All of which sounds good, but a recent post over on ReadWrite bought up a valid point, the contention of Huddle CEO Alistair Mitchell that, over the next twelve months, organizational knowledge, will fracture. Mitchell’s reasoning lies in the very real trend for bottom-u adoption of cloud applications, and the corresponding burgeoning of the number of different tools being used across an organization. As he puts it:

When employees are storing stuff in the cloud, and using something like 15 different cloud storage tools to do it, their corporate knowledge, their brain, is destroyed

In the article, Brian Proffitt rightly points out that historically, data has been stored in one of two places – within on-premise servers or on employee’s local computers. So long as the organization had some decent enterprise search or document management in place – organizational knowledge was generally protected and accessible.

Peer inside a large enterprise today and it’s a fair bet that there will be organizational knowledge stored across a plethora of services – cloud storage offerings (DropBox, Google, Box, Huddle etc), point solutions (Project management, document collaboration) and applications of many different types. Proffitt suggests that these disparate systems create a large amount of time wastage:

On a day-to-day basis, workers themselves increasingly struggle with the problems of finding data. Where did I put that latest template for the expense report? My document folder? In the project folder? In Dropbox? Oh well, I’ll just email HR for another copy. Time wasted, again, and redundant effort from the worker and the people that have to help workers replace data they already have. Yes, this might take just five minutes, but how many times does this happen every day?

MyPOV – Bring on the Global Services

One of the recurring themes I’ve been articulating over the past few years is the opportunity for services that span a number of different applications. These can take many different forms – at an infrastructure levels it’s tools like RightScale and enStratus giving organizations a single view across multiple infrastructure assets. For developers, tools like Appsecute (disclosure – I’m an investor) allow them to tie together all the myriad of systems they use into one stream.

At an application level, social tools like Chatter and Yammer allow organizations to pull in content from different teams, locations and applications in order to create a “single pane of glass” at least at a social level. The same trend will rise with documents and institutional knowledge. Already companies like Huddle and Box are trying to solve this dilemma (Huddle through deep technologies which surface relevant content, Box by creating a document collaboration platform which spans an entire organization’s software tools). But discrete tools add to the problem, as Proffitt points out:

But here’s the rub: With the introduction of every new separate social, collaborative or storage service, the problem actually gets worse, because it sets up yet another location for data to live. Without a truly universal service-bridging search tool or the potential to integrate these services, the fracturing of the enterprise brain will only continue

I suspect that, over time, a number of vendors will begin to surface who deal with this information discovery problem without the being conflicted by attempting to also fulfill a specific application space. Both Huddle and Box for example are trying to be content collaboration tools, while at the same time tipping their hat at the cross-application problem. It’s hard to legitimately deliver a pan-application document solution when you’re also trying to be one of the many systems of record. Of course all these vendors are articulating this problem and rapidly telling enterprises that the ideal solution is to deploy their tool across the entire organization, but it feels that, for the time being at least, that isn’t a likely scenario.

Rather solutions that take a Google search appliance approach and apply it specifically to the discovery, archiving and accurate classification of organizational knowledge will be an interesting area of development over the next few years and, in solving that problem, the plethora of data sources and types we need to deal with on a day to day basis.

• BoxEmbed, an HTML5 framework that allows a kind of “Box inside” frame within other applications was launched (more on that here). An initial 10 partners joined the program with more to come
• BoxEdit was announced, a plugin that allows users to edit content directly without having to go through the roundtrip download-edit-upload process for files
• A partnership with SAP to integrate Afaria a mobile device management product, with Box
• More integration – including GoodData for administrator-level analysis of Box usage – more integrations on the way
• A partnership with ProoPoint for data loss prevention (DLP) services integrated with Box
• An improved search to make sense of the copious amounts of content modern workers face
• The previously announced rollout of twofactor authentication and more granular security scope

Box CEO Aaron Levie was quick to talk about the post-PC era and the massive growth of connected individuals who access their data either exclusively or partially via mobile phones and tablets. In Levie’s view, this fundamentally changes the software paradigm for enterprises and means that the hegemony of the integrated full-stack suite is no longer a sure thing.

At BoxWorks we heard from Mark Tonnesen of Electronic Arts – he told of EA’s gradual move to the cloud and their perspective that content collaboration is an appropriate first step. Tonnesen told of the tipping point that came for EA when internal business units became the champions for the more widespread rollout of Box throughout the organization. In some ways the pressures that forces EA to look at tools like Box are the very ones that Box is banking on to provide growth going forwards – EA needed to increase its ecosystem because they simply could not build every game for every demographic in every region. rather a wide ecosystem allows them to scale – and according to Tonnesen, cloud enables the ecosystem to thrive.

MyPOV

Box is remarkable in the fact that a company started by a couple of young college dropouts, focused on a consumer file-sharing tool has managed to pivot successful into an enterprise powerhouse. ne can’t understate the brilliance and copybook execution that Levie and co-founder Dylan Smith bring to the company. But clearly they have some brilliant advisers around them also. This is demonstrated by the fact that the Box executive team is a fascinating selection of individuals – half of whom have come from webscale consumer companies and the rest from more traditional enterprise software companies. This creates a product that has the sometimes conflicted attributes of having an empathy for users along with the requirements that large enterprise IT demands.

Box is doing a stellar job of building an impressive ecosystem around itself – the fact that it has got such varied players as NetSuite, Jive, Zendesk and SugarCRM to talk a consistent story of content collaboration within their own applications, but provided by box, speaks not only to the forcefulness of their vision but also to the real fear that the best of breed vendors feel about the elephant in the room, Salesforce. This really struck home when speaking to Box customers during the event who, while being real evangelists for the product and the company, admitted that had a fully functional content collaboration application existed in the Salesforce stable when they were doing their due diligence, their decision would more likely have favored the behemoth of the cloud industry. Box realized that and is moving fast to shore up its response to that threat – two key people who will deliver on that need are Chris Yeh, VP of Platform and Sam Schillace, VP of Engineering. Sam in particular is a coup for Box, Levie describes his hiring as a sever year project – not surprising since Schillace created Writely, the product which eventually became Google Docs.

Box has some breathing room, Salesforce pre-announced ChatterBox and it’s only due for release in 2013. The likelihood, given history, is that ChatterBox will be a fairly lightweight product initially. The question is whether a lightweight product from a full stack vendor outweighs a deeply functional offering from an ecosystem player. Time will tell on that one. At the same time there are other players, in particular Huddle who have credible, robust and compelling products to offer. Those other vendors however will find it hard, Box has roughly 10 times the funding of Huddle and this make it very difficult or Huddle to gain attention in the space – I’m picking a short to mid term trade sale of Huddle. Box meanwhile has far bigger sites – it truly wants to be one of the top-table vendors of this next cloud age.

There are no certainties in this industry – but Box has the ecosystem, the smarts, the funding and the leadership to deliver on its promise – it would be a ballsy man that betted heavily against that.

Huddle is an interesting company – it sits in a similar space as Box but has generated less Silicon Valley buzz – partly because the Huddle founders, Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin are British and hence stereotypically a little reserved (at least compared to the hyper-exuberant Box CEO Aaron Levie). While not being as flashy as the competition however, Huddle has quietly been building momentum – I wrote about their previous all-of-Government deal for the UK government, but outside of that Huddle boasts of serving over 100000 organizations including deployment within 80% of the Fortune 500 companies – some big names using Huddle for at least part of their operations includes Diageo, Kia Motors, Procter and Gamble, NASA, Sodexo and Unilever.

Interestingly enough, Huddle’s Series C is a huge $10M more than Box’s Series C. While these sorts of comparisons are, at least to an extent, some kind of Freudian penis envy game, it’s fair to say that the number, relative to Box’s number, is quite an achievement given the stronger awareness that Box has – at least in Silicon Valley. I surmise that this has something to do with Huddle’s success globally, including the high profile UK Government deal – these wins give VCs faith that Huddle’s proposition can scale geographically.

Huddle is trying to differentiate itself in the content collaboration landscape – a very busy place with both facebook and Google entering the market and joining Box, Dropbox, Syncplicity (recently acquired by EMC) and many others. Part of this differentiation comes from something I wrote about previously, their “intelligent file synchronization tool”, a tool that utilizes aggregate data from employee usage patterns to determine which files are most relevant to users and these files are fully synchronized between devices – the idea being to save bandwidth and precious storage on mobile devices and also to offer users a faster collaboration experience.

Content collaboration is a massively hot area – and already we’ve seen some M&A activity that will only increase over time. Both Box and Huddle are well places to provide a consistent and credible enterprise story in the space and they’re both building successful businesses. Box looks set to IPO in the next 18 months or so which will heat things up even more. As for Huddle, they’ll use this money to increase head count and continue building a customer base globally.

As the amount of data available increases however, there is a need to intelligently manage what data is available on different devices to ensure security, but more importantly appropriate fidelity for the context of the particular employee.

This is where a new development from content collaboration vendor Huddle comes in. Huddle Sync is being dubbed an “intelligent file synchronization tool”. Essentially it utilizes aggregate data from employee usage patterns to determine which files are most relevant to users and these files are fully synchronized between devices – the idea is to save bandwidth and precious storage on mobile devices and also to offer users a faster collaboration experience.

In making this move Huddle is shooting over the bows of two distinct groups;

1. Other business collaboration tools like SharePoint and Box.net whom it seeks to differentiate from with a smarter system that is tailored to individual use
2. Consumer synch tools like iCloud and others that don’t have the security and flexibility that enterprises demand

In a nod to the demands of enterprises, Huddle provides IT with full transparency of where data is stored, who has synced what files and full audit trails, it also has a remote wipe capability, so that should a device be lost or stolen, or an individual leave the company, data can be remotely deleted from the endpoint.

Huddle has some IP locked up in the intelligent sync offering – they weren’t prepared to go into too much detail but did tell me that;

the engine works uniquely for each user and will consider who you are and your permissions, the files you access and how often, who you collaborate with and how often you access their shared files, and much, much more in order to measure relevance. Then relevant files are automatically delivered to your Huddle-enabled devices so that you never have to manually locate and download them. And as time goes on, the engine learns from your workflow and becomes more accurate at delivering the most important content. Of course, if Huddle Sync didn’t anticipate the need for a file, you always have the ability to manually download it.

Even more interestingly, the tool has the ability to go beyond a users own files and be exposed to data that they didn’t even know existed. The example Huddle gave me went as follows;

if you’re working on a cancer research project and there is useful (but siloed) research data spread across branches of your organization, Huddle Sync locates those relevant files (which you may not even know existed) and delivers them to you

That’s a pretty compelling proposition, and it will be interesting to see how much traction the new feature gets once it comes into general availability.

In a world where new entrants are trying to break the near-hegemony that Microsoft SharePoint has in enterprise content management, the new generation of vendors is painfully aware that they are in a death race to build momentum. Revenue comes secondary to increasing the viral spread of their products in the expectation that whoever builds the best momentum is going to be an amazing money spinner and/or acquisition target.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to watch the initiative that these players take in order to get market share. Case in point today is the announcement from Huddle (more on them here) of their “Unlimited Enterprise” package which allows organizations to collaborate with people across their entire business ecosystem, consisting of internal teams as well as customers, partners, contractors and suppliers, for free.

This is a logical step when you consider that Huddle’s own customers display a massive amount of external sharing – they report that around 93% of their customers are using Huddle to collaborate not only within their own business but with external organizations also. This is a great functional area to target for two distinct reasons; As Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell says;

…the modern enterprise relies on a wide network of external organizations to achieve its goals. Yet, traditional collaboration services, like SharePoint, lock information and people in silos. They were designed in a pre-internet era with the purpose of keeping content inside the firewall and the outside world, out. Consequently, no one uses them

This might be over-stating it a little, but it’s fair to say that there is immense frustration from users of SharePoint, and it’s this frustration that Huddle and its competitors are attempting to use to their own advantage.

1. Traditional content management offerings are poor at external collaboration. As more and more organizations have an organic structure with loosely coupled project groups from both inside and outside the corporate walls, flexible external sharing becomes critical
2. As a viral tool, giving organizations the ability to trial Huddle for free while working on an external project is an awesome way to spread knowledge and pick up new customers. It’s a viral sales strategy exemplified.

The Unlimited Enterprise plan is a cut down version of the full application – lite users can view or download files and comment on documents, files, whiteboards and discussions. The package also includes unlimited workspaces and API access, advanced customization options, full mobile access, data export, AD Integration and global support.

Alongside the Unlimited plan, Huddle is reacting to the concerns they hear from CIOs about moving to cloud services, and is launching a 99.9 per cent Uptimemoney-back guarantee. They are guaranteeing three 9’s uptime including any downtime for their 13 annual product releases and maintenance. Uptime is absolutely a concern for CIOs, however I’m not convinced that three 9’s will do it for them – most CIOs I speak to have had “five nines” drummed into them over a number of years and, aside from the fact that many of them don’t actually equate those figures to the actual duration of outages – they’re nonetheless looking for a check box to tick.

CIOs are also rapidly getting to the point of realizing that SLAs are very blunt instruments. Huddle for example is making mileage out of telling people that rather than offering service credits with their uptime guarantee, they are offering financial compensation in the form of refunds of license fees rather than service credits. For a multi billion dollar organization that could conceivable lose many millions of dollars from unscheduled downtime, the refund of license fees, while a nice gesture and all, is pretty much meaningless.

Overall Huddle is working hard to keep apace with its more well-known rival, Box.net. While it’s fair to say that box has attracted more attention (and funding), Huddle is in the interesting position of tapping both a US and a European market – it’s this dual approach that is giving it more momentum than it would have otherwise and these two new announcements will only help with that.

• New social analytics software that integrates wikis, blogs, activity streams, email, calendaring, and flags relevant data for action
• The new IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is a cloud-based productivity suite allowing users to co-edit documents in real-time and is a clear response to Google Docs and Microsoft’s 365 Live products (in beta, due some time this year)
• New software that integrates social networking capabilities with enterprise content management as a response to both SharePoint and new platforms from box.net and Huddle
• Domino – a new messaging and collaboration software offering that aims to steal some of the thunder off Yammer and Salesforce Chatter

It’s a lot of news and a bunch of product announcements, only some of which are actually generally available yet. This is however IBM and the availability and quality of the offerings are somewhat secondary to the fact that IBM sales staff will now have an answer to the ongoing questions from enterprise customers about IBM’s response to compelling offerings from Yammer, Box, Google and a myriad of others.

In a statement more akin to the words of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Alistair Rennie, general manager of Social Business at IBM said that;

There is boundless opportunity for social business to transform how we connect people and processes, and increase the speed and flexibility of business. A successful social business can break down barriers to collaboration and put social networking in the context of everyday work, from the device or delivery vehicle of your choice, to improve productivity and speed decision-making

Music to enterprise ears, so long as the products actually deliver on the promise. And so long as those organizations haven’t already looked elsewhere to fulfill their requirements in these areas.

I’m particularly interested to hear more about IBM Docs, a “social document platform” and IBM’s strong move against both Office and Google docs. Hoping that integration across office productivity, content management and storage, provides added value for prospective customers, IBM has created the offering so that IBM Docs authors will be able to store and share documents in IBM’s own SmartCloud Engage, and gain visibility over the documents through IBM’s content management offerings.

It’s early days for IBM, and they enter a market that, while still full of opportunity, needs to see strong differentiation between different vendors. IBM will hope that it’s massive momentum and brand recognition will provide that differentiation – time will tell.

Reflecting on the recent BoxWorks conference that I was unfortunately not able to attend, Krish commented on Box’s increasing adoption by enterprise saying that;

I am convinced about the traction Box is getting in this space. Starting with companies like P&G to Six Flags, the companies were completely confident about trusting Box for their content management needs. From the talks given by Box enterprise customers and my own conversations with some of these players, it is pretty clear that Enterprise Mobility and Collaboration are two of driving factors behind their move to Box.

Krish pointed out hat, while this a great boost for Box itself, it’s more a validation that the entire concept of social sharing and collaboration is a valid one. That view gained further weight when Mark Hurd, in discussion with Sameer Patel during Oracle Open World agreed that enterprise customers are really interested in the entire collaboration space. And, if the success of Box is anything to go by, seemingly happy to look way from traditional vendors for this need. Interestingly enough Hurd indicated some news on the horizon with the statement that “I absolutely agree and stay tuned – there’s an announcement coming over the next 48 hours on collaboration” – I sense an acquisition in the air but more on that later.

Which takes me to another vendor, one that has gained far less attention than box.net, but one who, in their own way has been getting runs on the board. Founded in London, but now split between US and UK presence, Huddle is an organization that has had press recently for two reasons – firstly they secured an all-of-Government deal for the UK government that really is massive news (and would have been covered far wider had it been a US-centric deal). Secondly they made news when Google unfortunately picked the word “Huddle” to describe its impromptu Google+ chat feature.

Well after that little debacle cleared, Huddle have been busy gaining momentum where it matters, in the hearts of the followers of this space, and with the footprint to actually be able to deliver into enterprise. First up was Huddle taking a leaf from the Marc Benioff playbook. Benioff was well known, in the early days of salesforce, for using large technology conferences (generally ones run by his competitors) as opportunities to do some guerilla marketing. In this spirit Huddle contracted a marching band and football team to garner some attention at the SharePoint conference in LA this week. Offering SharePoint users and conference attendees a “Welcome to the True Cloud”.

While it’s easy to dismiss stunts like this as mere marketing campaigns, it is an important feature of building public perception that a company is a credible alternative to an incumbent – one only needs to look at the billboards and tee-shirts created by Box.net to see the value in that.

The important thing beyond perception however is execution, and timed to coincide with the lighter weight efforts, Huddle was crowing about he fact that it has just finished a record quarter and is on track to triple sales year-on-year. Some specific wins they’ve had this year include;

• The launch of the Huddle’s Adoption Guarantee
• The signing of Matt Wise who built sales at MessageLabs (sold to Symantec for $700m in 2008) to run corporate sales
• Figures jointly identified by Huddle and UK government reveal that replacing Microsoft SharePoint with Huddle could save more than £287 million
• Huddle became the first cloud-based collaboration service to launch a private version of its offering – Huddle IL3
• The company secured a high value ten year deal with FCO Services for Huddle IL3
• Huddle has recently signed deals with Unilever, Diageo, M&C Saatchi and the Belgian Ministry of Health

Now is the opportunity for players like Box and Huddle to really double down on investing to build market share – the figures coming from both camps show that this is in fact happening. As well as this Huddle has scored a coup, appointing the former MD of salesforce in UK and Ireland, Simon O’Kane  as the Huddle VP of Enterprise.

O’Kane’s job will be to make the excitement and attention that comes from guerilla marketing campaigns and tie that with the credibility that comes from the whole of Government deal hat Huddle did – this gives him a base rom which to really start having deep and meaningful discussions with enterprise CIOs about the realities of deploying Huddle. While on the face of it many would content it’s a simple prospect of making the decision and flipping a switch, the attention that we’ve seen Box.net give to he practicalities of enterprise deployment show it to be an incredibly complex and nuanced thing – and one that requires a real level of maturity around it.

While Huddle is happy to declare that;

Software as a Service (SaaS) has truly come of age and the security and uptime concerns that are the typical barriers to adoption are starting to be overcome.

The reality is somewhat different – seeing the approach that salesforce took to slowly easing its product into enterprise is confirmation of this fact. Huddle has a massive opportunity ahead of itself – they need to focus on a disciplined approach to profile building and sales execution, with that in hand, the sky’s the limit.

UTRU is a national, non-profit network of urban teacher programs – the kind of operation that is in place across every sector, every vertical, every group across the country. What do these sort of networks have in common? Lack of resource, lack of time and too much to do. Based on the medical residency model, UTRs provide prospective teachers with masters-level education as well as a year-long apprenticeship in a classroom so that they can gain hands-on experience. Originally set up in 2004 as an informal partnership between the nation’s existing UTR programs in Boston, Chicago and Metro Denver, UTRU is now setting the standards for urban teacher preparation nationwide. Expanding at a rate of four or five additional partnerships a year, UTRU was faced with the challenge of effectively communicating and disseminating information with its countrywide network. UTRU have just eight staff and escalating levels of inbound communications.

So why the cloud? According to Diana Hagans, Finance and Operations Manager, UTRU;

As the volume of partners grew, it became increasingly obvious that we needed to store our content in a central online environment and enable people to collaborate effectively. With a limited workforce, we needed a platform that was easy for our partners to navigate and find information for themselves. As our staff prepare to lead training, documents are uploaded into workspaces and meetings are scheduled. Gone are the days of 10 different document versions going back and forth via email. There has certainly been a significant reduction in the amount of time spent on the phone and sifting through inboxes!

The important point here isn’t which Cloud platform UTRU are using (sorry Huddle, you’re great, but there’s more of interest in this story). The real story here is that UTRU are using Cloud to achieve more, for less, with the help of the cloud.

I never tire of telling real-world stories about how the cloud is helping real organizations – if you have any good on-the-ground stories to tell, drop me a line.

So how do tools and process work within this organization? Recently Andy McLoughlin, CEO of Huddle, wrote an opinion piece for Forbes looking at this trend. He identified mobile as the trend that is bringing the death of the traditional company  to fruition – the perfect storm of near-ubiquitous connectivity along with mobile devices that can leverage cloud computing and a demand from workers for flexibility are all converging to make this vision real.

We often hear from hand-waving enterprise 2.0 advocates who tell about adoption of E20 tools within their workplace. Often however this adoption is a thin veneer that doesn?t extend significantly beyond the usual early adopter suspects. Independent digital agency AKQA is bucking this trend. It?s an interesting case study, not least because only the other day I wrote about PBworks special edition of its product targeting agencies.

AKQA is a large, geographically dispersed agency. It has 900 or so employees working across the globe in Europe, the US and APAC. Formerly they used a bunch of different point solutions, all tied up with email and an extranet. Understandably this led to people having to use a large number of disparate systems and issues round integration ? they were looking for a standard global platform that covered off all their collaboration requirements.

So? how does their new setup look?

• All client campaign material is stored in a central workspace accessible to anyone regardless of physical location
• The solution itself is hosted by a third party (SaaS) to ensure it is scalable and IT issues are abstracted away from AKQA
• It is integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, the directory system of choice for AKQA
• It?s multi language, cross platform and cross device

It really matters little which product AKQA happens to have deployed ? PBworks agency edition, Moxie (despite my poor review), Socialtext or many others. As someone commented on one of my posts recently:

I didn?t see why Facebook was so great until I tried it. I was happy with MySpace until then. Same with Google, I used Yahoo for years ? what did everyone mean by ?better??

And that?s the entire point with Enterprise 2.0. Despite all the hand waving from vendors keen to talk about their particular product, the real story is from end users who are utilizing these tools to enable new ways of working more efficiently. Robert Burns, Executive Director of Information Technology at AKQA puts it succinctly saying:

As a global creative agency, we assign multiple teams on a project regardless of which office they are based in. We treat our employees as a global talent pool. For example, in one campaign, the creative team could be based in Washington D.C. and the technology team in London. [a cloud solution] enables us to keep track of projects in real-time, view client feedback and clearly identify final proofs.

I asked Burns for some more specifics about the benefits they’ve seen from going down this route, the main benefit in the shift from an email-centric approach is that AKQA have created a reliable, one source solution for client interactions that has, in their words, equalled more efficiencies and reduced errors and miscommunication.

In terms of the changes that the approach has made to end users, Burns told me that:

We used to rely on multiple clients updating campaign documents on a daily basis and sharing them via email. This resulted in some missed elements and frustration as additional man hours were required to fix the issues.

So it?s a great success story, as I said the actually product that AKQA chose is very much secondary to the success of he deployment itself ? but in the interests of completeness it’s worth mentioning that Huddle was in fact the successful vendor in his case.