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

14.11.2008

One of our customers is a bank with 80,000 employees. They did an internal survey, and they found that almost half of them, more than 40 percent, were already on Facebook. It would take them years to get those people actively collaborating and using something like SharePoint.

CIO: There's been a lot of developments in the effort to bring enterprise apps to the consumer market. , and Facebook announced that you could . Is this a threat to WorkLight?

Kaminitz: These are positive developments from our perspective. Our interest is very simple: we believe consumer platforms will become more and more open. Our value proposition isn't around the gadget [or widget] development. It's about adding the security and compliance and integration layers, which none of these Web 2.0 vendors are doing, nor is it in their business model. People are buying IBM and Microsoft because it's enterprise grade. It has all the things IT requires. But the consumer tools provide such a better end-user experience, and people have to choose between the two. Before, Facebook wasn't an option because of security. We want to provide the best of both worlds, something that's enterprise grade while giving that consumer experience.