Blog | Archive for the ‘SONAR’ Category
Ovum cites Trampoline for next-generation CRM
By Charles Armstrong | Monday, August 16th, 2010
Technology analyst Ovum has published an article “Using Social Search & Analytics to fix CRM” emphasising the need for businesses to incorporate data mining and social network analysis solutions as part of their CRM strategy. The article highlights Trampoline as the outstanding vendor in this technology sector. Ovum identifies three areas where such intelligence is transformative. First, providing a solution to the problem of incomplete data that plagues conventional CRM solutions:“Accessing the “missing” 75% of actionable information is vital from a competitive and business survival perspective, and so organizations must consider the option of information discovery tools alongside traditional enterprise search solutions.”
Second, enabling employees to instantly identify which of their colleagues can introduce them to a new contact:
“According to Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0, “social calling” (or a “warm introduction”, as traditionalists might call it) is 8-10 times more effective than cold calling, and so the business value of social connections is there for all to see.”
Third, understanding the comparative strength of different relationships in a B2B sales process:
“In the world of B2B sales and marketing relationship management, developing and fostering relationships with the right people is incredibly important, and so by analyzing the information held in an organization’s email system, existing CRM platform, and corporate directory a more useful insight into the strength and nature of a customer relationship can be obtained.”
It’s exciting to see mainstream analysts like Ovum advocating the use of data analytics technologies as part of a CRM solution. The article caused quite a stir in the analyst community and has been covered by a variety of other titles including CIO Magazine Germany, Katonda Magazine, Computer World Norway, Computer World Philippines and CIOL.
Posted in Media, SONAR | No Comments »
Trampoline awarded UK trademark for “SONAR”
By Charles Armstrong | Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
We’ve just received confirmation that Trampoline’s application for a UK trademark on the “SONAR” name has now completed the approval process and has been officially registered. This is great news for Trampoline and our customers, guaranteeing clarity in the market. We started using the SONAR brand in 2006 when it originally started life as an acronym for SOcial Networks And Relevance.At the end of 2008 we were disturbed to discover that IBM was promoting their own network analysis technology under the “SONAR” name. We contacted IBM pointing out that this was bound to create confusion with Trampoline’s products. They said their product was only at a development stage and wouldn’t necessarily be brought to market under that name, but they stopped short of making a commitment.
Since then we’ve been working to secure the UK trademark for SONAR. We’re delighted this has now been granted. Meanwhile we’re proceeding with trademark filings in other territories.
Posted in SONAR, Trampo news | No Comments »
Trampoline launches SONAR CRM
By Charles Armstrong | Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Today I’m excited to announce the arrival of Trampoline Systems’ new baby, SONAR CRM. This is the culmination of a four year journey which began in 2006 with our original vision for SONAR. It marks an important milestone for Trampoline and an entirely new paradigm for customer relationship management.Ever since the launch of Siebel’s “Sales information System” in 1994 businesses have deployed CRM platforms in an effort to increase the effectiveness of their sales operations and their ability to forecast next quarter’s revenue. To attain these benefits they needed everyone in the sales team to be dilligent about keeping the system up to date with their contacts and activity. Unfortunately human nature has often proven recalcitrant and many businesses have failed to achieve the results they hoped for.
CRM systems have continued to improve. They’ve moved to the cloud, been integrated with other programs and wired into social networks. But the paradigm of manual form-filling has remained unchanged. Until today, that is.
SONAR CRM is a social analytic technology designed to run alongside an existing CRM solution. It works by analysing patterns of electronic communications using data from corporate email servers, directories, CRM platforms and other sources. When you make a new contact SONAR CRM automatically picks it up. There’s no need to manually record activity. SONAR CRM does that automatically. It also tracks the symmetry, strength and responsiveness of each interaction. For business to business accounts SONAR CRM brings even greater benefits. It automatically identifies decision makers and works out the best way to reach them. It analyses the structure of the account and highlights deal-losing weaknesses and failure points. It helps turn borderline deals into wins.
SONAR has always been renowned for its sophisticated visualisations and they’re a central part of SONAR CRM, helping make sense of complex accounts. But now they’re accompanied by powerful tabular and chart reporting so users can get the insight they need in whichever form is most appropriate. We’ve also streamlined deployment and maintenance by providing SONAR CRM as a cloud app with user and admin interfaces accessed through a secure website. To integrate with email and CRM systems running internally customers simply install the lightweight SONAR Connector inside their firewall which extracts the relevant information, strongly encrypts it and passes it on to the main server for analysis.
Over the last six months we’ve been piloting SONAR CRM with some big-name customers and the results have been phenomenal. Using SONAR CRM customers have increased their pool of known prospects by more than 400% compared to existing CRM data.
Today we’ve added details of SONAR CRM to the website and there’s more coming in the weeks ahead. In the meantime if you’d like to know more please get in touch. If you’re on Twitter you can also follow @tramp0 for updates.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR, Trampo news | No Comments »
Visualivideo
By rebecca | Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
I had a video made from the visualisations in Trampoline’s products for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference party. The party played with the theme “No man is an island”, for which we had this video showing, blow ups of Charles’ photography from St. Agnes (the tiny island on which he did the ethnographic research into information distribution that led to Trampoline) and little photos as gifts. We had funky furniture and great tunes too, but I can’t find even a tenuous way to link them to the theme. Most importantly, it provided a venue for folks to meet each other, chat and make connections, hopefully resulting in each of them being a less of an “island” in the sea of conference attendees.
Trampoline visualisations video from rebecca kemp on Vimeo.
I wanted our product to look like art, and we did a pretty good job, if i do say so myself. It was made so fabulous by Eddie Codel (editing) and Trampoline Dev (product)! The content is taken from SONAR Dashboard, SONAR Flightdeck and Metascope.
Tags: Marketing, video, visualisations
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | 1 Comment »
E2 Wednesday: The Toaster-Killing Cloud, E2 Clusterfage, You Give Good Boothage, There’s Such a Thing as Too Much Stuphs, Great Party
By peter | Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
It’s Wednesday afternoon at Enterprise 2.0. In spite of a few frustrating failures in infrastructure, it’s been a really great two days here at E2 for Trampoline.
Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.
Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)
The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.
New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…
I blame google, of course.
I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.
Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).
The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.
The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.
When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.
Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).
Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.
Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.
I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.
Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.
The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.
As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)
Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.
So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.
We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!
Posted in Events, Organisations & Technology, SONAR, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu
By peter | Friday, August 10th, 2007
I’ve now been a Tramponaut (er, Tramp? Trampoliner? Trampo?) for a week, and it’s been an amazing start. Everyone here is as smart as I hoped, even nicer than I thought, the stuff we are working is actually MORE important than I thought it was originally, and boy, do we have a lot to do.All in all, a truly fantastic time and place for a start up to be.
I’m thinking about lots of things, and I’ll write more on them later. Here’s what I’m thinking about this morning.
We’re very hard at work nailing down the last chunks of functionality on SONAR, and this gives a few of us the luxury of spending a little more time thinking further out than “bap or ciabatta?” when we go down to Franco’s to get lunch (takeaway back to the office, of course – must multitask! Eat and solve world hunger… or maybe just spend more time obsessing over FaceBook).
This is extremely cool because we get to imagine what happens in a world where we make our customers data available to them in profoundly new ways. But it presents some interesting challenges.
With SONAR 1.0 we are solving a problem that I think almost every Enterprise on the planet has, however they either don’t really know it, or they are ignoring it because they have no way to address it. The most efficient expert networks usually run below the formal infrastructure of an enterprise. They are organic structures that don’t use “modern” protocols for communication. There are exceptions, most notably in labs or widely disparate disaggregated online communities (WoW raids, anyone?), but these aren’t the general rule.
I can’t recall “subject matter expertise requisition forms” in any of the enterprises I’ve ever visited. Mostly things boil down to who you know and how well you get along. That’s how things have always worked. So what’s going to happen when our customers embrace our technology? What more will they want? How will they use the product? What new things will they do to it that we can’t imagine yet? We WILL have “OMG you did what to our poor sw? that is soooooo cool!!!” moments. This could be followed by Al telling me “woo hoo! We can have that done in a quarter!” or by Craig saying “oh… no… that will pretty much completely blow our architecture up”.
We can’t really ask the enterprise this kind of stuff, because we’re not even fully at the “prove to me this thingy does anything useful” stage. We haven’t even really developed the right language to describe things, frankly. And our customers probably don’t really understand how big of a problem they have, no less tell us about new problems they will see once they are past the first set…
There’s a scale of product-fu:
1) Starting out prod fu: wait for RFP, submit bid, build solution. Wait again.
2) Experienced prod fu: ask a bunch of customers what they want, validate the problem set, boil it down to something smaller than “everything”. Build that. Repeat.
3) Elite prod fu: Work with customers to understand their problems. Work with analysts to understand the space. Work with technologists to understand what is possible. Combine and make your best fit solution to solve one or more problems that most customers either don’t know about or have no solution for so they ignore it.
Right now we do elite prod fu. Not only must we engineer product to solve today’s problems, we have to be super smart and dig even deeper into the space and identify the additional problems the introduction of our SW will uncover. We have to understand the way enterprises work so well that we can see past the introduction of SONAR to a future where it does what it’s supposed to do, and thus uncovers existing-but-unrealized problems.
We predicate this on the fact that we don’t understand all of the problems that Enterprises face. Der. We can’t, but we assume that the problems are there. We, and our customers, don’t have the tools to uncover them yet. HOWEVER there’s stuff even beyond this, and for that we need ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu.
There will be brand spanking new problems – ones that truly don’t exist at all yet because they can’t, because the things that create the baseline to make them even possible don’t exist yet. Our customers will have them. We have to figure those ones out, too.
4) ultra-major-cosmic-black-belt-prod-fu: Build solutions to problems that TRULY don’t exist yet, but which will be, at least in part, based on things we (and this is the BIG we – it’s all of us in technology) are going to do to create them in the future. NO ONE can tell you about them.
In some cases, once you’ve figured them out yourself, just talking openly about these things will get you a PhD, arrested, committed, branded a heretic, or all of the above. When you get this one right, you have to be careful as you can actually spook people. It’s like being a really really really good fortune teller. From the outside it looks like magic.
This is one thing that makes the state of play here so interesting – we have the opportunity to anticipate the future invention, in the truest sense of the word, of problems created by systems that don’t exist yet.
How cool is that? Very cool.
Peter
Posted in SONAR | 3 Comments »
A Behavioural Shift in Our Emails
By alistair | Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Since we started using our own internal Sonar deployment as a test bed, we’ve been noticing a subtle but distinct shift in the way we compose emails. We’re taking just a little bit more care to write informative subjects and supply more context, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.One of the main characteristics of the email noise that pervades the enterprise is a lack of persistent context. I long ago lost count of the number of hours of lost on fruitless trawls through my inbox for some nugget of information that I *know* is there, languishing in some long-forgotten recess of my mail client, but I just can’t find it because it’s lost in a morass of meaningless subjects, like “meeting notes”, or “tomorrow”, or – everyone’s favourite – “Re:”. A communication medium such as email, without the situational or emotional context that is generally inferred from ambient knowledge such as a previous verbal conversation followed up with an email, or from the non-verbal clues that provide up to 80% of our meaning, can inevitably lead to serious misunderstandings or just….. noise. A potential goldmine of crucial information – somebody’s inbox – quickly becomes a black hole of knowledge that can never be found again.
What we’re finding since implementing Sonar is that the knowledge that our emails are going to be processed and have themes extracted from them is making us – consciously or subconsciously – put that little bit of extra thought into providing that context in our sentence construction. It only takes a second to change a subject line like “meeting notes” to “notes from production meeting”, or change “tomorrow” to “tomorrow’s development tasks”, but that extra context makes the world of difference when you’re dredging back through your inbox, months down the line.
It also means that the picture of organisational expertise that Sonar can build up can be rich, informative, and ever-evolving. It’s changing the way we communicate, in subtly varied ways, making us provide more relevant information and, frankly, cut out the crap – and that, to my mind, can only be a good thing.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | 1 Comment »
Enron Explorer: 40,000 visitors from 100 countries in two weeks
By Charles Armstrong | Monday, November 13th, 2006
When we launched Enron Explorer a few days before Jeffrey Skilling’s sentencing we hoped it might capture people’s interest and give them a way to dig below the headlines. The response has been fantastic. 20,000 people visited the site in the first forty-eight hours following Skilling’s sentencing. After this initial peak people kept on coming, reaching a total of 40,000 visitors over the first two weeks from 100 countries around the world. People have done some great detective work too, judging by the skulduggery and scandals highlighted on the comments page.Naturally we’re all delighted; particularly since the system kept on running smoothly under this battering, which included being BoingBoinged and hitting the front page of Digg.
Posted in Events, SONAR | 1 Comment »
Enron Explorer hits Boing Boing and del.icio.us
By alistair | Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Since we got Boing Boing’ed yesterday, Google Analytics shows that we’ve had over 21,000 page views so far – and that’s just to the front page. Unfortunately the GA javascript can’t be included in the main app, as it’s pretty much all AJAX requests, so we’ll have to wait for analysis of the Apache logs for full statistics.I also put the Enron Explorer on del.icio.us 4 days ago – it’s now been echoed by 112 people, including one who speaks Russian, by the looks of it. Google Analytics confirms that we’ve had visitors from 71 different countries, interestingly enough including two from the Cayman Islands and one from an anonymising proxy – Kenny Boy, that’s not you is it….?
Some of the comments are fantastic :
fpaulus “Interesting (both technologically and economically) walk through the Enron e-mail archives”
markwithasee “searchable database of all of enron’s internal email from 99-02. WOW.”
RStacy “A look into what the future could look like in corporate transparency and analysis.”
slightlyfleury (ahem – best not repeated here!)
some of the tags that people have applied to it (under the posting history on the right) are also interesting – I always find it intriguing to see how other people see what we’ve done.
Posted in Organisations & Technology, SONAR | No Comments »