There are a number of competing startups and big businesses with their sights set on the same enterprise-class audience, but Mitchell says the company's biggest competitor is e-mail.
"Huddle competes with traditional enterprise content management and collaboration solutions, such as Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Connections and Cisco, at one end of the scale and prosumer web productivity tools on the other. These include the likes of Box.net and Basecamp. But we actually view e-mail as our biggest competitor," explains Mitchell.
The reason being that business users gravitate toward e-mail as their primary communication tool. "But e-mail is a terrible collaboration tool ... You get content clogging up people’s inboxes and no one has visibility of the final versions of documents. You end up with chaos," says Mitchell.
It follows, then, that Huddle's primary purpose is to get rid of the chaos by providing collaboration tools for a variety of project and communication-related tasks. "Huddle is like Box.net plus Basecamp for adults. People grow out of these prosumer web products and turn to Huddle because we have the enterprise-grade feature set, support and security measures required by organizations," hey says.
Room for More Growth?
Although we couldn't get Huddle to go on the record with official stats on users and revenue, the startup did share that it has hundreds of thousands of users and that both areas are seeing 300% growth. To sustain this upward trend, Mitchell shares that the company is focused on four areas: mobile, integration with enterprise systems, multi-language support and integration with third-party platforms.
Huddle is already aggressively working on each of these goals. On the mobile front, Huddle makes applications for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry. "With more and more devices being launched, mobile will continue to be of importance for us," says Mitchell.
Huddle also designs to be complementary to the work tools that enterprise staffers are already using -- SharePoint and Office products, for instance. "We understand that many enterprises have already invested a lot of time, money and effort into rolling out traditional systems and, rather than being a ‘rip and replace’ service, Huddle works in parallel with these systems," Mitchell explains.
Third-party integrations are also key and bring Huddle's functionality to users of other platforms including Xobni, Linkedin and XING. Plus, "more great platform integrations are yet to come," Mitchell tells Mashable.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Ed Yourdon
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