MindTouch: Creating open source software that enterprise loves

The world of enterprise software and services has changed radically over the last few years. Aaron Fulkerson has seen it all, and his company MindTouch is changing how people work together at big companies.

"One of the things that we've had the benefit of at MindTouch is really massive installation base," says Fulkerson, Co-Founder and CEO of MindTouch. "It's over 20 million. We have a couple thousand customers, too, but the main thing is having such a massive install base and so many users, you tend to see interesting trends."

Among the trends that Fulkerson has spotted is a desire from big companies for software that adds a social layer to existing applications and systems. With their foundation of an open source build, MindTouch has been well-positioned to respond to that demand. "We came to market with a general purpose platform for collaboration in the beginning. It was an enterprise wiki, and also a platform that you could federate systems and collaborate very easily wiki-style, and build applications and rapidly iterate on applications," says Fulkerson. "Previously it's only been through the very large vendors that you could achieve [the social layer], except it took you 12-18 months and very lengthy development cycles to do it. We're seeing people do that with MindTouch, and a deployment that would take 12-18 months takes a month or three."

The second niche that MindTouch has carved out is providing companies with a platform to vastly improve their documentation. "We started seeing more and more of our customers—Intuit and Microsoft, Intel and Autodesk and Mozilla—launching these documentation communities where they have a body of content for user manuals," explains Fulkerson. "Just imagine taking ten DVDs of video and text and putting it on the internet for the first time. What does that do for your search engine optimization? And then building a community around that where [customers] can contribute to it. They're registering with the site, they're sharing information with you about how you can improve this or that—of course it's helping lead generation."

Enterprise wikis and documentation communities may sound like rather different applications, but Fulkerson asserts that they're actually the same use case—they're just applied to two different things. "One is internal around enterprise systems, the other one is external more around social media sites. But they're both delivering collaboration and social capabilities in a web-based environment that's connecting systems together."

More info:
MindTouch web site: http://www.mindtouch.com/
MindTouch blog: http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/
MindTouch profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mindtouch

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• MindTouch
• Aaron Fulkerson
• enterprise
• wikis
• documentation
• open source