Mzinga Acquires Prospero

I couldn't end the day without pointing to the news that Mzinga has acquired Prospero. Chris Brogan pointed out that one of the cooler things that they did with the announcement was to use social media to do the launch - as witnessed by an active conversation on Twitter this morning. While that was cool, what I like about Mzinga is:

- They have internal enterprise solutions for eLearning and HR
- They have external enterprise solutions for B2B customer and partner communities
- They now have consumer-oriented solutions
- Prospero has a very distributed architecture with APIs so social functionality can be distributed and integrated with other content and functionality.
- Mzinga has the marketing and management strength to growth the company.

But others are not sleeping: Passenger and HiveLive just raised money; Cisco early last year bought 5Across, Neighborhood America bought MOVO Mobile, OneSite bought Social Platform...

Competition is also coming from enterprise communication and collaboration applications, content management vendors, and enterprise search platforms.  Microsoft recently announced that SharePoint Server sales have surpassed $1B.  Enterprises who want to deploy communities have plenty of options and it is already clear there is huge demand for this so there will be plenty of room in the market for multiple solutions.  The winners will likely be those that not only have interesting and flexible technology but the services and experience to make companies successful.

Comments

[Aaron Strout]

Rachel - thanks for your kind words. We are excited about what the merger of Mzinga and Prospero bring to the table for businesses, but you're right, there is a lot of competition in this space. To that end, we can't afford to rest on our laurels - even for a moment! We look forward to your keeping us honest.

Best,
Aaron (@astrout)

[Rachel Happe]

Looking forward to it!

[mike walsh]

Rachel,

great coverage. Do you think that Mzinga is trying to be too many things to too many people? They now have 3 platforms to thinks about and potentially integrate. I would love your opinion on this.

cheers,

mike

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks Mike!

From my understanding, one platform will be phased out, one will be used for external communities (and for exposing content from other systems to those communities), and one for internal enterprise communities.

This seems like a logical breakdown in the way companies are currently deploying social networks but long term I think companies will want one platform across their different communities.

Integration and migration is always tricky though so how smoothly Mzinga can sell and support this strategy has more to do with their business practices than the technology per se. Will be interesting to see how it evolves.