So what does that mean…what does it look like…how do you support it and what can we learn from great cultures that we are all familiar with like Google and more local to Austin, Bazaarvoice.

For Socialware it all starts with the team. We are looking for and hiring the top talent across every group. Our goal is to build a company that people are passionate about.  And also to create an environment that is fun, fosters teamwork and is ultimately a place that people are excited to come into each and every day.

To help along these lines we’ve taken a few steps:

Couches, Yes. Desks, No.
Reception desks are so yesteryear.  Every great Web 2.0 company that we have visited has a comfortable lounging, socializing, gaming area at the front of their office…we are no exception.  Nothing brings a company together better than literally sitting around and ideating or just hanging out and gaming together.

Kindle anyone
Taking a page from great companies such as Zappos, we wanted to encourage our team members to read and absorb the things that we believe.  We took the approach of loading up Kindles for folks to grab and read at any time.

DJ booth
Why a DJ booth…first of all it’s cool.  More importantly, we wanted a novel way to rally the team and in our case each event is associated with a song snippit and the team members that drove it get to “mix it up” to announce it.  BTW, I’m pretty sure we beat Twitter to the punch with this one.

Whiteboards everywhere
For ideas to flow and transparency to happen we decided that painting our walls with anything short of whiteboard paint would not suffice. As we say around the office “if it is white you can write”.  Thanks Ideapaint!

“The Best Around” award
In any culture it is key to single out individual accomplishment. Our version is “The Best Around” award aptly titled for this classic number from a Karate Kid movie whose sound track was indelibly logged in our CTO’s mind

Maybe most importantly we are all about drinking our own Kool-Aid or eating our own dog food whichever saying you prefer.  As the Social Middleware company we are fully leveraging our own solutions.

For instance, our Social Stream is driven by our Social Marketer product allowing our employees to separate their personal social networking posts from their professional ones and to promote our company and products using their existing social profiles.

We are just getting started and realize it isn’t the destination but the journey.  So far that journey has been a blast and we will continue to work to make Socialware a place that everyone loves to work.

By the way, if you have an interest in working in this kind of environment let us know.  We have immediate openings which you will find at our jobs page.

The article gives an overview of the company, the problems we are solving in the social space, background on our funding and a perspective from the industry.  On that front here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“Matthew Lees, vice president of the Patricia Seybold Group, a Boston-based research firm, said the social middleware business is still in its infancy as businesses figure out the role of the social Web.”

“Everybody is thinking about how they can use it effectively and prevent what they don’t want to happen from happening,” he said. “What’s definitely here to stay is the tension between what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. That’s still being hammered out.”

Michael Coté, an Austin-based analyst for RedMonk said “There’s a need for companies to be more involved with social networking, I think it’s an extremely manageable risk.”

We couldn’t agree more on both fronts! Thanks again for a great piece ABJ.

The sharing of ideas and innovation has long been deeply tied to social settings like Starbucks, a pub or your favorite restaurant.  It seems that entrepreneurs seek each other out to share ideas and test concepts.  The picture above was taken at a local Austin restaurant called Guero’s.  Not only did this table produce a hefty bill from all the margarita’s and Corona’s, it also produced several very successful companies that have reshaped how we communicate.   The founders of Twitter, Adaptive Path, Gawker, MetaFilter, Flickr, Six Apart, Get Satisfaction, Typekit, Jenville, Measuremap, Mighty Girl and Blogger were all here to collaborate, innovate and have a little fun in the process.

As part of the next startup generation I wonder what our table will look like?  Is collaboration evolving beyond dialog over an enchilada plate at Guero’s?  I don’t know if social networking will take the place of a coffee shop or local pub, but the reality is that the ability to share thoughts and collaborate has expanded well beyond the restrictions of geography.  People will still meet and innovators will still be drawn to each other, but the genesis of those meetings may very well start on social networks.

Another question. Can we consider collaboration on these platforms a necessity for innovation and growth?  Think about the possibilities of adding 30 writers to the conversations and dialogs had by CS Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Now think about this concept in a corporate setting and ask yourself, are large companies stifling creativity by blocking access to these sites?

Many of the clients that I speak to on a daily business are committed to the marketing and customer support aspect of social networks, but is that enough?  The most successful companies today are the ones that continue to innovate – the rest wither and die on the vine. As we enter a paradigm shift in communication it is my belief that companies that are not encouraging the full use of social networking platforms are fostering a corporate culture of complacency.  Early adoption of this new strategy will prove out the winners and the losers in this next decade.  Don’t believe me? Just look at the study by the Altimeter group. They found that those brands deeply engaged in social had an “18% increase in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period.”

The new voice of innovation and creativity will be louder and louder on this platform and for enterprises to compete they will need to hire and train a collaborative workforce.  The corporate culture of segmented departments and the separation of thought leaders into distributed think tanks will become a liability. Collaboration within the enterprise needs to transform as well.  The answer?  Start leveraging these social networking platforms for internal and external collaboration. Go out and participate in the discussion and encourage your employees to do the same.  And don’t forget the most important part of engaging in social media is to listen. Listen to your customers, your promoters, your detractors, your competitors and your employees.

The long and winding road to arriving at what we consider to be the perfect description of the void in the technology and market landscape that we fill with our technology is an interesting one and it is worth sharing details of why we chose this label and why it is so important.  Category naming and claiming is a big deal…we don’t take it lightly. Hopefully the following will share some insight into why we thought that it was so important for Socialware.

As a recent ReadWriteWeb article so eloquently put it, “Socialware talks in a language that IT can understand”.  Thank you for that great line Alex.  In a week full of Socialware visibility, this was one of, if not, our very favorite line because it so neatly represents the genesis of Socialware.

We are asked a lot about why Cameron and I were inspired to create the company in May of 2008 and why we were able to come up with this novel, albeit logical approach to filling such an important gap in the market.  The response is always that it was a direct result of the unique background and experience that we had had in two worlds, the world of enterprise software which we spent the better part of 10 years in, and the world of web 2.0 which Cameron and I had both been fully immersed in for the past 4 years.

For us the idea that enterprises would want to embrace the public infrastructure of social technologies, which are free to use, innovate faster than enterprise software, and that employees are clamoring to use, was the obvious next step towards the consumerization of IT.

But based on our experience we were also keenly aware of the challenges of identity management, policy management, business process management, legacy integration and more.  How would we go about “enterprise enabling” the consumer social web?  The answer was of course to extend the old familiar notion of the glue layer, the traditional middleware that is used intra-enterprise to tie together legacy systems.  So in Alex’s words, the repurposing of the term middleware and applying it to social provides comfort to IT teams in a world where they are confronting a whole new array of technologies with a unique and daunting set of challenges.

Conveniently enough the use of the term middleware in general has fallen out of popularity since the consolidation of that market occurred.  There was no one actively staking claim to that term and in the new world of the “Hyperextended” enterprise, it was clear that middleware had to take on a new dimension. It had to reach beyond the four walls of the enterprise and encompass the open social web.

Another great part of the Social Middleware convention is that is says – security, control and enablement – all at once.  Early on in Socialware’s life we really struggled with the question of: are we about control or are we about enablement? We knew the answer was both but that was always hard to get across to the market.  We have always known that while the present environment is about control, i.e. access control, governance, compliance and more, the future is really to achieve true collaboration across consumer social networks.  Nothing encapsulates this better than the term Social Middleware.

Finally, Social Middleware is a bit of a shout out to the legacy of our hometown, Austin, TX.  In the technology world, Austin has been perceived traditionally as an enterprise software town having been the home of enterprise software juggernauts like Vignette, Tivoli, a large IBM office and more recently companies such as Webify Solutions and Solarwinds.  Austin is making a concerted effort as a tech community to form a new identity in the web 2.0 world.

Local high profile startups such as Bazaarvoice have helped to further that cause.  Given this history and the knowledge base of both experiences, enterprise software minds combined with fresh blood and thinking on the web 2.0 front, I can’t think of a better location to build a Social Middleware company. We are all excited when we think about the impact that Socialware as a company might have on the local Austin technology scene which we have all been a part of for many years.

So how has the term been accepted so far?  Use of the term web wide within 24 hours of our launch date (Dec. 9^th) went from next to nothing to over 19,000 references.  To me that sounds like acceptance of a new category in a day.

We look forward to connecting with you and sharing more details about Social Middleware and what it means for your business.