Walk the Talk

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to talk about the social workplace and the power of social in an enterprise context. Whether it's on stage at an industry event or in the client's board room talking about what’s possible, it is always amazing to see what can happen to an organization that unleashes the power of social. It’s a great understatement to say that I simply like what is happening to the way we work and communicate. And with so many of my former teammates from RedDot and OpenText having made a move to join NewsGator, I had to see for myself what was going on.

It is one thing to talk about the social world and give advice and another to actually build the required infrastructure that makes all of that happen. A few months ago I got to know JB and the executive team at NewsGator and learned first-hand what it takes to build a business around social infrastructure. I learned quickly that the team has done a wonderful job of making social a reality in so many enterprises. The numbers speak for themselves with more than 4 million enterprise users and hundreds of companies globally building their social infrastructure on Social Sites.

We actually liked working together so much that JB and the board asked me to join as CEO & President, which I accepted in a heartbeat. The Social Workplace provides an amazing opportunity to improve how we think about work and how we think about productivity. We are just at the beginning of this fundamental shift and I see great opportunities to extend and expand our product lines to help our customers get the most out this opportunity. The NewsGator team has done a phenomenal job bringing the power of social to the enterprise and I am excited to be a part of the next chapter.

I’d also like to welcome a few new members to the team. Stefanie Lightman has joined us as Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy; and Markus von Aschoff has joined us as Vice President, Product Management.

I am sure we’ll find time going forward to talk about how we write this next chapter for NewsGator. Already the leader in the Microsoft ecosystem, we’ll take a close look at opportunities to expand our reach to more enterprise categories like SAP processes, additional document and records repositories and of course expanding our cloud capabilities. I can’t promise we’ll get it all done this week and it might require us to look at external growth avenues but we are excited about the possibilities. And - in the spirit of real social - feel free to share your ideas about how we can walk the talk together.
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