Market Growth and Demand for NewsGator Enterprise Server

This morning we announced several new customer deployments for NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES). Over the last six months, we've seen a significant increase in demand for Enterprise RSS solutions from Fortune 500 companies all the way down to 40 person companies across a wide range of industries- financial services, insurance, high-tech, discrete manufacturing, law firms, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical, chemical and professional services among others. Many of our larger customers have asked us to keep their names quiet during the deployment process, but several smaller companies- SI Group (Chemicals), Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger, Vecchione, P.C (Legal), Polyform (Manufacturing), Return Path (High Tech) and Vyylo (IT for Spencer Trask, the financial services firm) allowed us to mention their names in our release.

In addition to demonstrating momentum for solutions such as NGES, what's interesting is that we are seeing a pretty diverse set of use cases and drivers for adoption. For the larger companies, NGES primarily is selected for one of three reasons:

• RSS aggregation is part of a larger Web 2.0 initiative (blogs, wikis etc;)
• RSS is viewed as an alternative delivery channel solve long-standing communications and collaboration issues that were not adequately addressed by e-mail, portals or other information delivery mechanisms on their own
• Companies pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year for premium content from Thomson, LexisNexis, Factiva and others and RSS will help ensure better delivery and usage of that content

The common thread between the different business drivers is that simply handing everyone a copy of an individual-use RSS reader (such as NewsGator Inbox or FeedDemon) or letting employees find one on their own isn't efficient or effective on a large-scale. Features in NGES that enable administrators to subscribe users and groups to feeds, customize the taxonomy, search against a central index, and get detailed usage and feed reports helps ensure a better uptake since it brings the relevant content right to employees, particularly ones who don't have experience using an RSS aggregator or finding feeds on their own. The ability for NGES to sync with all of our client products as well as corporate portals and mobile devices (more on that in a future post) also gives companies the flexibility to have different employees access content from the devices/interfaces that make the most sense. IT also likes a centralized solution because it cuts down on support issues, reduces bandwidth consumption and gives them better overall control over the process.

For mid-market and small companies (although some departments/business units in Fortune 500 companies fit into this category as well), the business driver can be around premium content (law firms have embraced this in particular, see the Prism Legal post about Delivering the Right Information to Lawyers and the Vancouver Law Librarian blog post about Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms), but often is around the idea that RSS is a better way to find and disseminate important information (company/client/industry news, large stock sales, competitive intelligence, key performance indicators etc;). Despite the fact that smaller companies don't usually have severe communications issues (at least as much as large companies do), the centralized management component drives them to choose NGES over individual readers.

One other important note is that the champions and/or decision makers within organizations for NGES is also pretty diverse. We've seen corporate librarians, KM professionals, marketers, salespeople and IT professionals (advanced technology, collaboration, portals) all evangelize adoption within the companies.

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