Serendipity Technologies is a unique web 2.0 company. It has earned a poll position within the Enterprise 2.0 space for a few good reasons.

Serendipity goes for for the big prize. Its Flagship solution, WorkLight™, is already helping global 500 and other enterprise customers catch up with web 2.0. The solution is a secure server-based software product that provides workers and consumers with “Web 2.0-style” access to corporate data stored in enterprise information systems and applications. Timely information is delivered using technologies such as RSS, Ajax, desktop and web-based gadgets and widgets, personalized homepages, social bookmarks, application mashups and instant messaging. 

In other words, it ports “traditional” IT systems to the latest and greatest of web 2.0, making it more manageable, natural to use and yes, sexier. Early stage execution was impressive and Serendipity have secured significant early stage funding. This created a working environment that is anything but common in web 2.0 start-ups. Being an Enterprise solution provider makes it even more impressive. The Enterprise software market, while naturally more promising in the long run, is naturally much more complicated and cautious when it comes to embracing web 2.0 technologies.

I sat down with Shahar Kaminitz, Founder and CEO of WorkLight for a holiday eve Q and A session which is hereby brought to you.

Could you tell us a bit about WorkLight, how old is the company, where are you on the corporate and product life cycle?

Shahar: The company was established in the beginning of 2006 by Yuval Tarsi and myself, at which time we also raised our first round of financing, totaling over $5M. We are backed by leading venture capital funds – Genesis Partners and Index Ventures – and Shlomo Kramer, co-Founder of Checkpoint and Imperva’s CEO. We have officially released our product, called WorkLight, in January 2007 at the DEMO conference, and it is now generally available. WorkLight is currently implemented and being used at several Global 500 corporations. We operate from our offices in Boston, MA and Yakum, Israel.  

What is your vision as the founder?

Shahar: For the last 18 years, I have been involved in different aspects of enterprise software as an engineer, manager and Venture Capital investor. The general direction enterprise software took during these years is towards more functionality but also great complexity. Information systems have become extremely complex to implement and offer a very poor user experience. In striking contrast to that, on the consumer side of the internet, things have gone drastically towards simplicity, as far as the end-user is concerned. Google, for example, has taught us all a lesson about the power of simplicity, which hides a lot of complexity “under the hood”. My vision is that employees will be able to enjoy the fun and productivity associated with all the new “web 2.0″ tools and services in their work environment. We introduce new ways of access to enterprise data, which are taken from the consumer world. For example, sales, inventory, orders and financial information will be accessible to employees in a personalized and convenient way, just like getting blog updates through RSS, building a Personalized Google page or creating a Yahoo widget.

What is the biggest challenge a modern organization needs to face in terms of information management today? How does WorkLight help solve it?

Shahar: Employees increasingly rely on information to do their job. This information is available from multiple enterprise applications, each one coming with its own proprietary, and often cumbersome, user interface. Workers need to login to each relevant application, search for the appropriate data record, and only then use it in the context of the business task at hand. The typical result is that employees either are not using the applications altogether, or suffer from what IDC calls “death by navigation”: a deadly effect on worker morale and productivity. Finding and consuming information is exactly what the Internet does so well for us as consumers. With WorkLight, people at work use the same services familiar to them at home to access enterprise data. WorkLight harnesses web 2.0 technologies to solve the information access problem. Enterprise application data become just like web content; accessible in the same form as web content and by means of the same web technologies. Furthermore, application data and web content can be freely mixed. We constantly add more web 2.0 interfaces to enterprise data to our current collection, which includes RSS, gadgets and widgets, popular personalized homepages, Instant Messaging and Social Bookmarking.

There is heavy debate regarding the maturity of enterprise 2.0. WorkLight is a Marquis company in that respect and one of the first to have raised significant early stage funding.  Would you define WorkLight as an enterprise 2.0 company?  Was it hard to rally quality investors behind the vision?

Shahar: There is indeed a lot of debate what is scope and definition of Enterprise 2.0, and I’m not sure that I have a clear position on that subject. Our customers are mostly unaware of the Enterprise 2.0 theme, but are very much aware of the widening gap between the “at work” and “at home” computing experience. What is important for WorkLight is that we solve a known and substantial business problem, and as result have a solid business model. This made things quite easy for us on the fund-raising front, not our association with a hot trend.

The borders between personal and corporate information are getting shadier. For example, you see personal blogs by executives becoming a legitimate part of the corporate and marketing strategy. But it also redefines information flow and security requirements inside the organization. What is your view on the expected evolution in that area?

Shahar: I am a big believer in blurring these boarders and eventually eliminating them completely. There is no reason why the employee needs to go back into the “dark ages” when at work. The corporation needs to take care of the infrastructure to enable this consumer-like experience in a secure and scalable way, and let the users do the rest.

Who do you believe you would eventually be “selling to”? The CIO? IT? Marketing? HR?

Shahar: Even from our first few sales an interesting picture arises: we are selling to the business units, where the business problem is painful. Often, end-users themselves are the drivers for change and incorporation of web 2.0 technologies in their workplace, facilitating a “grass-roots” process. This can be the sales, marketing, HR or finance department. IT is then engaged in the process to verify that the product adheres to corporate policies, mainly security.

At the personal level, as a start-up-ist, what are the most fulfilling moments you have? most challenging?

Shahar: The most fulfilling moments are when you see that something so young and fragile as a start-up company is able to impact people. This can be your customers, for whom you are able to generate real value and change the way they work. It can be industry analysts or potential business partners that positively react to your new technology. And it is certainly your employees who get engaged in something adventurous and innovative. Challenging moments are mostly related to the lonely feeling of a small company with limited resources “fighting” against the whole world.

How do you deal with the “chicken and egg” situation of the early stage - getting the product ready for the customers in parallel to getting the customers who define the product?

Shahar: We did not really suffer from this problem. We were able to get enough customers engaged in a very early stage, before the product was ready, just based on their need for a solution and the innovative nature of our technology. There are organizations, notably in the financial services sector, that have a strategic goal to identify and incorporate new technologies, and these people are great partners for a company in its first year.

What would make 2007 a successful year for WorkLight and for you?

Shahar: 2006 was the year of company setup and initial product development. We were delighted to be able to implement the product at several huge organizations and garner a lot of interest in our offering. 2007 is dedicated to extending our reach into more customer organizations in more markets and enriching the product with more “web 2.0″ capabilities. If at the end of the year our solution will be used by tens-of-thousand of people and will significantly impact their work experience, I will regard it a success.

      

The Israeli Games 2007 event will take place on April 11th, at Kfar Hamakabya form 8 am to 6 PM. It will include 2 tracks and keynotes from Erel Margalit, JVP and Ofer Leidner from Oberon Media. Other speakers include Steve Weiss from Sony Online, Alexander Fernandez from Streamline Studios, Jessica Tams from the Casual Games Association, Shaul Olmert from Nickelodeon, Michael Eisenberg from Benchmark and other who will share different aspects about the market from the US, Europe and Israel. At the end of the event a unique round table about Metaverses will take place.

This event is a first in Israel in terms of size and focus. Its aim is to expose the games market, a $30 Billion in size, to local developers, talents and investors. Accordingly, the event’s management expects over 300 attendees. Over 100 job vacancies will be introduced.

The sponsors of this event this year are AMD ATI, JVP, Decima, Revolver, Nisha HR, Quick Soft, Lucid, 3DV and Vollee.