Huddle Seeks To Displace Microsoft SharePoint For Cloud Collaboration

Cloud collaboration and content management player Huddle

The four-year-old Huddle, co-headquartered in San Francisco and London, offers cloud-based solutions to manage projects, share files and collaborate with other users inside of the company, securely. It offers tools online, on mobile devices, on desktops and via Microsoft Office applications. It also is available on major business social networks.

Huddle is looking to supplant legacy Microsoft SharePoint installations, and to get users to give cloud collaboration a whirl it is promising a refund if 100 percent adoption is not achieved in 90 days. Even the company's tagline is a shot at its chief competitor: "Simply: if SharePoint was built today, they would've built Huddle." Huddle claims uptime of 99.9 percent and the company said it typically achieves 90 percent adoption across businesses, compared to SharePoint's adoption rate of just 32 percent within the first three months of roll out.

"Customers who have deployed Huddle to replace or work alongside SharePoint tell us that Huddle's adoption rate is three times higher than Microsoft's," Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell said in a statement, adding "Unlike SharePoint, Huddle offers mobile access, simple external collaboration and deployment within hours -- all at 10 percent of SharePoint's total cost of ownership."

With the Huddle Adoption Guarantee for its cloud-based collaboration platform, Huddle is promising users their money back if an organization doesn't hit 100 percent user adoption in 90 days.

"One of the biggest concerns when deploying any new enterprise application is user adoption," Huddle said in an announcement for the Huddle Adoption Guarantee, which also claims that Huddle has eight times the adoption rate of its main rival SharePoint. Huddle added: "We are so confident in the successful take-up of Huddle within your user community that we offer a unique Adoption Guarantee."

According to Gartner, more than 40 percent of enterprises don't properly consider process and organization issues when installing an enterprise content management system, which can lead to lack of adoption. Huddle's Adoption Guarantee states "that within 90 days 100 percent of your initial user groups will be trained and using Huddle actively -- or we will refund a full three months subscription value."

"Adoption is key to the success of a new technology deployment. However, with the rise of the consumerization of IT and high expectations from the user community, it's not easily achievable for most …," Mitchell continued. "Today, we're putting our money where our mouth is and guarantee that our software will be a safe investment for any CIO or CTO considering deploying or upgrading their collaboration and content management systems."