PBworks - Melding Social Media and Unified Communications

Chris Yeh discusses PBworks and how the company is melding Social Media and Unified Communications.

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant; I am here with Chris Yeh from PBworks and I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and Chris is going to talk all about his Enterprise 2.0 company and product.

Chris Yeh: Sure. PBworks is an online collaboration company and you may ask, "hey, what's different about PBworks from every other company out there?" Well, there are a couple of things. Probably the most important one is that we are really focused on solving specific problems for specific industries. So we've built a suite of products with variations for different industries, such as education, where we have hundreds of thousands of teachers and professors in schools and schools districts using this. Law firms, where you have five of the top 25 law firms in America. And just announced today, our Agency edition where we focus on the leading Madison Avenue ad agencies and we have some of the largest agencies in the world using us there as well, such as Landor, Oval VPR, etc., etc. What we find is that by really diving deep into the use cases for specific industries and figuring out ways to solve real, specific problems for them, we can build a good business. Instead of having to slug it out and try to explain, "oh, how are we different from fifty other people?" we simply tell them, "listen, nobody else is building a solution for you and what your particular problems are." That's what we do, feel free to talk to our customers and they'll tell you why we help them solve their problems.

The other thing is, we have been around quite a long time. We were founded in 2005, and we have a very broad user base, almost 4.5 million people use PBworks every month. And as a result, it's pretty much a tried and true tested solution.

Blair Pleasant: Well what is the solution? What does it do?

Chris Yeh: The solution combines of a variety of things. We talked a little bit earlier today in a Town Hall about suites versus best-of-breed and we take a suite approach. So we started off as PBwiki, a wiki hosting company. And we added to that wiki collaboration, file sharing and document management, project management, social software, real time collaboration with integrated voice over IP teleconferencing, voice, and so on and so forth. And what we've tried to do is build a complete solution, because again, if you are trying to serve a specific market they don't want to hear, "you're going to have to buy our stuff plus this, plus this, plus this." They want to hear, "here's something that I can deploy today that's going to solve my problem right now."

Blair Pleasant: Most of the companies that are here, they don't have voice solutions, they just have the collaboration part. So tell me about how voice integrates with your solution and what that provides to your customers.

Chris Yeh: What we try to do is make voice a complete part of the collaboration solution. It really comes down to reducing the barriers to voice collaboration. Everyone knows that conference calling and web access - all of these things have been around for a long time. But there's a friction involved in doing them. So let's say you set up a conference call, you email out the phone number and the ID and you wait for people to dial in, "oh I'm here, oh I'm here." Well, we're still waiting for this other guy, I think he was going to the bathroom and hopefully he'll be back soon. And it just means that if you are going to do a conference call, you only do it if it's something you plan out a head of time. Conferences are basically reservation intended things. Whereas, in our system what we do is we actually have built-in presence detection in our product. So whoever is logged in, goes into the presence system and you can see who else is actually available at any given time and when you do that you can instantly chat with them, using our web-based chat, much like a Facebook-style chat. You can communicate with them and then as you're chatting you may say, "hey, we really want to do a phone call." You just click the little telephone icon and our voice over IP system will dial your individual cell phone numbers or desk numbers, connect you guys together in a call. It's a call that while you are on it, you can add or drop people from that call on the fly using a web-based console. And where at the end of the call you have the option of saving the recording and storing a recording in one of our online workspaces. So it tries to take voice and make it an integral part of collaborating. It also tries to make it something that you can do at the drop of a hat. Something that comes up ad hoc as opposed to something that you do as an appointment.

Blair Pleasant: So it really is integrating unified communications with social media and social collaboration.

Chris Yeh: You got it. And you see how they interact. The voice and the presence are two things that really go together, because it's the presence that allows you to determine that you can now initiate a voice call and not have to worry about fumbling around over access codes or waiting for people to show up.

Blair Pleasant: Well thank you, Chris. How can people contact you and follow you on Twitter and get in touch?

Chris Yeh: Sure, the best way for people to find PBworks is to just go to PBworks.com. That's P as in productive, B as in businesses, W-O-R-K-S.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/chrisyeh, and Chrisyeh.com as well.

Blair Pleasant: Thanks so much Chris.

Chris Yeh: You're welcome, my pleasure.