Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Please tell us, what is Sparqlight all about, what do you do?
Brian Reisgen: Sparqlight provides the world's leading Cloud-Based Enterprise Social Workflow Application.  We make it simple for anyone to do what used to be very difficult: manage, visualize, and automate your work.
Our solution breaks down into three critical areas:
1.) The core Social Workflow interface, where you manage, collaborate, and complete work.
2.) Analytics, where you visualize, benchmark and improve workflow performance (including impacting key performance indicators).
3.) Workflow Automation, which helps automate and accelerate workflow.
This is complex stuff that used to take millions of dollars and months or years to implement.  We make it as simple as signing up with your work e-mail address.  No training required.

You just launched the Enterprise version. Please tell us more
Reisgen: From the beginning we knew we wanted our solution to be optimized for Enterprise customers.  That means organizations that have some rudiments of process, are metrics driven (or want to be more metrics driven), and are smart about automating and accelerating their competitive advantages.  Interestingly, we see that kind of rigor in even the smallest of organizations nowadays--in large part driven by the democratization of technology.  So...to us, Enterprise means companies that have their act together!

With that as our guideline, our Enterprise solution is optimized to deliver maximum ROI for those kinds of organizations.  While our core Social Workflow service is available for free to anyone, advanced analytics for tracking, visualizing, measuring and impacting Key Performance Indicators, and advanced automations in the form of workflow acceleration, integration with other systems, and process automation is only available to our Enterprise customers.

Who is your target audience and how do you intend to reach them?
Reisgen: We're fortunate in that our audience tends to be a self-selecting group of business owners, executives, IT professionals, engineers, managers, emerging leaders, and overachieving knowledge workers--these kinds of people tend to seek out solutions proactively.  That means they're going to find us via the internet and through social media, but also from the inherent virality built into our product--when people see what Sparqlight can do for their business, they want to spread the word; we make that an organic, natural part of the product experience.

What is the biggest challenge you face right now in telling your story and winning over new clients?
Reisgen: Two exciting challenges, actually.  The first challenge is that we're in a very nascent market.  It's going to take a while for customers to understand not just what we do, but how enterprise social technologies of all sorts are going to help them build better businesses.  We love this challenge because we get to make a contribution to how enterprise social (and social workflow) is defined--and more importantly, we get to have a privileged dialogue with our customers (who are also visionaries in their own right), as they help us define the space.

The second challenge is that we are "unsexy"!  We're not a technology start-up in the music, entertainment, or consumer social spaces, so our story isn't likely to be told in the popular press.  We love this challenge too, because, in our view, being "sexy" is an anti-test...the same way being popular in high school is: all the really cool kids...the really smart ones, are outsiders!

These are exactly the right challenges to have when you're a start-up!

I'd be curious to hear any general thoughts you have on market trends...
Reisgen: We see two trends converging: 1.) companies like Sparqlight are extending the social metaphor beyond the idea of "facebook for the enterprise", into actual workflow and business process--beyond anecdotal ROI about increasing employee engagement, and into measurable, bottom-line stuff; and 2.) the evolution of enterprise social networks as the systems of record for collaboration in general--a shift towards a platform strategy and away from just micro-blogging.  In both cases, we see ourselves as the "killer app" that justifies adoption of enterprise social technology.

What is the viral aspect of your product?
Reisgen: Virality is weaved into the core of our service, and it's a natural, value-added aspect of its use.  To be sure, a single user can gain a lot of value from just organizing their own, individual workflow.  But the real power of Sparqlight becomes evident as more and more people use it within an organization to get work done, delegate tasks, benchmark work performance, and share best practices.

On top of the inherent virality of our service, we're leveraging existing enterprise social networks and platforms form Yammer and Google.  We've made joining as easy as pressing a button.

How will you make money? What's the business model?
Reisgen: Our revenue model is a freemium one.  The product is free to try out, for up to 50 users.  And for customers that want access to advanced analytics and automation, we offer an enterprise version of Sparqlight that is priced at $20/month per user.

Who are your competitors?
Reisgen: We are often lumped together with cloud-based collaboration systems, which is fine.  But there are significant gradations in the collaboration continuum: everything from simple to-do lists on the left hand side, to document collaboration systems, to big-iron BPM systems on the right.  We're positioned in the "fat middle", with a bent towards enterprise.

SYS-con: How do you differentiate from your competitors?
Reisgen: Three ways, and they are very important. One - fanatical focus on Social Workflow.  We're the only company that is relentlessly focused on that single idea. Two - Robust workflow automation.  Our customers don't just want to keep up with the competition, they want to get ahead.  The best way to do that, from a workflow perspective, is to automate and accelerate key business processes. Sparqlight is the only service that makes that possible.  Three - Unprecedented workflow visibility--in the cloud. We bring the same visibility, measurement, and accountability into general business processes that CRM customers have had for their sales processes.  All that, and we wrap it in a simple social interface, accessible anywhere, free to start, and as easy to sign up for as using your business e-mail address.  That's revolutionary.

How does your technology differentiate from the competition and can you elaborate on the different technology deployed?
Reisgen: Our differentiation comes from focus. While others are pursuing horizontal strategies--adding features that solve tangentially related problems, we are focused on going deeper into workflow and process, metrics, and automation.

What business or technology could yours disrupt?
Reisgen: Traditional enterprise business process applications are ripe for disruption.  This is a roughly $5Bn market filled with overbuilt, inflexible, and expensive solutions.  While we won't ever attempt to match their functionality in total, we do focus on the best 10% of it that the market cares about.  We also expect to extend that market with new functionality made possible through social technologies.  We like to think of ourselves as the surface streets, and they are the super-highways.

It's worth mentioning that we disrupt e-mail too.  I was talking with our new marketing guy the other day and he was worried because his inbox was not as busy as it was at his previous job, then he realized it was because he was always on Sparqlight instead. It's addicting once you are on it.

Who founded the company, when? What can you tell me about the story of the company's founding?
Reisgen: I founded Sparqlight in 2010 as a spin-off of all the work I was doing as CEO of my prior company, The Enterprise University (TEU).  Most of TEU's customers are executives at high-growth, mid-market companies, and they all face very similar challenges:  leveraging the power of process and analytics as management tools, while still staying agile and innovating in real-time.  Traditional BPM solutions were overbuilt for them, so most were using e-mail to manage workflow...which is crazy.  Initially, Sparqlight was an internal application we used at TEU to manage all our engagements and our clients' challenges. As the service evolved, it became clear we could help more companies if we spun the product out into a separate entity.

What is your distribution model? Where to buy your product?
Reisgen: We are cloud based and running a freemium model so you can be up and running in minutes. Go ahead, try it at www.sparqlight.com

What's next on your product roadmap?
Reisgen: We are going mobile towards the end of this year and we are announcing some significant partnerships in the coming months.

Are you targeting a first VC round? If yes when and what will you use the funds for? How much money is being sought?
Reisgen: We are raising money right now to ramp up engineering, sales and marketing. It will be a modest A round.

What else would you like to add?
Reisgen: Sparqlight is the Enterprise Social Workflow Application. We invented the category because we are driven by the idea that Enterprise Social is about getting work done. #gwd

Thank you for your time.
Reisgen: Thank you

Company's twitter: @sparqlight
Website: www.sparqlight.com

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