Elium (previously Knowledge Plaza), the pioneering enterprise social network dedicated to Social Knowledge Management, already well-established in France and Belgium is expanding its markets by acquiring the Swiss company HyperWeek.

The Swiss market: a market full of potential

Already well-established in France and Belgium, elium’s integration of Hyperweek, opens the door to the Swiss market. A real opportunity with thousands of knowledge-based companies looking for structured solutions to enhance human capital using techniques well beyond simple file sharing: sustainable sharing of knowledge.
While Switzerland is famous for its banks, NGOs, watches, sports federations and major pharmaceutical companies, it is also becoming known for innovation in biotech, meditech, pharma, cleantech and industrial sectors.
Based in Geneva, Hyperweek is active in corporate social networks. Omega, the Swiss Touring Club, Nestlé Switzerland and Montreux Jazz – to mention only a few – have successfully deployed their platform.

Beyond the commercial aspects, skill building

“This acquisition allows us to gain a foothold in Switzerland, a market that has many industries where knowledge management is an important issue,” said Antoine Perdaens, CEO of elium. “HyperWeek is more focused on content delivery with significant community outreach, while elium is built for projects including a knowledge management dimension.” By combining the two solutions, elium is well positioned for new project developments around Intranet 2.0.
This acquisition also enables elium to expand its team. In particular, Raphael Briner, CEO of HyperWeek takes over marketing and the elium user experience. The social experience and vision of HyperWeek will be a major contributor to elium’s on-going success. In particular by addressing the sometimes conflicting project challenges of meeting the business objectives while ensuring the adoption by the majority of employees.
The opinion of Raphael Briner is clear. “A true knowledge platform must cover both informal and structured sharing, depending on the context and the specific needs of the project. There are thousands of possibilities to create a middle road between an enterprise social network and a planning tool” And his decision was immediate. “After an initial telephone call, Antoine came to Geneva to present his solution. It only took me a few minutes to be fully convinced. Exactly the architecture I had dreamed of!”.

One actor, two solutions

Conceived in 2007 as was Knowledge Plaza (now elium), the HyperWeek platform has been used primarily for the sharing of rich media content (pictures / videos) where managing access rights was not a major issue, but focusing instead on editorial capabilities and providing a social environment. For example, the notrehistoire.ch project has collected more than 40,000 media items structured by group, date and geo-location. Its success has been recognized by various international awards.
Some customers, mostly those offering platforms for public access (from Google or Bing) will continue to experience the evolution of HyperWeek. The brand and its product will remain active at hyperweek.net, and remain focused on open editorialized networks.
While the customers of elium, can only welcome the new features that are being announced after the holiday season: improved compatibility with major cloud technologies (Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox and even SharePoint protocol support), improved presentation with real-time display changes, redesign of spaces and profiles.

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