Badgeville aims to make child's play out of software deployment

Badgeville is promising buyers of the new edition of its gamification software that it will be easy to integrate it with four popular enterprise social collaboration products.

Badgeville for Communities has been tuned for "plug and play" deployment with products from Jive Software, Lithium Technologies and Microsoft's SharePoint and Yammer, according to Badgeville CEO and President Jon Shalowitz.

The integration with the Jive, Lithium, SharePoint and Yammer products has been accomplished via pre-configured connectors and templates, and is focused on the collaboration tools' use in intranets, extranets, user discussion forums, customer support sites and the like.

Badgeville for Communities is an offshoot of the company's core software, which can "gamify" a wide variety of enterprise applications.

Companies buy the Badgeville software to add gamification features to enterprise software whose engagement they want to increase among end users, whether they are employees, partners or clients. Companies often find that intranets/extranets, enterprise social networking suites and ERP/CRM applications are prone to being ignored by users.

The Badgeville software adds game mechanics to motivate individual users via things like missions and contests. Groups can be featured on leaderboards and win expert badges. And it also has social elements, like activity streams that display notifications about actions and achievements.

The core Badgeville software requires that developers dig in and integrate it on the front end and back end with the third-party application that the customer wants to have "gamified." But Badgeville for Communities is designed such that the integration process is much simpler and can be carried out by the Jive, SharePoint, Lithium and Yammer admins without having to engage in back-end coding, according to Shalowitz.

The company plans to extend the list of third-party apps that Badgeville integrates with in a pre-configured manner. "This is the first of many," he said.

This is a natural next step for Badgeville, which since its founding in 2010 has seen the gamification market mature, according to Shalowitz.

"Gamification is moving from a 'nice to have' to a 'must have'," he said. "So to make our product more mainstream and a core component of the enterprise software stack, we want to pre-build connectors and integrations to make its deployment as seamless as possible."

The Badgeville product is delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and its price starts at between $50,000 and $75,000.

Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.