We did a market survey. We pulled up five or six different companies. We looked at Planbox and Planview Spigit. I can't remember the some of the names of the other ones, but we had five or six companies that we evaluated, and Planbox was Spigit's strong top contender. We had them all come in and do a demo. We talked to each one of them. We did a pros and cons of each, then selected Spigit at the end of the day.

I remember at the time that we selected Spigit for the predictions analysis part of the tool, which determines costs and value. However, we haven't used that feature and probably won't use that within Spigit, which is funny at the end of the day.

We did a pretty big search among different solutions. We have probably looked at a half-dozen or so of the large players in this space that have similar offerings. 

Our evaluation was based on price on, customer support, and quality of service. We felt, and still do feel, that Spigit is the clear leader in the crowdsource ideation space. It is a leader within our industry for energy and utilities in particular. We have a lot of peers who are using it very effectively. We feel that we benefit from the community of Spigit users who are very cooperative and engage frequently. We've been very pleased with it and feel that the value that we get is excellent and that they are very competitive among their competitors. Spigit continues to be the gold standard in our eyes.

We just implemented Spigit. We didn't even consider other vendors.

I don't even remember their name. It was so long ago, like three years. We only had one conversation with them.

We used BrightIdea, who is a competitor of Spigit.

We did research and considered Imaginatik, but chose Spigit. With Spigit, there is more automation within the challenge. The crowd can help identify better ideas. There is less manual input in order to help select winners. Spigit does a nice job of enabling the platform to identify the best ideas.

We chose Spigit because when using it ideas naturally progress. Also, when you compare one company versus another, Spigit was a bit larger and seemed more stable.

The last market evaluation I did included more than 10 solutions, in-depth, including demos of all of the systems and meeting multiple times with their sales teams and product people. In the past, I've used Brightidea as well as IdeaScale, and we also have a homegrown platform that we built out of SharePoint.

A few years ago, Spigit was something of a market leader, but there have been concerns at the companies where I have used Spigit due to the fact that Planview has moved to being a PPM, a project and portfolio management company. Often in our meetings with them, they're trying to sell us other products to supposedly maximize our Spigit solution or our idea management. I've seen their roadmap, I've seen that they're doing an overhaul. Apparently, they do have something coming out in the near future as an enhancement to Spigit, but over the last three or four years it has been pretty stagnant.

And if they're going to improve their platform, they should try to stick to a timeline. The timeline they gave us for the rollouts to improve Spigit is almost a year late now. They are falling behind a lot of the competitors out there when it comes to improving the idea management platform. If that platform is not where they want to focus, or where they're making their money, I can understand that. But in the idea management space, they are definitely not the number-one platform anymore.

From a partnership perspective, it seems that Planview is not as open to suggestions, whereas other companies I know not only look for customers for feedback but they'll have an open challenge for their customers to submit ideas. And they actually take those ideas and incorporate them into their products, often on a quarterly basis. We've mentioned a few improvements that could be made to Spigit and the response has been, "Oh, well, great. Why don't you buy our other product?" They seem to take the focus away from Spigit and try to move other products from Planview.