startupmania

Tamir Geffen, CEO and founder of Israeli start-up GoMidjets, has won a the IBM Beacon Award, a prestigious, international award, which was given to him in light of his significant and creative contribution to the DeveloperWorks network, IBM’s professional and developer network.

GoMidjets develops plug-ins for application development tools in the Rational family, and works with a distinct marketing model of reaching key personnel through social media networks in order to expand its install base. GoMidjets’ plug-ins offer simplicity, process automation and an application of recommended workflows by IBM.

The IBM Beacon Awards are given every year to a select group of executives and development companies around the world, as gratitude for showing initiative and excellence in developing products based on IBM tools and services. The winners are selected by leading members of the professional press, market analysts and IBM executives.

Among GoMidjets’ clients and users are large organizations and companies who employ a wide range of development groups. Reaching these technical personnel and executives through traditional marketing channels is considered a pretty rough task. GoMidjets, on the other hand, has managed to register thousands of downloads from countless companies all across the world, including all sects – from government and military organizations, federal authorities as well as software and application companies such as Comverse, ST MicroElectronics, Thales, Oracle Motorola and others.

“The company was founded out of social media,” says Geffen. “Two years ago I started a professional blog as a means of sharing my knowledge and connect with other professionals in the field. One day, I developed a small product which I shared freely on my blog and was surprised at the number of downloads, from all across the world, without any added form of publicity.”

The connection between GoMidjets and IBM is run through IBM Israel’s GTU, the unit in charge of managing the contact between IBM and the software houses, start-ups and the local development community as well as integrating Israeli technologies in the product basked which IBM offers to clients around the world.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum