Listen to my interview with Shahar Kaminitz, founder and CEO of Worklight, whose technology harnesses Web 2.0 tools from the consumer Web for enterprise use.
In this podcast, learn how online, consumer-oriented services like Facebook, iGoogle and Pageflakes can be connected into the enterprise environment without introducing security risks, and hear about some of the business results enterprises are achieving with these popular Web tools.
Listen to or download the 9:00 minute podcast below:
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PW: Shahar, WorkLight really is focused on technology that helps enterprises take advantage of all the Web 2.0 capabilities that are out there on the consumer internet, but use them more securely for enterprise purposes. Can you explain a little bit more about how that works?
SK: Right, that's exactly right. So the vision behind WorkLight is pretty simple. It's that, over the last few years we've seen tremendous innovation on the consumer side of the Internet. Whether you want to call this Web 2.0 doesn't really matter. But we've seen a bunch of tools and services like Facebook and My Space and iGoogle and My Yahoo, etcetera, which are used by tens [of millions] and maybe more than 100 million people for some of those tools.
Those services are very compelling, very simple to use, very effective, very popular with users. And the interesting thing is that a lot of them have also very relevant business implications. So you can definitely see them — and we can talk about it later — how they can be very valuable for business users, either employees within the enterprise or just customers of business.
Yeah, and I think that people see the Web 2.0 tools out there — and people using them are getting very excited about them — but there's always this nervousness about introducing [them]. Because it's also a little bit of the Wild West out there, [there's] a lot of innovation and a lot of it's chaotic. So how do you introduce that into an enterprise environment without bringing the walls tumbling down?
Well, that's exactly the question, because I think there's pressure on companies — and we see this time and time again — to allow and introduce those tools within IT. On the other hand, they are very legitimate concerns, mainly about security and regulatory compliance, because those Web 2.0 tools were not built for enterprise use. They're not enterprise grade in that sense and a lot is lacking.
It's true that they excel in terms of the user experience and simplicity, but they're missing very basic security capabilities: access control, authentication, compliance - especially if you're a bank, then you have the regulation applied to you, etcetera. And this is exactly what WorkLight sets out to do, is take those best-of-breed Web 2.0 tools and make them enterprise-grade, in the sense that what every CIO or chief security officer in a large corporation would expect from such a solution.
So using the WorkLight server, an enterprise can plug enterprise applications or resources into WorkLight, so that those resources can then become available in some of these tools like Facebook and iGoogle — without being exposed to the security risks that are inherent in those tools without that additional protection.
Right, yeah. So in that sense, you can think of WorkLight as a middleware product that bridges between traditional IT systems. It can be applications, directories, databases, etcetera, and the vast selection of consumer Web 2.0 tools. To date, we support over twenty of the most popular tools that people use in their personal life.
So explain to me some of the use cases. Why would an enterprise get benefit from connecting enterprise systems into something like Facebook or iGoogle or some other widget or personal web page?
So maybe let's look at some — a few of the most common use cases with our customers. Maybe, the first one would be a retail bank, that today is offering a web based e-banking application, a portal. This portal is being used let's say by some portion of the customers, who come into the portal once or twice a month, maybe to check their balances, pay their bills, etcetera. Now, you can use WorkLight to expose all of these services the bank offers securely through an iGoogle gadget, for example, or a desktop widget, or a Facebook application, which means that you make your banking services available where people are already spending their online time — which increases the engagement with those customers from maybe once or twice a month to everyday.
It's really as much as that is it? People actually do get that much more engaged because you're bringing the e-banking application into the environment that they're using?
Absolutely. These are the actual numbers we're seeing from several deployments we have, because — think about, I mean the client that needs to proactively think about it, go to the portal, log in, check their balance or do whatever, versus just making this available where he's already at, this is a major change in the user experience.
Well, yes, I can think of some students I know who probably are quite keen to check what their bank balance is every — several times a day.
Right. If you're thinking about bill payments, which is something that, if you get this pop-up in front of you and you can just click and pay your bill, this is pretty compelling. So this is where we've seen usage actually surge by at least tenfold by just making it available, those services, through a consumer interface.
Right. And the bank wants people hitting its systems that much more because — why?
Because, I mean, it depends on the nature of the banking service. For some banks, it just generates more transactions, meaning more revenue for the bank.
Right.
In other cases, the bank uses this to make up-sell or cross-sell efforts more effective, because you give people useful information very handy, and you can use this also, maybe in a subtle way or a polite way, to offer them new services.
Right. And I know that also you have companies using — particularly large companies, I think you mentioned 10,000 employees at all grades — where a company is that kind of size, they're actually getting benefit from using things like Facebook or personal web pages like Pageflakes, as an interface into internal systems.
Oh yeah, we've had several very successful implementations of that sort with companies between 50,000 to 100,000 employees, so very large companies. Those companies are global by nature. They have people everywhere, in different offices, people working from home, and they are connecting them together either to share knowledge or to find information or to publish news from the company — the kind of things that people do very naturally in their personal lives on Facebook is also something which is natural for them to do on Facebook. So this is what we've done in several cases, implement a secure application for a corporation within the public Facebook.
And the advantage there is that you can make these capabilities — these collaboration capabilities — available to people using a tool that's already familiar to them, rather than having to reinvent the wheel.
Right. And this tool is not only something that they're familiar with, it's also a very good tool and it has very successful components, like the newsfeed, or the friend list, or the groups, which each one by itself are very useful also in the business context. So it's not only popular, it's also a very good fit with this particular need of business collaboration.
Right. Well, that's great, some really good use cases there of how Web 2.0 can actually be useful in an enterprise context, which — it's always useful to hear stories that show what can be done with these technologies.
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