Big announcements coming out of DrupalCon, the annual conference for the open source platform Drupal, is that Buzzr, our very powerful but easy website building platform, is now available to the public. We launched the consumer edition in beta — a self-service, build your own site tool. And we officially announced the release of Buzzr Enterprise Edition – -a white label, multi-site tool for organizations to empower ordinary users to create social publishing websites. B.E.E. has been in beta for several months, with several clients.
Here’s the press release:
Buzzr.com, a partnership with Drupal powerhouse Lullabot, today announced the official launch of Buzzr Enterprise Edition, a turn-key multi-site white label solution for organizations that need to rapidly and cost-effectively create and maintain many robust websites or microsites.
Buzzr also debuted the beta launch of its Consumer Edition, a self-service platform. Buzzr is fully hosted and features an exceptionally friendly drag and drop interface, as a layer over Drupal, the powerful open source social publishing platform favored by hundreds of thousands of developers, yet previously out of reach for most ordinary users. One thousand beta accounts will be given out during DrupalCon, a three-day international conference that kicked off today in San Francisco. Trial accounts can be requested at Buzzr.com.
A national sales force will be marketing the Enterprise Edition. The white label platform is initially covering five sectors: non-profits, higher education, media/entertainment, government and consumer goods/services. Sales offices have been opened in the Chicago, San Francisco and New York markets.
“Buzzr can save organizations months of time getting multi-sites to market and can shave hundreds of thousands of dollars off of development and maintenance costs.” said Buzzr CEO Edward Sussman. “Many companies and organizations maintain dozens of websites without any centralized platform. Buzzr is not only a more cost effective alternative, it can also create websites of much higher quality than ad hoc builds, or websites built with less robust blogging platforms.”
Buzzr enables ordinary users, without Drupal training, to create and run a websites that feature critical Drupal features such as custom content types (such as a restaurant review form), flexible views of content (such as restaurant review forms organized by five star ratings) and fine grained user permissions. Scores of social features are available as standard out-of-the-box, or as Drupal plug ins.
“Buzzr is Drupal made easy,” said Liza Kindred, Business Manager of Lullabot and president of Buzzr. “In our experience, many organizations wish they could better empower their day-to-day site managers and Buzzr allows this. We hope to allow this less technical audience enjoy many of the incredible benefits of Drupal.” Lullabot clients have ranged from Sony Artists, to The Economist, to the Grammys. The Lullabot team includes the co-lead of the next release of Drupal, the head of the Drupal documentation team, the maintainer of one of the two most critical Drupal modules, and the authors of Understanding Drupal by O’Reilly Press.
Even though the user interface is highly streamlined for ordinary users, the Drupal “under the hood” is still accessible to software engineers who might wish to add or modify Buzzr’s out of-the-box features. This allows clients to tap into the Drupal’s 5,000 add-on modules. Buzzr will provide code review and continuing support services for clients with their own technical teams, and can also provide customization services through its Buzzr Partner network. Buzzr also integrates website performance and scaling into its hosted platform.
TheGiftCardCafe.com, a pilot white label client, uses the platform to upsell websites its thousands of day spa and beauty salon customers. “Buzzr turned out to be the perfect solution for offering full featured websites to our clients,” said Carl Tuinstra, CEO of TheGiftCardCafe.com “We needed a system that allowed us to rapidly build sites but with enough flexibility to meet a wide variety of business needs. Out of all the “website builder” systems we have tried no other comes close to the features and flexibility.”
Buzzr announced the appointment of Chris Sayre and Chuck Simmons as Vice President of Enterprise Sales. Sayre is a 15-year veteran of software sales. He previously served as senior account executive at Northrop Grumman, an account executive at AT&T, and Director of Business Development at SaaS platform vendor Corent Technology.
“I was attracted to Buzzr because of the large market for organizations that need a lot of websites, yet want to migrate away from static brochure-like websites to more dynamic websites,” said Sayre. Sayre will be focused on the non-profit and higher education markets.
Buzzr will be represented on the west coast, especially for the entertainment and technology sectors, by Communicate.io, a San Francisco based sales and marketing firm.
Sales of the Buzzr platform will primarily be led by Peter Karnig, co-founder and former director of Business Development for Five Across, as well as the current CEO of Grabbit.net. Communicate.io CEO Lisa Padilla (who has worked with Apple, Intuit, HP and others) and partner Fred Davis (a founding team member of Wired, CNET and Ask Jeeves) will also assist in sales and marketing. The team plans to offer some clients an integrated offer of Buzzr and Grabbit, a social media aggregator tied to a social network.
East Coast sales, especially for the media, will be led by Edward Sussman, the CEO of Buzzr and former Executive Vice President of Mansueto Ventures (Inc. and Fast Company magazines). The office is in New York City.
Instructional videos about the front end of Buzzr can be found at http://buzzr.com/how-to-videos . Buzzr today announced a limited time trial offer of $99 a month for up to 5 sites, a $99 one-time fee for installation and $99 for a one-hour monthly support contact. Pricing is incremental based on usage, starting at $30 per month, per site, and saves organizations from committing to leasing servers before they know how widespread their adoption will be. Monthly site fees can drop to as low as $14 a site for large organizations.
Buzzr is a member of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University Incubator, supported by the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
“It is great for the reputation and image of our Varick Street incubator to have a tenant with Buzzr’s market presence and technical knowledge,” said Bruce Niswander, director of the NYU/Poly Incubator. “The nearly universal need for the simplified creation and maintenance of promotional web sites makes Buzzr’s product attractive for use by virtually every resident tenant looking to enhance the commercial impact of their on-line image.”
Contact:
Sales:
1-877-77BUZZR (772-8997)
Chris@Buzzr.com (Non-profits and Higher Education, and the Midwest)
Peter@Buzzr.com (Entertainment, Technology Companies, and the West Coast)
Ed@Buzzr.com (Media and the East Coast)
sales@buzzr.com (General sales information)
Media and General Inquiries
Ed Sussman
Ed@Buzzr.com
or call, 1-877-77BUZZR (772-8997)
