Aussie channel veteran launches rival to LinkedIn

A veteran of the Aussie channel has launched a social-business networking platform that he hopes will reach one million users and perhaps even rival LinkedIn.

ChannelPace co-founder Greg Furlong's industry credentials include senior roles at IBM, Lenovo and Network Neighborhood, among channel manager roles at Acer, Lexmark and Toshiba.

ChannelPace officially launched in 56 countries in September, after a year of development, beta testing and piloting.

The platform was co-founded by Larry Lewis, a 20-year veteran of the banking sector who started coding on punch cards in 1973.

ChannelPace combines contact management, business networking, company CRM and social communication on one platform – and was driven by Furlong's "frustration" with the slow uptake of CRM systems and "the general difficulties faced in having access to accurate and contextual information".

"Today, in my opinion, it is even more difficult, as most of us have our network of contacts spread across our phone, email client, business networking sites and CRM systems. This has actually made having access to accurate information even harder," he told CRN.

[Discussion: Has LinkedIn ever led to business opportunities for you?]

The tagline for ChannelPace is 'Your Social and Crowd-Sourced Business Relationship System' – by overlaying a user's personal contacts with 'crowd-sourced' records uploaded by other users, it seeks to avoid problems with out-of-date or duplicate users that plague LinkedIn.

It also attempts to avoid the problems of under-engagement seen with CRM systems.

Furlong said that despite CRM being worth $20 billion a year, it is "the emperor's new clothes".

"CRM has been around for decades, but there are some basic issues that have never gone away or been solved. These issues include getting people within a company to actually use it, accuracy and confidence in the information, and the actual design of CRM systems.

"Traditional CRM and ChannelPace differ at a very basic level. CRM is built on the premise that the company owns the contacts; ChannelPace is built from the ground up recognising that the individuals own their contacts. This is a very basic, but extremely disruptive and powerful point of difference," said Furlong.

Another obvious parallel is LinkedIn; Furlong said he had been working on the ChannelPace idea since before LinkedIn launched.

"I must admit to holding my breath as I thought they were going to implement something similar to ChannelPace, but they didn’t".

He pointed to some key differences between ChannelPace and LinkedIn.

"One of the most annoying things to me about LinkedIn is that there is no way to have any confidence that when a person says they are at 'XZY Company', they actually are."

ChannelPace avoids this through crowd-sourcing: if a user hasn’t logged in for 30 days, the system automatically switches to crowd-sourced information, which is more likely to be updated.

"All people associated with that contact, and people in their company, are now able to keep the information updated or even flag the person as having left the company.

"In this way, the system can provide an indication of the likelihood of a contact still being at the company they say they are at," said Furlong.

[Related: LinkedIn allegedly 'hacks' user emails]