Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Stealth-mode startup Intrix is focusing on delivering a semantic-based solution to bring social networking into the enterprise environment by enabling collaboration, sharing, tagging and conversations, with the goal of helping companies realize productivity increases. The startup was spun off from Intera, a high-tech firm specializing in business-social web solutions.

Semanticweb.com recently had an email chat with Davorin Gabrovec, CEO and Founder, about the emerging Enterprise 2.0 world — and why social networking tools have a role to play in this new workplace.

Semanticweb.com: Your company declares that business is now social — what does that mean and how does that potentially bring greater value to 2.0 enterprises?

Gabrovec: [The] Internet is now changing not only the way we live but also the way we work. Can you remember those days, when we were just “surfers” on the web and using search engines to find information? Now users are becoming more and more “pro-active” with the web and many are easily sending, exchanging, sharing, creating and contributing to content on the web. On the other side of all this, you have big enterprise applications, which are still working in the classical way — one way. They are too heavy to adopt, too complicated to change quickly and not intelligent enough to listen to users’ needs.

Today’s sophisticated users want their information in more than one way, they like to view it in certain ways and they want to customize it and share it with their co-workers. We at Intrix see that this is the way people collaborate and communicate with their friends through social networking tools, and we want to bring those tools to the enterprise environment.

Semanticweb.com: Is the desire users have to bring the social networking experiences they have in the consumer world into the enterprise environment facing challenges?

Gabrovec: There is already a trend to use social networking tools in the enterprise environment; tools such as simple tools for collaboration, project management, blogs [and] wikis, document sharing or feeds exchange. Intrix would like to bring the end users’ passion for social networking to an enterprise user. We would like to encourage enterprise users to use their business applications with the same passion [as] they use their private social tool and be more productive and effective.

But first we have to prepare the environment to make this happen. Up until recently enterprise managers have not been embracing social network tools to empower their employees. They need to be prepared and they should believe in empowering employees. In order to convince them, there needs to be a solution on the market that will bring simple and efficient social networking tools for the working environment into the enterprise. This is what Intrix is hoping to achieve.

Semanticweb.com: Your solution is still in stealth mode, but how do you envision it solving these issues? Where does the focus need to be? Is there anything you can disclose about the technology at this point?

Gabrovec: Intrix is still in stealth mode, but it’s clear that the product will be offered as a service, running in the cloud. It will be one of the most efficient tools for the new enterprise, besides all the collaboration, sharing, knowledge exchange, etc., Intrix will be smart. Learning from user habits, Intrix will remember the way employees usually work and will help them to be even more efficient and happy.

Semanticweb.com: You are building this new solution on previous technology, and you go so far as to say in your corporate blog that it is nothing revolutionary. Rather, that its importance lies in interactively and strategically migrating legacy systems to Enterprise 2.0. Can you provide some further background on how the heritage behind the new solution will help you reach that goal?

Gabrovec: We started as a web-based software solution provider, with two different products for enterprises (project management and customer relationship management tool) for our local market. In the last three years we have grown from a lot of experience and great feedback from companies of different sizes and industries that are implementing web 2.0 collaboration tools (companies range from SMB to national governments and ministries and large corporate enterprises and multinational companies). In all these projects we learned a lot about how employees work in their environment, what they need and want to be able to do, how they use their tools or what they would like to have to be more effective and productive.

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