CEM is that it is about collaboratively managing the enterprise.”

“We partnered with nGenera on our collaboration initiatives due to nGenera’s in-depth understanding of our business and their strong track record of insightful research on web 2.0 for the enterprise. In addition we also appreciated their practical approach in helping customers realize business impact through collaboration,” said David Johns, SVP, Chief Information Officer and head of Shared Services for Owens Corning. “Their team was critical to the success of the initiative we launched.”

nGenera’s CEM Solutions

nGenera’s CEM Solutions (www.ngenera.com/solutions) combine thought leadership, collaborative applications, and collaborative strategy and implementation services to deliver business outcomes.

- nGen Enterprise Collaboration. Build a collaboration roadmap by identifying high-value management initiatives within their enterprise and deploying them on a collaboration platform. - nGen Collaborative Selling. Build a collaborative selling channel across internal sales pursuit teams and external sales channels, leveraging Sales 2.0 processes and technologies. - nGen Customer Experience. Deploy collaborative processes to define, create, measure and continuously improve the customer experience. - nGen Talent Management. Implement transformational approaches for managing the talent base of their organizations.

Each solution is targeted at a specific executive role in the organization and delivers outcomes specific to that role and line of business. These roles include executive, sales, marketing, HR and IT leadership.

“It takes a deliberate sequence of selecting the right initiatives, garnering executive sponsorship, deploying applications, increasing your collaborative capacity and most important, delivering real business outcomes,” said Steve Douty, EVP of Platform, Products and Marketing at nGenera. “This is exactly how each of our CEM Solutions is designed - and when you deploy them enterprise-wide, they are truly transformational.”

nGenera Collaboration Platform 3.0

In addition to the announcement of CEM Solutions, nGenera also released version 3.0 of nGenera Collaboration Platform, (www.ngenera.com/applications/enterprise_collaboration.aspx) a cloud-based platform that features:

- Widget-based collaboration architecture. nGenera Collaboration Platform offers more than thirty widgets that provide the full range of core collaboration-enabling components. - Robust, open, enterprise-class platform. Provides global services for user, security, search and storage management. Compliant with OpenSocial standard to enable easy integration of third-party applications, including Google Wave, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others. The platform also integrates with Microsoft Sharepoint versions 2003 and 2007. - Integrated collaboration and social data services. This unique capability provides all applications with access to collaborative components (e.g., groups, projects, events, content) and social data (profiles, activities, relationships) that creates a new class of people-aware collaborative applications. - Security and administration. Every enterprise instance of nGen Collaboration Platform comes with a robust, secure administrative capability that enables the configuration and management of provisioning, menus, messaging, groups, membership, users and mass on-boarding, along with an extensive reporting capability. - The exclusive home of nGenera’s world-class research and executive communities.

The nGenera Collaboration Platform hosts a number of collaborative applications (www.ngenera.com/applications), each taking advantage of its rich set of services. Highlights of these applications include:

- nGen Ideagora and nJAM. In his best-selling book Wikinomics, nGenera’s Don Tapscott coined the term “ideagora,” capturing the ability for global communities to generate “marketplaces for ideas” in the Web 2.0 age. The nGen Ideagora application drives internal and external idea generation, including submitting and voting on ideas, and creating discussions about them. nJAM is a large-scale, external-facing ideagora with a rich interaction space for thousands of simultaneous participants. - nGen CIM. A powerful suite of integrated applications that seamlessly manage customer interactions including voice, email, chat and self-service knowledge bases. - nGen Wikiforce and nGen Salesmap. These applications enable new collaborative selling processes that give sales pursuit teams a space for interactive account and opportunity planning, shortening the sales cycle. It is fully integrated with Salesforce.com(r), the leading SaaS CRM application. - nGen Simulation. Combining sophisticated modeling and mathematical techniques with powerful visualization, nGen Simulation lets executives test numerous complex business hypotheses using real data before making significant investments. Instances of nGen Simulation appear in all CEM Solutions.

nGen Collaboration and nGenera’s CEM Solutions are available today. The company has hundreds of customers (www.ngenera.com/company/ngenera_customers.aspx) in the Global 2000, including Accenture, AOL, Best Buy, Cisco, Daimler, Disney, EMC, Fed Ex, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Owens Corning, Pfizer, and Verizon, among many others.

“Collaboration is a journey, not a destination,” said Papermaster. “In Wikinomics, we showed how it has the power to revolutionize business. With a decade of research, knowledge and experience in making collaboration work, no one knows the journey better than nGenera.”

About nGenera

nGenera drives productivity and business velocity by deploying on-demand Collaborative Enterprise Management (CEM) solutions in the world’s leading organizations. These innovative solutions combine nGenera’s collaborative applications, executive insight, advisory services, and education to deliver critical business outcomes in marketing, sales, IT, HR and operations. For more information, visit www.ngenera.com.

About The Enterprise 2.0 Conference

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. This annual conference and sponsor pavilion focuses on the tools and techniques that best leverage the technical, productive and social aspects of IT and workgroup environments to build a cohesive collaboration strategy and empower a connected workforce. For more information visit: www.e2conf.com.

Source: nGenera

Ann Reichert of nGenera Corporation, +1-858-254-3676, areichert at ngenera.com