Though the company name might not necessarily ring any bells, a small company with some big-name backers, is posed to change the way the industry views–and implements–PLM. The company name is Kenesto and one is its co-founders, Mike Payne, might be better known for his leadership positions at PTC, SolidWorks and SpaceClaim. The product Kenesto is a cloud-based “Social Business Collaboration” platform that runs in a Web browser.
In marketing speak, Kenesto is a cloud-based Project Collaboration and Workflow Management solution that can be used for team discussions, file and content sharing, collaboration, project organization, task management, and workflow management. The idea behind the product is to combine customer-oriented collaboration technologies with a workflow engine that enables users to create both dynamic (on-the-fly) and static (pre-defined) workflows; capturing process flows while people work.
Company Adopts OEM Marketing Strategy
Another factor that sets Kenesto, the product, apart from competing PLM products is the way in which it is being marketed. In December the company announced a partnering program that would allow third-party vendors to private-label the solution for subscription sales into their respective markets.
Logic behind the move is explained by Stephen Bodnar, senior VP of Products and Strategy at Kenesto (and former VP of PLM at Autodesk). “The framework we’ve put in place to support partners who wish to offer our technology to their customers, branded as their own, and through their own sales channels, makes great sense for us given where we are in our company’s lifecycle and the level of investment required to capture additional, much larger markets. It also makes great sense for enterprise software providers who wish to offer the kinds of cloud-based collaboration capabilities, such as those available in Kenesto’s solution, in a timely, cost-effective manner.”
Consolidating Workflows
The newest version of Kenesto organizes around workspaces, teams, or communities. It is not application-centric; it is whatever-centric. “Think of DropBox on steroids,” Bodnar says in a recent interview with Ralph Grabowski, editor of upFront.eZine. For instance, Kenesto has discussion flows, where DropBox does not; Kenesto views 250 file types, Dropbox does not.
Though it’s common for PLM solutions to offer file and content sharing, project organization, task management, workflow diagramming, Kenesto goes about many of these quite differently. For workflow diagramming, Bodnar says, “people in an organization know only their part of the workflow; no one person knows it all.” So Kenesto allows each participant to model their portion of the workflow (see image). The administrator then eliminates duplicates and overlaps.
You can give Kenesto a free test drive (after registering) here.
