Even though I’m not involved with NewsGator Enterprise, it’s actually one of the reasons I started talking with NewsGator about being acquired.
You see, there are quite a few “Web 2.0” startups out there, some of whom have business plans eerily familiar to those of us who witnessed the first dot.com boom and bust (namely, cross your fingers, ignore your high burn rate and hope a business plan falls in your lap before you run out of cash).
And I have to confess that last year I figured NewsGator was one of those companies – but that changed when I read Greg Reinacker’s platform roadmap post, in which he mentioned (among other things) their Enterprise plans. That was an “aha!” moment for me, since it made it clear to me that NewsGator as a company wasn’t based on wishful thinking. IMO, RSS behind the firewall is an idea with legs, and the fact that NewsGator was the first in line to capitalize on it is a big reason why I entered acquisition talks with them (ie: I wasn’t about to join forces with someone that wasn’t in it for the long haul).
So why am I writing about NewsGator Enterprise now instead of when it was first announced? Well, until last week I hadn’t actually seen it, so it would’ve been misleading for me to talk it up. But during my latest trip to Denver, NewsGator Enterprise developer Lane Mohler gave me a tour of the product, and I was very impressed with what I saw.
If you’d like to read more about NewsGator Enterprise, here are links to PDF documents that go into it in more detail than I can provide here: