Over the last 12 months MindTouch has extensively surveyed both customers and users. Previously, I shared facts about the community of users. Primarily I reported on the remarkable performance of our users in spreading the word. Thanks again for this. Also, I highlighted top programming languages and top business use cases. Now I am pleased to present, what I believe, is even more interesting, indeed even exciting, information about our paying customers. The following information is a statistically significant sampling of our over 1,000 paying customers.

Before I dive into some of our findings, here is a simple return on investment (ROI) calculator developed from our customer research that will help you calculate the returns you can expect from deploying MindTouch. You should know I am using a 20% increase in efficiency (lower bound from customer research—see below). I have supplied the initial input for 100 users and an average employee salary of $45,000. Plug in your numbers and your ROI will calculate. I think the result will impress you.

I highlight the above ROI as “partial ROI” because this figure represents improved efficiency,  but does not cover improved effectiveness, which is difficult to measure. With the dashboards and reporting capabilities in MindTouch our customers are reporting improved effectiveness as well.

Early customers, such as Red Mountain Retail Group and Bill Me Later reported 25% to 40% increases in productivity. This translates to millions of dollars in savings for these companies. Recent surveys have reinforced these claims. Indeed, a statistically significant sampling of customers show an increase in productivity that is, on average, above 20%.

Justifications offered for increases in productivity include: finding and sharing information more efficiently, automating reports that previously were manually created, automated dashboards, achieving the same output with fewer human resources (a popular explanation—perhaps a sign of the economic times) and improved output from existing resources. Respondents quantified gains in terms of hours per week per user or by anecdotal percentage gains estimates based on the aforementioned justifications.

46% of customers report their businesses would stop (mission critical 20%) or be severely adversely impacted (highly valuable 26%) without MindTouch. Another 40% of respondents ranked it moderately valuable. This was assessed on a scale of 1 to 5, where ratings ranged from not valuable, mildly value, moderately valuable, highly valuable and mission critical.

88% of customer respondents use MindTouch constantly (42%) or frequently (46%). Another 12% of customer respondents use it sometimes (9%) or rarely (3%). This was assessed on a scale of 1 to 5, where ratings ranged from never, rarely, sometimes, frequently and constantly.

Of the customers that evaluated alternative enterprise collaboration platforms, the top competitors considered where Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, IBM Lotus and Open Text ECM Suite. In that order, with SharePoint, by far, taking the lead in competitive platforms considered.

There was a lot of valuable information gathered from our user and customer research. While it was overwhelmingly positive some of the most useful information was constructive feedback about places to improve; such as more comprehensive documentation. Thank you all for taking the time to participate.

Learn more how MindTouch is delivering value to our customers by reading the Forrester Wave: Collaboration Platforms report.