There is a world of difference between news aggregators like Google News, Moreover and Meltwater and a true customer intelligence system like FirstRain. All have the ability to deliver some news from the Web but the similarity ends there. Keyword-based news is OK if you want a simple cut of everything, but they are absolutely insufficient if you want your enterprise sales team to drive revenue by deeply understanding their customer’s business.

An enterprise customer intelligence system like FirstRain:

1. Uses semantic analysis to categorize all content (Web, social media, etc.) to a high degree of specificity—well beyond the specificity possible with keywords. For example: Using analytics, FirstRain can track and filter on topics as specific as “Diabetic Nephropathy”, “Enterprise Telecom Services Market” and “Solar Energy Farms Capacity Expansion”, which means the sales team will receive customer intelligence with a much higher degree of relevance than any other solution.

2. Searches the global Web, identifying and extracting only business-focused content (including news, press releases, company Web sites, government filings, industry sources, blogs and much more), while filtering out the consumer, entertainment and other noisy content routinely delivered by Google Alerts and news aggregators. This filtering has many layers to it—at the source, content and model levels—to ensure that only high quality business content makes it through to the end user.

3. Prioritizes all content using multi-factoral algorithms that push the most significant intelligence to the top (based on the user’s own workflow at the time), then de-duplicating it so you only see each important development once, all greatly improving the relevancy of the intelligence each user sees. This saves time and money for enterprise sales and customer marketing teams, eliminating the hours spent combing through search results (and often still missing key developments), and reducing it to seconds reviewing only the most important developments impacting their customers and their customers’ business

4. Delivers this highly personalized content wherever and however the team needs it: on their iPad, iPhone, Android device, directly into the social enterprise portal or CRM, or simply via a daily email intelligence brief. FirstRain’s apps allow the sales and marketing team to collaborate using this powerful customer intelligence database quickly and easily from any device, at any time, all integrated into their own daily workflow.

The patented technology that goes into the creation of this enterprise customer intelligence system is the result of years of algorithm development, customer collaboration and fine tuning—and it’s why most vendors of basic Web content can’t match it. But it’s these differentiators that are helping FirstRain deliver our users the kind of customer intelligence that actually grows and renews revenue in their businesses.

The most exciting development in the Enterprise today is not, as Salesforce and Jive would have you believe, “social networking for business” but the not-so-stealthy explosion of the iPad as a productivity tool.

We see dramatic deployments every day, especially into the enterprise sales and customer marketing teams which are the teams we work with most often. Eric Lal of ZDNet keeps a site updated with iPad pilots — often documenting large company decisions we have already seen on the ground — thousands at a time!

Even big blue IBM may now have one of the largest Apple and iPad deployments in the world. As an Apple fan it’s terrific to see the corporate world finally seeing the light. Even my own R&D team (for a long time PC-based nerds) are adopting a mix of Apple in with their PCs, iPads (of course for development) and iPhones in with Android phones (which after all you can hack and play with so much more easily than an iPhone).

I also agree with Peter O’Neill at Forrester that many market researchers are falling behind in their methodology and not including broad enough sources of corporate deployment. They have a PC bias and may be missing the rapid growth of BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies at companies large and small. BYOD is not only popular but in the end it’s cheaper. Cisco pioneered this policy 5 years ago, showing that it was, in the end, cheaper for IT to support. And while IT departments still worry about data security, I was convinced this was solved the day my Symantec customer told me in 2011 that he could now work officially work on the iPad (Symantec is the most paranoid company on security – appropriately so given that it’s their business).

There are two major waves happening for enterprise sales teams right now: social collaboration (yes I don’t think Salesforce and Jive are wrong) and the iPad. And the FirstRain customer intelligence system is right at the intersection of the two – with our sizzling hot iPad app and integration into the top collaboration portals. We have customers deploying in all of them: Jive, Salesforce, Microsoft and Quad (Cisco) and in every case enterprise sales reps also have iPads (either their own or company issue) so they can stay on top of their major customers wherever they are.

And I hope I never have to use a PC again… although this is a false hope since my husband is the lone hold out in our family because he is an electronics designer and needs the high end tools which will probably never be on Apple (sigh).

Image from AllThingsDigital

There is nothing that feels as good as an email from a customer like this one we received today. This is from a company who wishes to remain confidential – but suffice it to say they are a large customer and have 9,000 employees using FirstRain intelligence. Well done Cory, Sagar, Ashutosh, Sweety and the rest of the support team. And thank you Jeff for your support of my team.

Cory and Team:

I just wanted to pause and say “thank you” to each of you for the hard work you do to produce and modify the [internal name they use for FirstRain daily intelligence briefs]. Your good work is evident each and every week and our [internal] clients are very pleased with [internal name]. Please know that your hard work is not going unnoticed and that you are having a positive impact with each [one] you produce and modify on behalf of our [internal] clients.

Job well done!!

Jeff

We have a real problem with jobs in tech. We have more jobs than qualified people.

This is not in the news today because for much of the US population there are not enough jobs. Not enough jobs that people are trained for. And yet in Silicon Valley we have 1 tech position open for every 2 that are filled. Hiring great technical staff is tough and increasingly expensive.

But this is not just a California problem. At the Nashville Technology Council’s annual meeting last week the theme was Diversity – and all the discussion was around education and attracting IT workers to Nashville. They have 1,000 open positions and not having enough IT workers is a real, commercial problem for them.

Commissioner Hagerty, in his warm up speech, talked about the need for technical education in their schools and local colleges. Followed by Mayor Dean who covered many of the same themes and a sense of urgency about education investment. The Nashville Technology Council has a mission to “help Middle Tennessee become known worldwide as a leading technology community, the Nashville Technology Council is devoted to helping the tech community succeed.” – and their main focus this year is Technology Workforce Development.

It was really fun for me to speak to this group and their membership. 500 people, all of whom care about technology jobs in Nashville.

Here’s my talk. I cover the urgency of the need to get more women into technology and the changes we can make to help women stay in technology. Today, even if they start out in the technical field, half of our tech women leave tech in the first 10 years – they either leave in college or they leave early in their careers. It’s just too hard and too isolated.

But it does not have to be this way – and that’s what I talked about. We have to solve this problem as a country. By 2016 we will only be producing 50% of the tech staff we need as a country. Today less than 50% of our workforce (women) hold less than 5% of the leadership of the technology industry.

This is such a waste of talent. It’s a competitive, bottom line issue for any company that needs tech workers – whether they are in health care, energy or computing.

We’ve solved it at FirstRain. We have women in leadership positions in engineering – and we have a very flexible work environment. We can solve it everywhere, and as a country, if we want to.

Long meetings can progressively sap energy and create altered states of being. Yes they can.

We went offsite as a management team for 2 days this weekend to talk through our strategy and 2012 planning. 11 of us in 2 houses at Pajaro Dunes, lots of flip charts, heated discussions, cooking together, walking on the beach and generally spending time together thinking about our business. It was really fun but, even so, it was intense and, combined with long discussions late into the night about the state of the world accompanied by some excellent wines, pretty tiring for some.

Two of our jokesters memorialized their progressive states of mind as they helped clean up after the meeting. They sent me the photos – the editorial is all mine.

Thanks Nima and Ryan – it was fun – and despite the warm sun and sand, amazingly productive!

FirstRain celebrated the holiday season on Monday with our annual company potluck and a lively version of the white elephant gift exchange game. As usual, the FirstRain “chefs” brought in a variety of fantastic foods, ranging from Thomas’ salmon to Doug’s Chili!

This year, FirstRain made sure to leave most of the gag gifts at home (well, besides a banana holder and a re-gifted gift). Bottles of wine and alcohol were high in demand and eagerly fought for. Julie ended up with the best gift, a bottle of wine and jars of David’s homemade jams and jellies. Eugene received the “worst gift”, a re-gifted chip dish. However, ironically the worst gift was brought in by Eugene, himself! Julie and Eugene won office gifts, a brand new iPad2 and Kindle Touch.

The party was a big hit and we’ll definitely continue the tradition next year. It was a perfect way to end a fantastic year.

We’re looking forward to 2012 and the exciting events that lie ahead for FirstRain.

Happy Holidays!

When we take on a new employee here at FirstRain, a lot of thought and energy is put into ensuring they are a really great fit. And so, unsurprisingly, when we recently expanded our sales engineering team, in the summer, it took us a few months and a couple job description rewrites to find our ideal candidate. Through that process I realized something interesting: what we needed in our early days when the FirstRain solution was still evolving is not what we need today.

Like many growing companies, in our early days we had a great idea and strong core technology but went through a process of understanding the real needs of the market and adapting our solution over time. In such an environment, the sales engineering role needed to be focused on tinkering and crafting solutions, managing clients, demonstrating consultative selling skills, architecting solutions and acting as a product specialist—really whatever needed to get done to help our growing customer base to “seamlessly” adapt the product to their needs and get the job done!

Needless to say, finding the perfect person to fit those chameleon-like standards was a bit tricky! At that time, we focused on finding an individual who could demonstrate analytical abilities and design thinking, who would excel in flexible environments, and would thrive as part of the tight relationship between our client solutions team, product development and leadership. This was essential in order to take important customer input and feed it back into our organization for immediate development or adaptation. In other words, bending the product to the customer’s will.

Although times like that are exciting and fun, they’re not easy. There were days that made you want to hide under your bed, and others where you were thumping your chest, knowing that that you are cracking the code. At times, every couple of weeks, we’d modify the sales process to see how we can shorten the sales cycle, increase close ratios and triage the outliers. Back then, we were correcting and adjusting, correcting and adjusting, getting ever closer to a repeatable solution and support model that worked across our target markets, or sometimes, just axing a target market from the list completely.

But as we started to hire for the team again in the summer of 2011—even though we had many extraordinary candidates—something was off.

We realized: the candidates were right, it was the job description that was wrong—wrong for the kind of company we are now. Today, FirstRain has a sophisticated solution set, clear target market and crisp sales process. In this environment, we now needed a different role, a more focused role that corresponds to what our customers need us to do today: Listen & Match.

As we noted in our (now updated) job description, today’s FirstRain Sales Engineers need to:

Listen to prospects and the account executive to validate and better match the solutions offered with the prospects business challenge. Asking good questions   becomes critical, executing on the deliverable and work on workflow issues with the prospect becomes paramount.

With a new job description the resumes began to roll in, and we started to interview 3-5 candidates a week, it became clear … the new candidates matched what we needed today.

As our solutions have matured, we are no longer looking for people whose main skill was “bending” the product to do whatever a given customer needed. Instead, we now need people who deeply understand the capabilities of our solution set, can demonstrate design thinking, as well as understand the business challenges our customers experience – to effectively bridge that gap, develop a rollout plan, and execute! It’s often a delicate dance, and one that still requires great flexibility. Instead of ‘Solution Benders’ we now need ‘Solution Dancers’, a role which is more nuanced, more sophisticated, and, I’m starting to find, is a lot more fun to manage.

The iPad is changing the world so fast sometimes it is hard to believe. We released our iPad app in early October. It’s such a hot, sexy app that now I lead off with it. Every time I meet with a prospect the first thing I show them is the Business Web on my iPad (usually pre-configured for their market) and then I’ll describe what we’re doing and why.

And to my delight I find that many of our prospects and customers are investing so heavily in the iPad that they can immediately relate to how FirstRain fits. But more fun than that is the new apps I get to see, often before they have been released. BI apps, sales apps, fashion apps… the world is going iPad.

Today Fidelity announced a major update to their iPad app – this time including FirstRain content. Fidelity has been our customer for many years now, but over the past few months it’s been exciting to work with them on integrating our sector and stock research into their iPad app.

Like we have done online, we are providing Fidelity with Hot Topic research, centered around sectors and trends – what’s rising? what should you as an investor be paying attention to? when you see a topic you want to drill in on, what are the recent developments that help you understand it?

You can download the new Fidelity iPad app for free on the iTunes store. To see hot topics, open it up and click on Research (tab at the bottom of the home screen). Chose hot topics and you’ll see the key active sectors and what’s changing . We identify what’s changing and what’s hot using our analytics technology – identifying clusters of topic, detecting anomalies, comparing them to past patterns, analyzing the new pattern to see if it shows a rising event. Here’s the landing Hot Topics screen this morning:

You see a list of sectors – swipe right to see more. Within each sector you can then drill down into a topic and see the latest business web news and understand what’s behind the trend. For example here — drilling in on Automobile Fuel Efficiency:

The topic research page shows you not only the news you need to read but also the stocks related to the trend that you may want to do deeper research on, and the volume of conversation on the Web on the topic you are researching so you can get a sense of how active it is.

Good apps on the iPad are simpler and easier, and more pleasurable to use than web apps. There is something about the simplicity combined with the tactile experience that changes how we feel about using the application, especially for non technical people and the older generation. We have only had the iPad for 2 years now… it is just the beginning of a sea change that will sweep how we all interact with both professional and consumer applications.

One of the best ways I’ve found to build community in the office is by working together to give back to the greater community.  Last week, the FirstRain team and I continued our annual tradition of volunteering at the Second Harvest Food Bank.  SHFB is a fantastic organization that strives to end local hunger around the San Francisco Bay Area.  I was pleasantly surprised (and impressed with the massive amount of food to sort) to learn that gathering and collecting enough food was not the organization’s main concern.  The great need for volunteers, like those of us from FirstRain, is necessary in order to help sort the food.  Kristin Sulpizio, the Director of Volunteer Services told us the “the food is there, it’s finding people to help figure out what to do with all of it, is our problem”.

FirstRain participated in this event not only to give back to the local community but to hopefully encourage others to follow in our footsteps. I know activities like this strengthen our own FirstRain community. Working together outside of the office allows my team to engage in an experience that deepens their sense of shared values, such as social responsibility and caring for others. Every year, I know I can count on our team to clear their busy schedules, to show up and to work very hard.  This morale is later translated inside the office, all part of the many reasons why FirstRain’s company culture is so dynamic.

Everyone got his or her hands dirty that day. Working as a team, we were able to quickly and successfully sort through a hefty amount of food in our two-hour time slot. Thanks to the entire FirstRain team’s effort, we helped 236,000 people receive food this month! The day was a huge success and everyone left the bank in great spirits. As always, I was pleased and proud to see my team come together for such a great cause –and one we will continue to support!

One of the challenges with creating something that’s truly new and innovative in a market is the anxiety you inevitably feel as you wonder whether the market itself is ready for your solution. But when you have really smart people who see an opportunity for technology to solve a real problem in a totally new way, sometimes you take a leap of faith that the market will respond and then a really interesting adventure will begin.

And so, it was extremely gratifying to see the announcement yesterday that the analyst firm IDC has included FirstRain in its 2011 list of “Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch.” FirstRain was one of 6 companies selected, and one of just two specifically focused on the discipline of Cloud-Based Analytics. According to IDC, this designation is given to companies recognized by their analysts as “driving innovation in business analytics.”

As an analytics software firm whose patented technology solves the challenge of delivering relevant, Business Web content to professionals in Sales, Marketing, Competitive Intelligence and other key roles, this recognition by IDC is yet another validation of the importance of the problem we’re helping our customers solve, and it’s terrific to see a leading analyst firm like IDC recognize the role FirstRain is playing. We’ve seen it in the great customers we’re signing every day, with the amazing product feedback we hear from those customers, and now we’re hearing from the analyst community too. It looks like this adventure is getting bigger!