Tech Mahindra build enterprise social network platform; to roll out to clients

MUMBAI: Tech Mahindra has launched an internal social networking site, to aid communication and collaboration with its nearly 1 lakh employees, and is looking to pitch the platform to customers in the next few months.

Enterprise social networking has boomed over the last few years, as companies look to gain the benefits of internal collaboration without the danger of proprietary information being leaked onto public social networking platforms.

Microsoft's Yammer, Tibco Software's Tibbr and Jive are some readily available enterprise social networking tools, but Tech Mahindra chose to build it own.

"We didn't want an out-of-the-box solution because we have specific needs that needed a special framework. So we built this over the last four months. It's also one of the first hybrid-cloud enterprise social networking tools," Vikas Gupta, Head – Technology Infrastructure Management, Tech Mahindra, said.

Gupta added the tool would help reduce the number of emails the company would need to send, make it easier for employees to find data that is relevant to themselves and collaborate across different centres. And the company is in the process of pitching the platform to customers.

"All our technology could be leveraged to our clients. You are going to see marketing literature coming out for Mybeat Plus in the next few months," Gupta said.

Tech Mahindra's move mirrors that of Tata Consultancy Services, which built its internal social networking platform called ‘Knome', and is also marketing it to clients.

The market for enterprise social networks is growing. By 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today, according to research firm Gartner.