Colayer experience

I made friends with two great folks yesterday. Markus Hegi (Founder) and Shadab Lari of Colayer Web Conversations.

My normal Web App scouting exercises have one basic premise - to facilitate productivity enhancement while consistently reducing operating costs for my clients (I am a fan of anything that kills costs for my clients). This leads me to several new web apps, and this week it was Colayer. Besides saving costs, it clearly stood out in terms of its utility and functionalities. In essence, I liked the simple, easy-to-use (on demand) feature that renders a powerful virtual organization. It also lets you scan the latest and the most recent events within the virtual enterprise on a e-newspaper and colloaborate across workgroups within micro communities. It was just a friendly getting-to-know that got me absorbed into a wonderful Web App these folks have put together.

It’s a Software for Intra and Extra-nets to model companies and organizations. Every department, every team and project gets a virtual workplace. The layers have been stacked up as Times (Company Newspaper), Comty (Workplaces) amongst several others as are in the making.

A company which got founded in 2004 (with under $ 0.5 m initial investment), having a developer strength of about 40 as of now, have come a long way in solving real life problem for companies in the Life Sciences and Technology R&D space by eliminating the pain points arising from Loss of Context (Fragmentation), Spam issues and inconsistency in communication.

No wonder it already has Eli Lilly, Mednetwork, Medix, Innovationwell.net, eCheminfo as some of its major clients from Europe, aside of numerous others brought in by its European Partners.

We spent a couple of hours over lunch when we discussed its potential for Indian pharma and Life Sciences market. I wouldn’t be surprised if Indian drug research organizations talk to Colayer en masse with its potency and feature richness that is sure to augment research efforts with near zero time loss on account of its in-built six sigma like prowess. Indian companies like their European counterparts are known to eschew transparency, but Colayer takes care of the need for confidentiality as well. [Markus is a Swiss national and knows more than a thing or two about need for secrecy emphasised by the Banks in his country]. I wish them well and a little more aggro on sales front - my supports are assured as always. I can see a great value creation potential for all its stakeholders if Colayer gets its act together, but fast.

I would safely recommend it to my clients in R&D space, knowledge driven enterprise and distributed organizations. What the heck – it’s available on demand, requires no software to be installed (that messes with your legacy systems), saves you a fortune in terms of telecons and physical seminars / meetings, preserves your need for privacy and confidentiality even as you feel a need for transparency amongst the select group of people working towards the same goal and, and, and….has a “pay-as-you-go” delivery model…

My advise to R&D heads and CTOs of pharma companies – try it out !

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