RALEIGH, NC and WALTHAM, MA--(Marketwire - May 1, 2012) - Peoplefluent™, offering a unique combination of best-of-breed social, mobile and cloud-based suite solutions for Talent Management, Vendor Management and Workforce Compliance and Diversity, today announced a strategic investment in Socialtext™, a leading enterprise social software provider. With this strategic investment, Peoplefluent, a Bedford Funding portfolio company, is dramatically reshaping the impact and value of Talent Management within organizations. The combined technologies of Peoplefluent and Socialtext deliver powerful enterprise collaboration capabilities and a broad new spectrum of employee engagement initiatives to customers.
"In today's fast-paced collaborative corporate environments, where informed and timely decisions have a meaningful impact on efficiency and profitability, social platforms lead the way. Together, Peoplefluent and Socialtext bring an organization's best minds and solutions to the forefront with digitized social environments and, for the first time, enable clients to share experiences, knowledge and innovations among themselves," said Charles S. Jones, Chairman and CEO of Peoplefluent. "We are changing the landscape of Talent Management with an unmatched knowledge transfer platform that is not simply about shared information and data, but about the true exchange and acquisition of deep collaborative corporate wisdom. It is the next generation of decision-making on the move."
"At the recent IDC Directions Conference, I presented that social business would be one of the most important growth areas for human capital management over the next few years," said Lisa Rowan, IDC Program Director, HR, Learning and Talent Strategies. "Socialtext's capabilities will complement Peoplefluent's other innovative initiatives, including their mobile application suite, gamification and workforce planning and analysis, to offer customers next generation HCM software capabilities in addition to their best-of-breed Talent Management suite."
Through social communities of aligned interests and goals, Peoplefluent will now help corporations share knowledge, experiences and ideas to inform the best thinking inside their organizations and, as important, across the ecosystems in which individual businesses operate. The thought leadership shared among organizations, industry luminaries, Peoplefluent experts and its large Fortune 100 customer base, enabled by the Socialtext platform, delivers collective and continuously improved business acumen and outcomes across the extended enterprise. Today's news further defines the leadership role of Human Resources in transforming individual knowledge into corporate wisdom to inspire innovation and to accelerate leadership for organizations around the world.
Mr. Jones continued, "We are dramatically changing the opportunity for HR within the organization by providing the underlying technology to migrate from business process to enterprise enlightenment. Knowledge fuels action. We intend to help businesses extract and cultivate valuable and transformative thinking by engaging and uniting their employees with a next generation social collaboration platform. In this new world, any individual, at any level, has the ability to have a profound impact -- and the outcome of this collective and collaborative inspiration will change the way organizations grow and innovate from this point forward. Today, we are helping HR transform their businesses by inspiring emotional connections between people and the work they do and the organization for which they do it."
Over the last year, Peoplefluent's investment, development and innovation strategies have been squarely focused on building solutions to foster employee engagement across the enterprise. Today's integration of the industry's leading Talent Management solutions and workforce analytics with advanced collaboration and social technologies transforms organizations to Engage, Enlighten and Enable their workforces around the world. With deployment of Socialtext technology within the Peoplefluent business, the Company advances its opportunities and methodologies in customer support, service, education and ongoing dialog and connection. The new social infrastructure offers Peoplefluent customers a powerful collaboration environment and real-time access to information throughout the implementation and support processes, and it offers Peoplefluent's internal team collaborative wisdom in their selling, marketing and product development endeavors.
Through proven technology that has earned breakthrough user adoption rates, Socialtext delivers a broad range of applications that make existing enterprise software intrinsically more social. This social layer brings social networking tools, microblogging capabilities, dashboards, social profiles, private and public workspaces and wikis, among a range of features, to multiple organizations, staff levels and functions, as well as to prospects, clients and customers, serving to break down traditional organizational hierarchies and foster collaboration. This prolific, familiar and easy-to-use social platform fuels best ideas and innovation through social collaboration that meets employees in their own user environments, whether that is on their smart phones or on their desktop, in an airplane or in a conference room. With this news, Peoplefluent introduces an embedded social layer that extends far beyond Talent Management processes to engage the entire workforce and extended enterprise in every aspect of an enterprise's workflow -- in a secure, cloud-based Open or Closed environment, satisfying the security needs of any enterprise.
Socialtext will continue to serve and expand its customer base under the current company brand. Peoplefluent, which has already deployed Socialtext technology within its own organization, will provide its customers with a standalone social platform and will also deliver every product within its existing suite optimized with embedded and integrated social capabilities.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Socialtext provides a meaningful west coast presence to further support Peoplefluent's global business. To expedite integration and knowledge transfer and to expand customer service, support and implementation efforts, key Peoplefluent technology and customer-facing employees will transfer immediately to the California location. Eugene Lee will remain as Chief Executive Officer of Socialtext, reporting to Mr. Jones.
About Socialtext
Established in 2002, Socialtext was the first company to deliver social software to businesses. By unlocking knowledge, expertise, ideas and data, Socialtext eliminates information silos across the enterprise to drive superior business performance. Socialtext's enterprise social networking products -- including microblogging, blogs, wikis, profiles and social spreadsheets -- provide simpler ways for employees to share vital information and work together in real-time. Delivered in a variety of hosted cloud services, as well as on-site appliances, enterprise customers are provided with flexible deployment options that meet their security requirements. Built on a flexible, web-oriented architecture, Socialtext integrates with virtually any traditional system of record, such as CRM and ERP, enabling companies to discuss, collaborate, and take action on key business processes. More than 6,500 businesses worldwide have accelerated their business performance with Socialtext, including Egon Zehnder, Getty Images, Symantec, Meredith Corporation, NYU Stern, OSIsoft, and Epitaph Records. To learn more, visit www.socialtext.com.
About Peoplefluent
Peoplefluent is transforming Talent Management through best-of-breed technology and expertise. With a deep focus on business intelligence and analytics, the Company's social, mobile and cloud-based technology gives clients the actionable insight required to make strategic decisions that drive better business results. Nearly 80 percent of the Fortune 100 use Peoplefluent Talent Management, Vendor Management and Workforce Compliance and Diversity solutions to manage salaried, hourly and contingent labor across their organization. These solutions manage the entire talent lifecycle from recruiting to onboarding and through the ongoing management of each person's career while helping organizations measure, analyze and empower their existing workforce. The Company's solutions currently support more than 5,100 organizations ranging in size from large, global corporations to small and medium-sized businesses, and it is used by more than 5 million users in 214 countries and territories around the world.