Monday, December 17, 2007

Intranets.com chief Faulk is back on the web

By Christopher Calnan

The former CEO of the late 1990s-era Intranets.com is back. And he's treading familiar ground as he leads a new venture to build online communities within companies -- this time with a twist: opening corporate intranets and wikis to the larger web community, where better knowledge may exist.

Rick Faulk, the former CEO of Intranets.com Inc., publicly launched Mzinga Inc. three weeks ago. Like Intranets.com, the technology is based on building online communities in the workplace. But unlike the employee-focused Intranets.com, Mzinga's business plan is built on the latest version of what was once known as knowledge management: the notion that sharing knowledge leads to a sum greater than its parts.

Burlington-based Mzinga was formed after an August stealth merger of Woburn's Shared Insights US LLC and Pennsylvania's KnowledgePlanet Inc.

Shared Insights founder Barry Libert, who recruited Faulk and now serves as Mzinga's co-CEO, said online communities are collaboration tools, a space in which Faulk has been operating since he was vice president of marketing at Lotus Development Corp. and then PictureTel Corp., the Andover videoconferencing giant.

Mzinga's business plan is built on a vision Faulk has taken to a lucrative exit once before.

"They all involve sharing information," Libert said. "He's been doing this for 25 years."

Online communities are replacing traditional focus groups by corporate marketing departments looking to gather information faster and cheaper. By offering blogs, wikis, online forums and chat rooms, businesses can hear from their most enthusiastic and loyal customers in a monitored forum.

The category of online marketing is littered with smaller vendors, and industry observers say it is expected to consolidate during the next five years.

Competitors in the online marketing space include Watertown's Communispace Corp., which, like Mzinga, hosts and manages the communities. San Francisco-based Leverage Software and Emeryville, Calif.-based Lithium Technologies Inc. provide platforms for clients to build their own online communities.

"This is a very hot area right now," said Westborough consultant Paul Gillin, the former editor of Computerworld and former editor-in-chief of TechTarget Inc. "This is an alternative (to focus groups) now because it seems to work. But it'll get overdone and cease to be effective."

KnowledgePlanet, founded in 1986, developed portals for internal training of client employees. Shared Insights, founded by Libert in 2001, hosted both internal online communities for employees, and external for consumers.

Mzinga is Swahili for "beehive," which Faulk describes as the "ultimate community."

He and Libert, backed by an undisclosed amount of capital from five investors, plan to grow Mzinga through acquisitions. Libert, who also holds the title of chief investment officer, said he's identifying acquisition targets for Faulk to then integrate with Mzinga.

He's expecting to complete the first acquisition during the first quarter of 2008.

Mzinga's goal is to generate $16 million in revenue this year and $20 million next year, Faulk said. The company's target customers are both large and small businesses because "the need is the same," Faulk said.

The popularity of online community marketing is growing, but Mzinga may be trying to do too much by offering both internal and external online communities, said Matthew Lees, vice president of the Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group.

"You can only focus on so many market messages," he said. "They need to find a sweet spot."

Faulk, one of the founding executives at Intranets.com, was the company's vice president of marketing and appointed to the company's CEO spot in 2001. He then shifted from an advertising revenue model to an on-demand subscription model and in 2003, the transformed Intranets.com posted $6 million in revenue and became profitable.

In 2005, California-based WebEx Communications Inc. acquired Intranets.com for $45 million.