In Conversation with Reid Conrad, CEO Near-Time

Near-Time is an Enterprise 2.0 suite that allows an enterprise or group to collaboratively maintain a shared intranet or extranet. Near time’s focus is definitely in the wiki school of Enterprise 2.0 – or sortof a wiki in disguise. They’re very much about collaborative editing of “static” content and pages as opposed serialized or conversational school like blogs or message threads. They also have features for document sharing, basic calendaring and, coming soon Reid tells me, task management. In their own words:

“Near-Time leverages the new Web to deliver seamless collaboration. Near-Time delivers a private and secure collaboration service for groups to share ideas, information, files and calendars. By integrating weblogs and wikis, Near-Time transforms work into knowledge.”

– Near-Time.com

Now in the wild for few years and with a “few thousand” active (presumably many paying) customers, what can Reid teach us about deploying Enterprise 2.0 in practice? Read on…

[What follows are my notes on an interview I conducted late last year with Reid Conrad, CEO of Near Time. Should be taken as not-quite verbatim. I apologize in advance for any modest omissions or errata, please attribute these to my poor shorthand habits rather than bad intent or any ineloquence on Reid’s part.]

How did Near Time get started? What was the need you set out to solve?…
Near Time started in 2003 out of what they perceive as two important trends:

1) need for “standards-driven collaboration tools” in the enterprise (by which I assume he means open/web-standards).
2) Organizations themselves are changing to be more virtual and more distributed and that existing Intranets and extranets just weren’t working to meet their needs.

Hosted vs Hostable, do your customers pressure you for a hostable solution, do you offer one?

Absolutely, clients frequently ask for this but Near Time only offers hosted (as in hosted by Near Time on the Internet and not behind a client’s firewall).

Many customers ask this question as much by tradition as anything else.

What they have consider what these tools are for, for connecting people both inside and outside the organization and its firewall.

As hosted service, you can connect to outsiders without IT, without concern over firewalls. Keeping application like this inside the firewall would be almost self-defeating.

As hosted service, users can create groups and content on the fly with no new need for hardware or software.

The second overwhelming advantage of a hosted solution is updates. Reid mentioned that they were able to deliver something like 18 separate upgrades to their product last year. “No way a traditional software model could do that”. Hosted (or software as a service SaaS) is “super powerful” this way.

Near Time seems to target almost any community for your software (companies, organizations, public/private communities etc.) what is your thinking behind the strategy versus being more focused on the specific types of committees or verticals you target?

That would be almost hard to do. Even individual customers have diverse uses of the tool across categories. A large client like an insurance company for example, often find diverse uses for of the tool across different functions, departments both inside and outside the boundary of the company. These “new Web constructs” like tags and wikis are a great way to filter content based in user-defined contexts [ that are inherently applicable across a wide range of applications]

Differentiation – How do you differentiate yourself from other competitors in the community-platform space (CollectiveX, BaseCamp etc.)?

According to Reid, Near-Time’s differentiating factors include their ability to host both public and private spaces, and also the ability to publish content our from private spaces. Secondly, scalability Near- Time can be useful from tiny groups of 2-10 all the way up to large teams our communities.

Is your real competition your competition or is it traditional email?

We talked about what people are using today for cross-organizational collaboration. Right now the only and dominant solution is e-mail. However, Web (Enterprise2.0) tools can provide a common ground for groups from different organizations to meet, author, share and create content.

Adoption -What adoption pattern who takes to the new tools fastest, who doesn’t?

Many clients have experience with blogs, either using them already internally or at least familiar with them on the web, and for these clients adoption is quicker [and by implication, slower for people inexperienced in social media].

The best advice for adoption is to start on ad hoc basis. Fight the impluse try to plan out (like the structure of the wiki) in advance. Just get started, work on it and go from there and let the content and structure emerge and be created as it’s needed.

It also does take internal leadership for these tools to take hold.

Thanks Reid!