Are LinkedIn chasing the enterprise market?

As a social network for professionals, LinkedIn is hard to beat.  They provide some invaluable tools to allow professionals to network with one another.  Since their foundation over a decade ago however, a raft of tools have developed to allow professionals to network and collaborate inside their companies.

It seems that LinkedIn would like a piece of that pie.  Chief Executive Jeff Weiner told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference this week that the company needs to think about creating private sharing tools that work behind corporate firewalls.

Weiner went on to say that the company are testing a private sharing option internally.  This will work behind corporate firewalls and allow corporate employees to share content privately amongst themselves.

On its own this is of limited value, as of course modern social intranets do much more than merely allow users to share content amongst themselves.  They do have the kind of profile related information that is hard to replicate on all but the most engaged of intranet communities however.

This isn't the first time that Weiner has hinted at entering the enterprise space.

"We're focused on creating value by helping [enterprises] transform the way they hire, market, and sell," he said on LinkedIn's fourth-quarter earnings call, where he stressed that the sales piece was of particular interest. "The core value proposition there is enabling companies to eliminate cold calls in favor of warm prospects."

At the moment they remain some way short of offering a really competitive product in this space, but they're certainly one to look out for.