REDWOOD CITY, CA — (Marketwired) — 10/15/13 — , the pioneer and market leader in gamification, announced today that the company will be participating in from October 22-24 at The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas along with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). Bunchball and HDS will be presenting on how leading companies can effectively leverage gamification to create an environment for open collaboration and new revenue opportunities. Bunchball will be co-leading a workshop with Jive on Wednesday, October 23 from 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. PT teaching participants how to take gamification environments and challenges to the next level for advanced users. Immediately following the workshop from 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m., Hitachi Data Systems- James Carter and Lauren Klein will be presenting a session titled, “.”

In anticipation of the show, Bunchball Founder Rajat Paharia met with HDS-s Vice President and Chief Engineer, Michael Hay, to discuss the key issues and challenges on the minds of business leaders tasked with improving organizational collaboration and engagement.

What we-re hearing from executives around the world is that they want to move their companies to the next stage of operational excellence. They are asking questions about how they can contribute to their organizations in a new way, whether that is through new technologies, such as gamification, or using big data to get new insights and make better business decisions. Across the board, these leaders are looking for technologies to create open innovation, leverage data intelligence, solve problems and generate new revenue.

Big data is transforming business across many use cases, and is enormously important to enterprise innovation. At Bunchball, we are particularly interested in how big data on user activity marries with gamification to inspire employee and customer loyalty. Almost everything people do today is mediated by technology, turning employees into walking data generators who are throwing off huge amounts of information. Smart companies realize they can take this data and use it to drive better employee performance. Consumer companies such as Amazon and Netflix have been using customer data to create personalized experiences for years, but only recently has the enterprise begun to leverage the valuable data employees generate all day.

When companies combine that data with the latest understanding of what motivates people and then add goals, rewards, fast feedback and a community in which to compete, collaborate and share, they motivate better performance. That is the benefit of gamification. Most companies have eked out the last bits of operational efficiency from their business, leaving their people as the sole remaining source of new revenue and income. By leveraging big data and gamification, companies can inspire a more productive and innovative workforce. This is especially exciting because we are going to throw off and receive increasingly more data in the future, creating new possibilities for data-driven motivation. And the companies who listen to this data will win, and the ones who don-t will lose.

Technology is a catalyst for developing new revenue streams for companies. At HDS, as part of our “Innovate with Information” campaign, we are using social networks powered by Jive to inspire collaboration and co-creation with our global community of customers and partners. HDS now offers 24×7, open peer-to-peer dialog among partners, customers and HDS. By unleashing the creative spirit of individuals through these social forums for open innovation, companies can create a machine for furthering innovation.

Essential to this process is gamification, which keeps users engaged and active. The key to a successful collaboration community is interaction between users, and through rewards, missions, and motivation gamification ensures that we develop lasting vital engagement.

Often, new technologies suffer from a lack of adoption or utilization due to a lack of understanding or resistance to change. It is primarily this lack of human motivation that prevents novel technologies from gaining critical velocity in the enterprise. This can be solved quite easily by ensuring a motivation engine that showcases value is in place. By driving sustained collaboration and participation among employees and providing incentives to create quality content, the new technology becomes a valuable experience and tool. Gamification can also be used as a “reputation engine” to help power this engagement and quality contribution.

Since the HDS Community platform launched in June, participation has increased by 10 percent every week, and Bunchball-s motivation engine has been essential in driving this engagement. At the same time, gamification has helped us quickly identify users who are curators and creators of content and impactful to our community and enabled us to encourage and leverage this influence. And by co-planning with a transparent peer-to-peer community, we-re able to establish a culture of open innovation. Capturing intellectual assets is increasingly imperative to companies in this new world economy, and gamification is a vital ingredient in encouraging constructive conversation in these social communities to generate valuable intellectual capital.

Booth G2 at JiveWorld13
Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball enables organizations to improve business performance throughout their ecosystem by creating highly active and loyal customers, employees, and partners. Bunchball-s comprehensive suite of innovative cloud-based solutions empowers companies to engage and motivate, leading to improved employee productivity, customer loyalty, audience engagement, and ROI. Bunchball-s world-class customers include Adobe, HP, Cisco, MTV, Comcast, LiveOps, VMware and Hasbro. Based in Silicon Valley, Bunchball-s investors include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. For more information, visit , our blog at , or follow .

For Bunchball:
Briana Marshall
Bateman Group
(415) 503-1818
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