Rob Howard • CEO, Telligent

Telligent is a 5 year old 105 person social network software company: in this conversation with CEO Rob Howard we discuss the challenges and opportunities for the industry.Rob is seeing far deeper knowledge from customers and prospects about the Enterprise 2.0 space, as people understand the technology and benefits. The Telligent value propositions of supporting innovation and collaboration communities around both structured and unstructured content, both internally and outside the firewall is aligned with their analytics software, which helps prove ROI.Rob thinks we're at an interesting point on the growth 'S' curve of the entire space and is aware of the need to innovate ahead of the larger vendors who are rolling up complete suites. He predicts a lot of change during the next year with a weeding out of the space at all size vendors. Rob is surprised by just how invested some companies now are with collaborative technologies these days, which are increasingly intertwined around their existing systems.Telligent software is helping tie different together back end technologies at client installs - erp, sales management, supply change - to increase efficiency of information exchange: they are seeing clients find this more useful than email.Rob is seeing a lot more to down adoption as senior management understand engagement of employees and customers, and Telligent are seeing some very innovative use of their technology by customers such as Dell.I'll be talking to Telligent customers in the next couple of weeks.