Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To deliver on this particular use case, you are obviously pulling data from Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels. How does that data framework work? Do you have to pay Twitter to get their data?

Kristin Muhlner: No, we don’t. Twitter and Facebook are open feedback channels. As long as you comply with their terms of service and their developer APIs, there are a number of methods with which you can gather data. With Twitter, for example, we are listening for those specific handles, and then we can bring that data in. It works similarly with Facebook – there are pages on Facebook dedicated to the agencies where you can gather data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 1)

Kristin Muhlner is the chief executive officer of newBrandAnalytics, the global leader in social market intelligence. Kristin has worked at companies such as Rollstream, webMethods, Deloitte Consulting, and Andersen Consulting and has more than 20 years of experience in this space. In this interview she talks about how newBrandAnalytics helps companies extract intelligence from online conversations and talks about open gaps in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Kristin, let’s start with setting some context for newBrandAnalytics. What do you do? Who is your target customer?

Kristin Muhlner: Fairly simply, what newBrandAnalytics does is take social information and turn it into operational intelligence. What I mean by that is we gather data about our customers, we analyze that using sophisticated natural language processing, we code it to industry-specific categories, grade it for sentiment, and then we present it back to them in a way that really helps those customers get a deep, rich understanding from a business perspective about the conversation about them online. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have a lot of e-commerce customers, does that mean you are building in the capabilities of running a full e-commerce shopping cart, for example, into your portfolio?

Joe Langner: With the number of customers we have and the time we have been on the market, we either produce those capabilities ourselves from our core products, or we work with business partners who complement some of those additional features.  Shopping carts, web stores, e-buildings, or digital signatures are using technology to automate processes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where does BlackBerry fit into all of this?  This is a segment that has high BlackBerry adoption.

Joe Langner: The devices we are writing to are those two [Android and iOS] at this point.  I haven’t seen the BlackBerry adoption as much.  They lost a lot of mind share in the marketplace. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bottom line is that you provide mobile app content to the entire ERP suite.

Joe Langner: Yes. The change within our business is that we change the apps once, but then they work with the multiple solutions we have. The customers don’t have to change their whole backup by turning off their systems; they can just add this if they have the need to extend the use of the tool. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your customers consists of IT or IT-enabled businesses?

Joe Langner: Depending on what you define as IT or IT enabled, across all of Sage mid-market customers, 16% to 19% fall into that category.

SM: What are we seeing in this segment as far as needs and behaviors? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At the level you are talking about, the competitor is no longer QuickBooks, it is Intacct and Netsuite.

Joe Langner: When you look purely at the enterprise resource planning (ERP) of Netsuite and Intacct, you can say that there can be friction. We do want to have the best ERP and the best accounting package that people can buy, but we also want to address a lot of the friction that has occurred. We are doing that through leveraging the web.  If we have a CRM or a front-end system and we also have the ERP system, we can address some of those challenges that the others have because we own both the front-end and the back-end, and we have the ability to make the systems work together more seamlessly. If you think about the social media space, you have Facebook, and the Facebook ID is used a lot with other applications. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 1)

For the past 15 months, Joe Langner has been the executive vice president of mid-market solutions for Sage North America. He comes with an extensive management background which includes strategic planning, operational excellence, and profitable growth. In this interview he discusses mobile and social applications and Sage’s current position on the market regarding those applications.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Joe, and welcome to the series. It would be helpful to give our readers some context about Sage. Then we will dive in to specific topics. >>>