Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich
Remember the “Back to the Future” series from 1980s? In the second movie of the three-part series chronicling the perils of time travel and big hair, the main “bad guy” Biff Henderson, has a flash of insight. A future Biff manages to send an almanac of sports scores to his younger self, courtesy of Marty McFly’s time-warping Delorean sports car.
In business, that’s what it is all about – getting that flash of insight. Being able to judge, with greater certainty, what will happen next. Moving just a few steps faster than the next guy to the right answer. In many respects, this is what nGenera Corporation is all about. Given that I’m an nGenera “insider,” I thought I’d start off the re-launch of my AustinStartup blog contributions with my little endeavor.
It’s a perfect circle, because many of you may remember my Cleantech Friday posts, which I had to put on hiatus almost exactly a year ago. nGenera at that time was still operating under our semi-stealth mode name, BSG Alliance. And being a fairly new, venture-backed start-up meant that I had very little time to do more than eat-sleep-and-work, like so many of you fellow brethren know.
But we re-launched the company in April of this year, after assembling an all-star cast of people, products, and customers, through acquisition and invitation. And, today, nGenera is busily working with a handfull of others to invent a new kind of product & services company for the global 2000. We call it an on-demand, business innovation platform for the next generation enterprise.
Sure, that’s a mouthful of trendy words that are pretty high up the hype-cycle at the moment. However, just because there is a lot of hype around the concepts like “platform” and “on demand” doesn’t mean they aren’t powerful. The best way to undertand it is to use it. So, I invite you to go to the nGenera website and, if you haven’t yet, “join” with your own account so you can get a little taste of what’s to come.
Make sure when you update your profile to use the Facebook synch. Once you’re legal, what you’ll see is a boatload of stuff. “What’s going on here?” you may ask yourself. What’s going on is you that have just logged into global, collaborative business platform. In the case of a casual, non-affiliated joiner, that means most of what you can see and do is limited to creating and particpating in public/private conversations, hosting and joining events, surveying your fellow members about ideas, etc. In other words, the essential building blocks of collaboration.
What you can NOT see and do are work with the special add-on stacks – assembled from nGenera’s research, education, expertise, and applications components – that our customers use to gain greater insight and better serve their own markets. You’ll get little glimpses of these components as you browse around the website: components for simulation, customer interaction, incentives-driven salesforce management, and the like.
So, what’s next for nGenera? Given the economic uncertainty of the times, we’re finding a receptive audience. Anything that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of current operations and provide greater retention and growth in existing customers, as well as attraction of new ones, has a greater chance of succeeding during such an historic transition time. Let me know your thoughts. I look forward to seeing you in the nGenera community.