Burlington, MA-based Mzinga, which provides social networking, community, and e-learning solutions for the enterprise, is today announcing that it has acquired Prospero. Prospero is itself a provider of enterprise community solutions, but where Mzinga mainly deals with corporate social networks, Prospero's product line focuses on the consumer side of community building. The combined company will become a market leader in the enterprise community space, with 1 billion pages served per month across 14,000 communities.
Mzinga launched in November of last year when corporate e-learning company Knowledge Planet and web community provider Shared Insight merged. The company provides standard social networking fare for use in corporate environments, including blogs, wikis, profiles, forums, calendars, polls, etc. Though Mzinga does power some consumer facing sites (such as the customer community for WebEx), they mainly focus on corporate communities and e-learning.
Karen Leavitt, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Mzinga, told us that one of the main demographics being served by their enterprise customers is baby boomers. With many of these older employees about to retire, companies are faced with a dilemma: how to retain that outgoing knowledge. Mzinga uses corporate communities and e-learning to extract and preserve that knowledge. By using social media tools that younger workers are already familiar with, Leavitt told us, Mzinga's approach helps to assure continuity during periods of turnover in the workplace.
Prospero, on the other hand, which was founded in 2000, is a leading provider of consumer-facing community solutions. Among Prospero's clients are every major US television network, ESPN, Amazon.com, iVillage, Hallmark, BusinessWeek, and Major League Baseball.
The presentation that Mzinga and Prospero showed us seemed to be very Prospero-heavy, and we can't blame them. Prospero's work is just sexier. While Mzinga was nearly profitable out of the gate providing social networks to corporations, and the combined company expects to see over $30 million in revenue in 2008, Prospero's portfolio makes better eye candy.
We also got the impression that going forward, Prospero's community platform will take the lead at Mzinga for social media, while Mzinga will continue providing its e-learning suite focused on corporate deployments. Prospero's platform consists of six main component applications: social networking, message boards, article commenting, live chats, ratings and reviews, and blogs. Each can be deployed via templates (i.e., built directly into an exist page's layout), widgets, or an API.
The two Massachusetts-based companies seem to be a good fit, and combined they'll have 125 enterprise customers, reaching 27 million unique users. The acquisition also adds 150 new employees to Mzinga's workforce.
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This is actually a pretty interesting area. While much of the focus around data portability, OpenSocial and "open social graphs" is on the big social networks I believe it will actually have a much bigger and more immediate impact on these small to medium sized sites.
These vertical social networks are often designed to integrate into existing environments, which is where the OpenSocial standard is going to make things a lot easier. For example, imagine a corporate e-learning system built around the goal of linking expert users with those who need help. The OpenSocial standard gives applications a standard way of pushing the activities of users to central system (the activity stream API). This can be used to identify the expert users and link them to those others who need them.
The Open Social Graph stuff (and the data portability stuff) is also useful on "the intranet", because it gives applications a way to automatically discover other applications a user has. In an intranet environment the privacy concerns aren't so great, either, which helps avert some of the privacy problems.
The job of comparing the adoption of these standards to the existing "e-portfolio" "standards" written for the education sector is something I'll leave for someone else...
Posted by: Nick Lothian | March 2, 2008 9:59 PMgreat article
Posted by: i-guide | March 3, 2008 7:21 AMhttp://www.i-guide.ro
Any ideas on how much the acquisition was for?
Posted by: Salman | March 3, 2008 9:32 AM