When Salesforce recently unveiled its social collaboration platform, Chatter; Jay Pullur, the founder of Qontext was silently smiling. Even though Chatter was direct competition to his company, Pullur was unruffled. 

“The launch of Chatter by Salesforce vindicated our idea of the need to put a social infrastructure within the enterprise,” explains Pullur, exhibiting the confidence of a David competing in a field dominated by Goliaths. The media hype generated around Chatter has helped, as his firm finds it relatively easier to explain the rationale for social networking within business or internal environments. Today, after close to 9 months since the product was first launched, the firm has bagged more than 20 customers.

To begin with, there are many similarities with Salesforce Chatter. For example, Chatter allows enterprises to follow people, documents or applications. Every connected entity automatically receives a notification whenever any changes have been made. Similarly, Qontext (pronounced ‘context’) allows enterprises to collaborate and share information from within their business applications. Qontext is available as an on-premise and a SaaS offering with a monthly subscription. 

“Most business applications such as ERP or CRM do not have in-built tools to support conversations among co-workers. Lack of collaboration tools within an application forces us to switch to e-mail. Instead of making users move out of context into a mail client or a portal to start a conversation, what if a solution could provide on-page collaboration inside your enterprise applications? Qontext does just that,” explains Pullur.

"We are like Salesforce Chatter, but not limited to Salesforce. This means that enterprises can add a social wrapper around their existing applications – be it SAP, Oracle or even proprietary legacy applications” - Jay Pullur, Founder, Qontext

Since most work-related conversations are triggered inside CRM, ERP, SCM, HRM, Intranets and other business applications – it is vital that such conversation is intelligently captured and classified. The current method is using e-mails for communication. Invariably, as conversations grow, e-mails get buried in the inbox and are delinked from the context that started them.

“When enterprise social networks work independent of other business applications, e-mail continues to be the choice for conversations. The conversations on the social network is then limited to generic topics. For social networking to succeed in the enterprise, it must have business content. If my business applications can socialize around business events, then there is a definite business value,” says Pullur.

With Qontext, streams of conversations can start inside a business application and join a company-wide stream that forms the core of the corporate social network. This is captured in the Qontext Portal, where users get personalized feeds on their home pages for viewing and participating. Pullur claims that contextual conversations created by Qontext can be effortlessly recalled. Hence, instead of working in one application to derive information, and then using another social networking or collaborative application to relay this information – enterprises can use a single user interface to relay or retrieve information.

Since Qontext tracks conversations from a point of origin, contextually relevant conversations can be recalled for future use. Hence, instead of requiring people to look into different applications, one can put the information in the middle of a stream of updates. For example, with Qontext, the entire history and conversations exchanged with respect to a given purchase order can be tracked from within an enterprise application page. Similarly, if the pricing for say, raw material, has changed significantly, the sales team can get an instant alert through the procurement application.