There was some big news today in the highly competitive enterprise social business market. By big, I mean $50 million big:
HighQ completes $50 million growth financing round from One Peak Partners, Morgan Stanley Merchant Banking and Goldman Sachs Private Capital
You may not be familiar with London, UK based HighQ, but they are a leading vendor of collaboration software in the legal and financial services industries. With the money from today's funding round, they hope to expand their presence in North America and into several other industries.
Some of the strengths of the HighQ are:
- Seamless integration of social networking, content creation (blogs and wikis), tasks, events and file sharing
- Extremely granular permissions/security model including viewing, editing, printing, saving, even watermarking
- iSheets, which is an online spreadsheet/database tool that enables people to easily create applications with structured, or organized data. So rather than just putting information into a document or wiki, you can create records, sort, filter, run reports, etc.
- Very clean, modern design
- Private messaging/chat
Areas I'd like to see HighQ improve:
- Real time communication, including video chats/conferences and screensharing
- Analytics to help both users and administrations gain insight into the content and conversations
- Developer ecosystem for business add-ons and extensions
- Deeper enterprise software integrations with products like Microsoft Office, Salesforce, ZenDesk, Workday, etc.
To get a quick overview of one of their three products, HighQ Collaborate watch the following video.
By the way all vendors should take note, this is how a product video should be done. It explains a problem and how HighQ solves it, shows the actual product (not just a fake animation), and it is just a few minutes long. Well done.
HighQ is a Constellation Research customer. I look forward to continuing to advise them as they improve their platform and expand their customer base. Congratulations on today's news, it is well deserved.