Mvine has launched a new social business platform, which it said was more capable and more secure for collaboration than Microsoft Sharepoint and Salesforce Chatter.
The company, privately owned and headquartered in the UK, is first launching the product in the financial services realm, including through a specific business targeting insurance firms.
One channel to financial services firms will be through BT, which has already implemented the system in its own operations in order to establish online groups for different sections of the company and those with different backgrounds.
Frank Joshi, Mvine chief executive, told Computerworld UK that while Sharepoint was an advanced and popular tool in businesses, Mvine “offers a full mix of document management – rather than just document reporting – as well as context aware information, video and blogging”. Other features include data integration and business intelligence.
Competitors also include Salesforce’s Chatter platform, the Jive social networking platform and Google Docs for document management. Joshi argued that Mvine offered the “easy” establishing and running of thousands of groups, as well as the features of each of those solutions and tight security on who can access what.
The system was “quick to implement”, according to Joshi, and could be established and running in many large organisations within weeks.
In a coup for the insurance element of its business, Mvine has hired former Lloyds of London chief information officer Chris Rawson to head Exvine, a business the comapny has established to specifically target the insurance industry.
Rawson said at the launch: “Insurers like to do business with people who speak their own language. They have highly complex businesses and supply chains, and we needed to address that directly with this product.”
While Mvine has targeted financial services firms for the launch, it plans in the longer term to sell to other sectors with high collaboration demands, including pharmaceutical businesses.