Ditching its campy, cute moniker, the company formerly known as
perksatwork.com changed its name to Abilizer this week to stake its claim to the corporate portal market.
With the market for enterprise portals booming, the company made a few
additions to its corporate portal services. For one, the firm upgraded its
Abilizer Employee Portal.
As part of this, Abilizer announced partnerships with content and commerce
providers to deliver news, information, expert-advice, products, services
and employee community for the Abilizer Employee Portal’s channels. The
channels focus on daily essentials, family, shopping, home and garden, and
personal finance, with additional channels in development.
Partners include iVillage.com, Accuweather.com and
Mobshop.com.
The new channels will boost the tools first introduced in the previous
version of the employee portal, which was licensed by the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc. and
Oracle Corp.
Krishnan Sastry, vice president of product development played a key role in
the changes. Sastry told internet.com this week that Abilizer was not
changing its business model at all — just expanding on it.
“The base business model remains the same,” Sastry said. “We’ve expanded the
value proposition and I think by changing the name to Abilizer we make the
statement that we are a business that builds and develops. It’s a more
serious name.”
Abilizer also made a serious push into the European enterprise portal sector
with its acquisition of IntraExtra, a London-based
provider of products, services and solutions to employees in the United
Kingdom, which is very similar to Abilizer. Abilizer plans to deliver its
new Abilizer Employee Portal starting in the fourth quarter in the European
Union, with an initial release in the UK.
Sastry said the purchase, for which financial terms were not disclosed, made
sense in light of Abilizer’s global push.
“We will be able to draw from their pool of existing relationships,” Sastry
said. “IntraExtra has a tremendous foothold in the enterprise market in the
European Union.”
The EU employee portal market is growing rapidly. According to Forrester
Research, intranet access for EU workers is growing at 40 percent annually,
and the EU’s 12.7 million on-line users at work outnumber their counterparts
with home access by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1. In three years, European
workers with Internet access at work is expected to nearly triple to 33.6
million.
Use of the Abilizer brand is effective immediately. The company will
continue to use the perksatwork name to describe its marketplace and local
merchant programs.
Yahoo! Inc., too,
made a significant play in the portal market this week. With its Corporate
Yahoo! strike, the giant will offer their employees content and services
from the portal giant on in-house networks.
