SEATTLE, April 14, 2011 - FuzeDigital today published an independent product review of its recently-launched Fuze Suite™ 8.0 release by former Gartner analyst and founder of ThinkJar Esteban Kolsky. In his analysis, Kolsky concluded that the Fuze Suite 8.0 “is definitely worth evaluation and enhanced consideration when looking for a social business platform."

The Fuze Suite combines knowledge sharing, customer care and community technologies in a single application that can be run in an on-demand SaaS model or licensed on-premise installation.

Kolsky identified FuzeDigital’s current client base as primarily small to mid-sized businesses but said that  the modular Fuze Suite is ”built using a true SaaS architecture – which means they can leverage the cloud model to grow and scale to virtually any size." He added that "FuzeDigital can be deployed in a true cloud (Amazon’s cloud is the only model that comes close to it, and FuzeDigital has proven to work in it without any problem) and leverage the power of the cloud to grow performance as demands increase."

In the review, Kolsky defined a true social business platform as  "the convergence of Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0: it is when a business merges their internal activities to become customer centric with their external activities to interact better with those same customers," adding  that "both disciplines flourish on collaboration and engagement," and use similar tools and technologies, "so it is only natural to expect organizations that adopted both to want to leverage and integrate between them."

Fuze Suite 8.0 meets Kolsky’s four criteria for a complete social business solution with robust functions for collaboration, reputation, rules and integration. Along with evolving business functions, processes, and technologies to operate as a social business, he added, "It is imperative to successfully become a social business to focus on a technology vendor that can both support current, non-social-business processes and business functions, yet related to the customer interaction, while providing a path for those same functions to become more social, more engaging for the customer and the organization to collaborate."

One of FuzeDigital's primary goals was to deliver Fuze Suite 8.0 as a complete social business platform instead of yet another community, according to CEO Chuck Van Court.

Kolsky noted that Fuze Suite nails that goal. He said “It is key to know that they did not simply add an integration layer to support these (social) networks, rather they made that integration layer a key part of their community-generated, community-managed knowledge base and brought the granular controls and reputation engine rankings to this integration, thus making the integration much more valuable than simply posting data in one or the other as most vendors have done.”

Calling FuzeDigital’s reputation engine “impressive” Kolsky said, “Being able to manage reputation for all members of the community across multiple categories is the aim of virtually all reputation engines, but this is the only one I see that can also assign reputation to the content itself, and track it down to each of the comments that may follow any content created.”

Van Court said, “We’re convinced that the reputation engine is critical to the success of any organization’s content – so much so that we applied for a patent on our unique approach which allows stakeholders to earn contribution points commensurate with the perceived value other stakeholders assign to the content they create. Contribution points not only motivate participation but identify and leverage specific subject matter expertise.”

Kolsky identified eight primary differentiators that distinguish Fuze Suite among social business platforms: flexible architecture, easy maintenance and administration, proven performance for target markets, precise focus on product quality, modular solution options, emphasis on knowledge as its binding element, simple pricing plans and complete functionality to support broad collaboration models.

He added that the Fuze Suite differentiators are so strong that they make another great asset, FuzeDigital pricing, "a bonus element." FuzeDigital offers flexible pricing which allows customers to tailor the modules used and concurrent administrators on a monthly basis. "Our use-based pricing makes our enterprise-grade solution affordable to small and medium, as well as large organizations," Van Court said.

Kolsky, founder of ThinkJar and former Gartner analyst, was one of two "thought leaders" in social customer relations management (CRM) cited by name when the Altimeter Group released a major report titled "The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management" in 2010. The Altimeter Group was named to Fast Company's annual list of ten most creative small businesses in May.

"We’re pleased to have been compared favorably by Kolsky with other industry leaders, including some of the largest such as RightNow, Parature and eGain in customer service and Jive and Lithium in online community," Van Court added. Kolsky's full review is available in the Fuze Suite Info Center.