SM: Did you raise Venture money?
CA: $5.8m Series A funding was raised from entities affiliated with the Tudor Group in March 2007.

SM: Interesting. Tudor Group is a Hedge Fund. This is the first concrete example I’ve encountered of a Hedge Fund playing VC. What stage are you at now?
CA: SONAR is getting traction in the enterprise market and the company anticipates securing a number of new customers by the close of 2007. Trampoline has a contract for SONAR with the Raytheon Company, a leading global defence and aerospace systems supplier.

SM: That’s a big one, congratulations! What other enterprise systems did you need to integrate with at Raytheon?
CA: Lotus Notes Domino, Microsoft Exchange, Docushare Doc repository, and an LDAP contact database. All done with Wiretap connectors. Very easy integration. The days of lengthy integration cycles are gone!

SM: Is your team complete? Does it have depth?
CA: Trampoline’s core management team is longstanding and we anticipate fleshing out the sales side over the coming months.

SM: What is your perspective on the Extended Enterprise trend?
CA: Trampoline believes that the Extended Enterprise will become increasingly important as organisations come to recognise the value the ecosystem which functions around the core organisation. As such, Trampoline’s SONAR platform includes features to extract value from the connections individuals within the user organisation have with other organisations, whatever the relationship between the two.

SONAR’s core expertise location encompasses in-house users’ knowledge and experience of collaborating, related or competing organisations and the connections or contacts they have with other organisations. In addition, SONAR extracts the themes (core ideas, areas of discussion or expertise) from correspondence and documents between users within the organisation and outside, enabling users to see the information exchanges taking place outside the organisation as well as within it.

At this point it should be stressed that SONAR includes multiple security and privacy controls surrounding the sharing of information, both actual documents and extracted information such as themes or connections. Users have complete control over the information others can view about them.

Upcoming SONAR functionality will condense user’s social networks into actionable pathways to desired contacts, so a user can, for example, see the missing link in a chain to a prospect organisation. If User A wanted to contact Prospect C in another organisation, they will be alerted to User B, a colleague with an existing relationship with Prospect C, who would be able to offer an introduction. This is designed to help organisations leverage their existing relationships both inside and outside organisations.

SM: So do you have to plug your data mining crawlers to other enterprises beyond the one who buys your solution? That, I imagine, would be a massive security issue!
CA: Actually, we don’t do that at all. There is so much “Extended Enterprise” info available within the enterprise itself, through correspondences, documents, etc. that simply mapping those into the corresponding relationship maps is sufficiently valuable. That’s how we tackle the extended enterprise security issue, while still delivering on the value proposition of finding that one small group in a lab in Malayasia working on Compound X, that a new project group in Germany ought to connect with.

SM: Very cool! Are you looking to raise another round of funding? Timeframe?
CA: A Series B funding round is anticipated in 18-24 months.

SM: Fascinating, Charles!

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Product Review]

This segment is part 3 in the series : Expertise Location
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