Xobni Wrings Time Savings Out Of Outlook

Company:

Headquarters: San Francisco

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Xobni Plug-In For Outlook

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 20 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Xobni fills the gaps in Microsoft Outlook with more efficient organization of contact information, building profiles that allow users to quickly find the people with whom they're trying to connect.

The Lowdown: If you're a technology startup, Bill Gates publicly describing your product as "the next generation of social networking" has to be the ultimate in ideal scenarios. So it was with Xobni, a San Francisco-based company whose Microsoft Outlook plug-in had Gates gushing with praise at Microsoft's February 2008 Office Developers Conference.

Xobni -- that's "inbox" spelled backward -- makes a plug-in for Outlook that builds profiles of a person's contacts that incorporate phone numbers, e-mail conversations and attachments, and then links this information to social networking Web sites. Xobni displays the profiles neatly in a sidebar within Outlook, and its sophisticated analytics engine enables it to organize large caches of data to let users quickly find what they're looking for.

With more than 3 million users currently, including some 80 percent of Fortune 500 firms, Xobni's time-saving benefits aren't going unnoticed. Individual Xobni users have reported saving 30 minutes to an hour per week, says Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte. "We provide more powerful search for e-mail," he said. "Anyone who's dealing with a lot of relationships and a large volume of e-mail can benefit from using Xobni."

Outlook is one of the most widely used applications for knowledge workers, but it's an older piece of software with its share of limitations, which means there's plenty of demand for the functionality Xobni offers, says Bonforte. Xobni also features integration with Sharepoint groups, policies and files, and is well positioned to add value as Microsoft pushes further into unified communications. "The more users push toward unified communications and collaboration, the more likely they are to benefit from Xobni," Bonforte said.

Xobni's business hinges on licensing its plug-in to enterprises, and its partners make money on the customization side. A Microsoft partner, Xobni has partnerships with around 20 other Microsoft Certified partners that build their own custom Xobni extensions for specific verticals. Xobni partners have built extensions for Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, and many more are on the way, according to Bonforte.

The creativity Xobni has shown in filling Outlook's functionality gap hasn't escaped Microsoft's notice. In April 2008, Microsoft and Xobni were close to an acquisition rumored to be in the neighborhood of $20 million, but Xobni rejected the deal because the company's founders didn't relish their potential role as a tiny speck in the Microsoft galaxy. Xobni has far greater ambitions than being just another feature within Outlook.

"Xobni makes your inbox more social and collaborative," said Bonforte. "Being able to stay there and not bounce back and forth between applications is a key benefit."