If You Can't Beat Consumer Apps, Why Fight Them?

14.11.2008

It's not so much a Web 2.0 approach, where you have everything personalized and just the way you want it. So we've done some projects with big retail banks, to take this secure information of their customers and making it available where their customers are spending their online time.

CIO: What consumer apps do these customers prefer?

Kaminitz: It pretty much follows their habits and people's habits are different. So today, when you deploy WorkLight's technology, you get the applications available automatically on 15 different environments. The environment [users choose] is often different based on their geography and demography. With a younger demographic, obviously Facebook is pretty big. The personalized homepages like iGoogle and live.com are also pretty popular. In other places, outside the U.S., there are other services that are more popular, like Netvibes, which is very popular in Europe. We've seen, in other demographics, that desktop widgets like Vista Sidebar gadgets or the Apple gadgets. I think it's pretty much about giving your customers a choice.

CIO: WorkLight is also used internally at companies, right? Tell us about that use case.

Kaminitz: We do see steady revenue for internal use in companies. I'm talking about large corporations around the 100,000 employees. Those companies want to see our solution as a solution to traditional enterprise software packages. Instead of investing in an expensive portal, they use iGoogle internally. Instead of building a new collaboration and knowledge sharing product, they might use Facebook. People are already [using those sites], so instantly you get 40 or 50 percent adoption.