The first thing you'll notice during a conversation with Rightpoint co-founders Ross Freedman and Brad Schneider is the ease with which they amplify each other's thoughts.

"Everyone talks about the entrepreneurial experience," Schneider said. "We're equally interested in 'intrapreneurship,' activity across the organization. We wanted to start something from nothing."

From their first encounter during their first week as college freshmen, the two have been intrigued with the role that information technology plays in supporting—and often redefining—business processes.

One of Rightpoint's fastest growing business practices centers on improving user experience, aka the ease with which non-technical workers can engage with collaboration tools and workflow software applications. Often, developers and agencies wind up developing these solutions with very little real-world feedback. Rightpoint approaches this differently.

The company has begun to turn what it has learned along the way into a suite of prepackaged software applications, starting with FeedCast, launched in late August. The software monitors and shares content posted on private corporate social networks enabled by the Microsoft Yammer platform, based on topics of interest to an employee.

"This is an natural progression of our work, one that allows our customers' employees to build on their familiarity with other social media tools and take a pulse on what's going on in their company," Freedman said. It appears to be working.

After earning their chops at much larger high-tech companies, Freedman and Schneider teamed in 2007 to create their Chicago-based firm. This year, the solution provider cracked the exclusive CRN Solution Provider 500 ranking for the first time (at No. 490). It's approaching $30 million in annual revenue, 90 percent of it attributable to services. What's more, Rightpoint was named Microsoft's Central Region partner of the year and a finalist for the developer's national award for collaboration and content.

NEXT: Rethinking The Organization