Greetings, and Extending Our Reach

Should have done this sooner, but better late than never.

I’m Craig Malloy, the new CEO of Bloomfire. Dave McCann and I bought Bloomfire from Josh Little last November. We raised money from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures to make the acquisition and provide some growth capital.

I first found out about Bloomfire early last year when I was still the CEO of LifeSize, a maker of videoconferencing products. We were using Bloomfire to enable our global sales teams; providing every person with what they needed to know, when they were ready to learn it, and giving them an always-on place for them to contribute to the knowledge sharing of the team.

Josh and his very small team had done a spectacular job bootstrapping Bloomfire into a really compelling web application used by hundreds of organizations. Dave and I, and our investors saw an incredible opportunity to scale it even further.

Our first inclination was to focus solely on the application of sales enablement but our potential customers showed us a number of other ways that Bloomfire brought unique value. Some of the other popular ways our customers are using their Bloomfire include:

– Customer Community
– Technical Support Community
– Company Intranet/Knowledge Base or Wiki
– Partner/Reseller Portal and Learning Community
– Public Learning Community, both open and subscription based
– Consultant/Client Community

We are thrilled to have such a flexible and useful application that can facilitate these critical business functions.

When we acquired Bloomfire, the team was only 7 people headquartered in Lehi, UT. We have since moved the headquarters to Austin, TX and the team has grown to 25. We intend to continue to grow our team as we grow revenue and our customer base.

In addition to adding new core capabilities to Bloomfire, one of our product strategies is to extend the reach of Bloomfire into other platforms and eco-systems. I am pleased to announce that Bloomfire is now integrated into the Google ecosystem. Bloomfire is available in the Google Apps Marketplace and your Bloomfire has single sign on with your Google account and can be accessed from your Google toolbar. This is a great way to start our integration efforts and there will many more of these in the future.

I couldn’t be more pleased and excited to be part of Bloomfire to help our customers share knowledge and learn from others on their team. After all, as we like to say in our Manifesto, everyone has something to contribute and none of us is as smart as all of us. Thank you for your support.

Craig Malloy