Mzinga Puts the Community Platform Puzzle Pieces Together

Mzinga, a player in the evolving community platform space, has relaunched its flagship offering with a product that integrates many of its internally developed features with acquired technologies.

The new platform, called "OmniSocial," provides external and internal communication and collaboration tools for human resources, customer support and marketing .

Social Software and the Enterprise

"Our vision is to make social software pervasive throughout business by changing the way companies operate," Eve Sangenito, vice president of marketing, told CRM Buyer.

It accomplished that by supplying the tools necessary to capture employees, customers and partners' ideas, she said.

Previously, Mzinga had two products -- a social media suite and a social learning suite -- with a great deal of overlap between them, according to Sangenito.

OmniSocial merged their features, giving users flexible deployment options that allow them to either implement it as a standalone platform or as an ecosystem of sites, she said.

Three Modules

The platform's three modules -- marketing, HR and support -- are available as Software as a Service offerings.

They include the ability to create advanced social profiles, blogs and discussion forums, as well as features that enable idea sharing, file sharing, course management, event management and calendaring, assessments and surveys, Web conferencing and collaborative content authoring.

The platform also offers administrative capabilities for managing site design and configuration, user access and registration, content moderation and management, and localization in up to 20 languages.

It allows businesses to create integrated applications and widgets, Sangenito noted, an ability particularly relevant to enterprises that struggle with siloed data and little connectivity between their applications.

"OmniSocial allows you to manage data across functional lines," she said.

There is also an analytics component in the feature set that goes beyond volume-tracking to give organizations greater insight into the kinds of engagements they are experiencing, she noted.

"It gives users a sense of the campaign's viral reach and a better understanding of the strategy," Sangenito observed.

OmniSocial is available now, with additional features scheduled for release in Q1 2010. That release will include additional analytics capabilities and a dashboard, Sangenito said.

Conflicting Focus

Wednesday's release marks the culmination of Mzinga's early growth story, Matthew Lees, vice president and analyst with the Patricia Seybold Group, told CRM Buyer.

"Mzinga has been around for handful of years with its roots from three different companies, including one that was acquired," he said. "I think to some degree it has struggled reconciling the different focuses of those companies -- reconciling the internal collaboration focus with knowledge management, for instance."

It also needed to solidify its code base along with developing a straightforward, coherent strategy , added Lees.

With those issues in the past, OmniSocial is an appealing package, he said. "What I particularly like is how it allows clients to deploy the application. A company can host it as a SaaS, for example, or it can put community elements on their own Web site by using code snippets and widgets."

Mzinga falls into a category that Lees loosely defines as "community platforms." Perhaps one reason for Mzinga's early divergence is the fact that the space itself is continually realigning to some degree.

"Everyone is still feeling out social media, what it means, its blurring between not just internal and external communities but also among personal and professional communities," Lees said.

Another way to look at the issue: Mzinga has several competitors -- but on a feature-by-feature basis. For example, in P2P support it competes with Teligent Systems and Jive Software, to name two, Lees said. In employee collaboration, those companies would be competitors along with Social Text.