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Company: BrightIdea
Started: 1999
Located: San Francisco, California
Geography: Global
Market: On-Demand Innovation Management
Products: WebStorm, Switchboard, Pipeline and Platform
Key Customers: Adobe, AMEX, Bosch, British Telecom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cisco, Harley-Davidson, GE, Kraft, UBS , and Nationwide
Website: Brightidea
Blog: Innovation Work
Twitter: @BrightideaHQ or @Brightidea
Recent News:
The cloud: Where bright ideas come to life
Innovation Management Helps Make Your Idea Reality
Wolters Kluwer Using Brightidea Social Innovation Management Software to Drive Future Business
Ketchum Expands Open Innovation Platform, Mindfire, to Accelerate Flow of Ideas for Clients
I asked, Brightidea’s Vincent Carbone, the company’s co-founder and COO a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market during 2010.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes, Brightidea was founded in 1999 and from day one our solution was designed on a multi-tenant database architecture that supports our SaaS application solutions. The concept of SaaS was still in its infancy, but with the launch of Salesforce.com and their brilliant “No Software” tagline, we believed SaaS was the future. We really believe Brightidea is the Salesforce.com for Innovation.
Why do your customers buy from Brightidea?
Unlike 50 years ago, companies today must continuously innovate at an accelerating pace to stay competitive. Companies buy from Brightidea because there is a fundamental organizational shift underway in medium and large companies who are moving their core business function from a “how to make” to “what to make” mindset. Most companies currently have no infrastructure or software to help them effectively manage their employee, partner or customer ideas that will lead to the development of future products and services. Similar to how companies implemented Customer Relationship Management solutions 15 years ago to manage and optimize their sales pipelines, companies are now starting to implement Innovation Management Software to better manage and optimize their Innovation Pipeline.
Our customers choose Brightidea because we have over 10 years of experience implementing innovation systems in large, complex organizations. Unlike more generic SaaS social software, like Jive and Lithium, Brightidea’s Innovation Management Solutions are grounded in a core business need around innovation, which delivers a true return on our customer’s investment. These business returns are measured in how our customers can manage large-scale projects, encourage new ideas that can improve innovation around product development, cost cutting and even safety ideas.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
One of the key trends we see is user-adoption of social networking components inside of SaaS software for collaboration. It wasn’t until consumers started to get comfortable with sharing information on Facebook, that the workplace began to feel comfortable sharing information in a similar manner. We believe most SaaS applications will continue to adopt more social and collaborative functionality.
What is your outlook for 2010?
We think the future is bright in 2010 for several reasons.
Acceptance of Cloud Computing is going to grow within most IT organizations, so companies will be looking to adopt more SaaS-based solutions.
As I mentioned, users of SaaS software are going to get more comfortable with social networking and collaboration capabilities and organizations will continue to add internal resources that are focused on driving business value through collaboration. We also believe that innovation is inherently a social activity, which means that all of these trends should be good news for Brightidea.
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