GroupSwim

GroupSwim is a company founded in 2005 by some of the original members of Commerce One. It launched Beta service in September of 2007 and is based in San Francisco, California. GroupSwim is privately held.

GroupSwim is hosted software, otherwise known as SaaS, that creates online communities for businesses. These communities can be for customers, employees or partners. The company sells to businesses including customers such as , and . The company is growing rapidly and is gaining 1,000s of users a month.

Overview
GroupSwim provides online community solutions for the enterprise. The solution is hosted and provided as software as a service. The solution powers discussion-based communities of all sizes to identify problems, find solutions, answer questions, and share ideas. Using technology called the Community Intelligence Engine, GroupSwim captures the most trusted community information. GroupSwim then transforms this data into actionable knowledge and automatically delivers it to each user. The goal of the solution is to enhance customer loyalty and employee effectiveness by mining their collective wisdom. GroupSwim was selected to participate in the TechCrunch 40 Conference in San Francisco and was named an up-and-coming Web 2.0 company . GroupSwim competes with other software vendors like Lithium Technologies and Leverage Software.

Problem Addressed
Business customers and employees have vast amounts of information that they traditionally share through email and word-of-mouth. Some enterprises try to develop communities to leverage this wealth of knowledge but rely on software that is cumbersome and noisy, turning off customers and employees accustomed to using today’s Web 2.0 and ecommerce applications. Users have high expectations but get overwhelmed with useless and extraneous information. Creating effective online communities can be challenging, but with the appropriate planning and tools, it can be done very effectively .

Solution
GroupSwim combines a Web 2.0 user interface with an enterprise feature set including multi-tenancy, advanced community configuration, website integration tools and enterprise class security functionality. The architecture scales from powering small groups and teams to handling massive customer communities discussing complex topics. The Community Intelligence Engine works in the background to automatically organize unstructured discussions into topics, to identify trusted contributors, and to highlight the best content. This unique approach classifies GroupSwim as an Enterprise 2.0 application. The term was coined and described by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School
in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review.. According to this paper, an effective Enterprise 2.0 application should provide extensive search, linking, authorship, tagging, extensibility and signaling; GroupSwim provides rich functionality in all 6 categories.

Business Model
GroupSwim is on-demand software; businesses are charged a monthly subscription fee based on the number of active users and whether the community is external or internal. Business and users are free to create an online community and try GroupSwim for 30 days with no commitment.

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