Mzinga Names New CEO
Mzinga, a social intelligence solutions, services, and analytics company, has named Alan Nugent its new CEO. Nugent will shape Mzinga’s vision for social intelligence initiatives, guide its long-term technology vision, develop research & development strategies, and manage customer acquisition. The position was previous held by Barry Libert, chairman and co-founder of Mzinga, who stepped down.
Nugent’s appointment as CEO comes after he has worked with the company as a trusted advisor since April, and after being named the chief performance officer in the fall. He assisted the company on product integration.
Prior to joining Mzinga, Nugent served as executive vice president and chief technology officer at CA Technologies, where he worked on strategic technology and delivery of the entire CA product portfolio. He was also a senior vice president and chief technology officer at Novell, where he led the company into open source and identity-driven computing solutions. Nugent was senior vice president, chief technology officer and chief information officer at MunichRe/American Re, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Xerox, and chief technologist and software architect at BellSouth. Nugent began his career at HP.
Nugent describes his vision for Mzinga’s social intelligence initiatives as “a refinement of the company’s strategy.” He spoke of the growing relevance of advanced analytics, calling both real-time and time-based analysis “critical.”
“The simple truth is that we’ve developed or defined a social intelligence ecosystem and recognized that we are a small company,” Nugent says. “We are looking to be successful in a market with a lot of large enterprise customers. You have to come to them with a story, and the story has to more than some kind of benefit, ROI, or otherwise that they will get by implementing some social initiative. What we’re all about is talking to customers about the things that they need to do to make the social implementations effective, not just why they’re important.”
Nugent says many of the companies that Mzinga has worked with realize the need to be social, but often struggle with strategy. He envisions Mzinga as offering “the right kinds of human interventional services, whether that’s moderation or vibrancy.”
Nugent also takes note of the increasing importance of mobility, observing that, “The next generation of the workforce, and every generation from this point forward, will be highly mobile, not just because of device availability but because it’s cultural,” he says.
Mzinga is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., and supports more than 15,000 communities and 2.5 billion monthly page requests from 40 million visitors in 160 countries worldwide.