Longtime readers will remember Sara Gates from frequent appearances in this newsletter. Sara was director of product marketing for Waveset Technologies, becoming vice president of identity management at Sun Microsystems when Waveset was acquired. I nicknamed her the “Texas whirlwind,” because of her ebullient, peripatetic and indefatigable demeanor. And now she’s back in the saddle, and wants to help you.
Well, if you’re employed in IT she wants to help.
She had noticed that there were many, many social networking sites where you could gather with friends and family and chat. But MySpace and Facebook (and Google+ really soon) became places for vendors to bombard you with “messages” generally touting their products.
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Sara also was familiar with the myriad of forums (fora?) and chat rooms devoted to particular products and/or vendors.
What Sara thought we needed (and conversations with many folks in IT confirmed) was a social network for IT people, with no vendors allowed. So she came up with Wisegate.
According to Sara, Wisegate will be the first private, independent peer community where senior IT professionals can freely exchange their ideas, advice and product experiences in an online vendor-free environment. No vendors or hype — just unbiased and unvarnished information. As she puts it: “Think Yelp! meets Match.com for corporate IT professionals.”
Gates leveraged hundreds of hours of listening to IT’s best and brightest who told her that after working in enterprise technology companies for many years, they’d watched corporate IT professionals struggle to find unbiased and unvarnished information about IT products and vendors. How could they get the real story about how products work (or don’t work), from people with the scars and hands-on experience? The information exists, but finding the right people with the right information at the right time is challenging. You typically needed a broad personal network, or superhuman talent to work the crowd at hectic industry conferences, plus the ability to navigate media hype and analyst reports. Or, ideally, all three. We thought: “There has to be a better way.”
Wisegate organizes the most valuable and untapped resource in IT: The collective wisdom of the corporate IT professionals who daily bet their jobs and reputations on buying, deploying and managing IT technology. Wisegate brings together the best brains in corporate IT. It provides tools for connecting, conversing and collaborating, and for creating product ratings, details reviews, and other content online. We keep out the vendors. Then, we get out of the way and let our members do their thing.
If this sounds like it might be of interest, you can sign up now (go to the contact page and request an invitation) and be ready to jump in when it launches next month. I say go for it — what have you got to lose?
