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Who are you (company) and how long have you been around?
Driving innovation since 1993, BroadVision is a provider of e-business and engagement management solutions for organizations seeking to transform their communication and collaboration efforts within and outside the enterprise by embedding valuable social behaviors into business relationships and processes. BroadVision® solutions – including the Clearvale enterprise social networking solution – deliver a virtual, mobile, and social platform of engagement for sharing expertise, enhancing business agility, and tracking accountability to deliver clarity in decision-making and improvement in both productivity and business results.
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What does your product do?
Launched in 2010, Clearvale is the social network for business, where transparency and accountability mean real works gets done. It enables businesses to connect and engage with employees, partners, and customers; share anytime, anywhere, and on any device; and track business processes, sources of knowledge, and network adoption.
Clearvale is cloud-based software-as-a-service, which means that it requires no installation or ongoing maintenance, and customers can have a social network up and running within minutes. From there, the network administrator at the company can choose which features to enable or disable, and can start inviting other members to the network.
Each member of a Clearvale network creates their user profile and connects with other people on the network. They can create communities of interest and join communities created by others. They can then choose from a wide range of social content types (e.g. blogs, wikis, forums, status updates, file sharing) to share their information, follow communities and network members, and to comment on contributions from others. All the activity a member has chosen to see is aggregated into a single activity stream to make it easy for them to keep up to date. It provides companies with an environment for employees to share information with their colleagues, partners, and customers while maintaining access control over who sees what content.
Clearvale consists of Clearvale Enterprise, a full featured enterprise network suite that enables businesses to create a social enterprise ecosystem, and Clearvale Express, a free enterprise social networking and team collaboration software tool for a single network.
What makes you unique in this industry that I am not able to get with other vendors?
Clearvale social ecosystems and hybrid networks allow organizations to create several social networks for their employees, customers, suppliers, and partners but manage these together as a coherent whole, rather than a series of disjointed projects. In addition, Clearvale hybrid networks allow for private, semi-private, and public collaboration in the same network. It provides organizations with the ability to invite participants as guests from different organizations to collaborate seamlessly and securely within a Clearvale network.
Mobile users of Clearvale can stay connected to members, communities, and other information anywhere, anytime. Clearvale’s mobile interface provides convenient network access from any smartphone browser. Apple iPhone and iPad users can also download the Clearvale App from the app store, while Android users can download the Clearvale App from the Google Play store.
BroadVision has devised a number of social analytics that can and should be tracked to give a proper understanding of how the Clearvale network is functioning. Clearvale’s social analytics model is displayed on dashboards, both at the user level and at the network level. Administrators can set score targets for the network, enabling goal attainment reporting as well as supporting contests or other gamification techniques.
Clearvale Tasks is the assignment management feature supporting better business workflows and social processes. Clearvale Tasks enable users to create tasks that contain multiple steps and assign each step to one or more people. It keeps track of who is responsible for the current step, notifies the next person when it is their turn to complete a step, and notifies the task owner when actions have been taken. It also includes the ability to set task reminders and designate different task types such as an approval or a directive versus a consultation.
The Clearvale PaasPort Partner Program enables partners to build a line of business in the cloud by co-branding, reselling and/or hosting Clearvale to their business customers to generate new, recurring revenue streams. This unique program allows our partners to reap the benefits of the ESN market without the investment in infrastructure or engineering.
Who are your 3 main competitors?
In general, our competition consists of email, stale intranets, and customer portals.
Which are your existing customers?
Clearvale customers and partners come in all sizes from small organizations with less than 100 people to large organizations with tens of thousands of users. Clearvale customers and partners span a variety of vertical industries including systems integrators, human resources, healthcare, telecommunications, higher education, financial services, marketing, and others. They benefit from rapid deployment, social adoption tools, and a flexible interface, which delivers a measurable approach to value.
NTT Communications Corporation is a partner of BroadVision through the Clearvale PaasPort Program. Powered by BroadVision’s Clearvale, NTT Com offers a cloud-based Task Management service which is a component of NTT Com’s enterprise cloud email service, Biz Mail. Biz Mail is part of NTT Com’s Global Cloud Vision which delivers a global network, data centers, and applications seamlessly across the globe.
BroadVision worked together with SOFTBANK TELECOM to develop and launch a social networking platform using Clearvale on White Cloud delivered as a Software-as-a-Service solution from the cloud. As one of the first resellers of the Clearvale PaasPort Partner Program, SOFTBANK TELECOM sells a suite of unique, easily customizable social networking solutions to its business customers. This platform provides business customers with on-demand access to social networking through their mobile devices, in conjunction with their voice, instant messaging, and data offerings.
National Taiwan University uses Clearvale as a self-sufficient, peer-to-peer social network that is easily accessed and utilized by students and staff in a safe, private environment but also includes the latest social features like profile pages, activity streams, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and file sharing. What began as a virtual orientation network for freshmen students is now used as the engagement platform for supporting all student affairs and staff collaboration for research, teaching, innovation, university operations, and project management.
Is it possible to customize the environment?
The network environment and appearance of Clearvale is completely customizable by the customer or by BroadVision’s professional services experts. Clearvale also has an API to allow social functionality to be embedded in other systems, and an external widget architecture which allow systems of record to display content in a Clearvale page.
What do you bring to the table in terms of top benefits versus us simply implementing it ourselves?
While the benefits of social networking for business are real, the landscape is littered with underused social business projects. To help ensure a successful social network, BroadVision has developed the Clearvale Social Enterprise Transformation (SET) program to provide guidance on planning and adopting best practices and metrics. The SET program helps organizations secure executive mandate, plan strategy prior to technology implementation, establish communities to generate content, encourage participation, drive adoption, and evaluate success using the Clearvale social enterprise platform.
Are there any differences between hosted and on-premise versions of the software?
Clearvale is an on-demand, software as a service application that is multi-tenant hosted. Because it is hosted on cloud-based servers managed by BroadVision or its partners, there is no need for our customers to invest in the infrastructure or personnel to install and manage servers for Clearvale to run on.
Who owns the data we’ll share on the platform, you or us?
The Clearvale customer owns the content and data.
Can we monitor and track usage?
With Clearvale, organizations have the ability to scientifically analyze the strength of connection between people and the relationships between people on the network. Using a combination of social analysis tools and data science principles, BroadVision works with companies to scientifically analyze the success of their social adoption.
How can I get my data out at the end of our relationship?
The Clearvale API makes it easy to extract your data out of the network any time you want.
What are your best practice approaches to gaining adoption of your product?
From our experience working with hundreds of companies around the world, we know that making a shift to working socially via an enterprise social network is about more than the choice of technology platform. There need to be clear business objectives defined, and roll-out needs to be planned carefully to ensure the desired levels of participation are achieved. That’s why we created the Clearvale Social Enterprise Transformation (SET) program to help companies start moving their work to a social environment.
Which languages does your product support?
Clearvale is currently offered in the languages of Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
What kind of support can we expect from you after implementing your product in our organization?
Our professional services team helps customers deploy Clearvale successfully across their organizations, advising on best practices for engaging with network members and measuring success.
Customers can contact our customer support team by phone, email, and Web. Customers can enter support tickets or access their local support service center during normal business hours (9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. local time at the various support locations). Customers can also choose Platinum Support which includes everything listed under Standard Support but have access to help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Customers also have access to our social support network, Clearvale Connect, to collaborate with other Clearvale users.
Do you have a community of customers that we can participate in to share experiences and approaches?
Yes, Clearvale Connect is the social network for Clearvale users. In this network, users can find support, learn more about the latest product releases, share best practices with other users, view training videos, and much more.
What is the model for upgrades and releases?
Clearvale is developed in response to customer enhancement requests and market trends. The advantage of a SaaS approach is that these enhancements are made available to all Clearvale customers at the same time.
What is your pricing model?
Clearvale is priced by Unique Monthly Visitors (UMV) and is defined as any user who logs into Clearvale in a given month. A customer will not be charged for multiple log-ins in any given month. Normally, UMV is smaller than total number of registered users, and even smaller than monthly page views. Customers can upgrade to another tier any month.
Who should our readers get in touch with for more information?
Contact us via email at [email protected] or by phone at 650-331-1000.
Is there something else you would like our readers to know about you?
Clearvale is not just another communication channel; it’s not “Facebook for business” or a place for office gossip. Clearvale is a place where employees can perform their job more efficiently and effectively by working in a more open, transparent environment where they have rapid access to the information they need, and with the people they need to communicate.