InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, is to give each of their 1 million customers an account with Huddle, the UK startup which has built a suite of social collaboration applications. – which were good enough to make it the only non-US partner for LinkedIn recently, alongside the likes of Amazon and Google. Huddle is still running on a $4 million Series A round from 2007 from Eden Ventures, but revenues are coming in at the same time.
InterCall conferencing customers can now schedule phone and web meetings in Huddle and share dial-in details, documents and meeting minutes. In addition, they will benefit from Huddle’s full range of project management and collaboration tools including discussions, whiteboards, tasks and document versioning and audit trail. The deal is a big one for Huddle – InterCall has around 30-40,000 new businesses joining them every month.
It’s interesting to note that Scott Etzler, InterCall’s president says “Many of our customers are already familiar with Huddle from LinkedIn and Facebook.” That indicates thay Huddle is shaping up to be a truly internationally recognised startup – something that doesn’t happen often enough in the UK. Alastair Mitchell, Huddle co-founder and CEO, says the deal is a natural fit and “realises our vision of end-to-end collaboration and social networking for business, in one place.”
Huddle’s main advantage is that teams can collaborate in a secure, VPN-like environment from any computer allowing them to avoid FTP servers and eliminate USBs and CDs. Customers now include Boots, P&G, Barclaycard and UNICEF and a number of UK and US government departments.
30 – 40,000 new businesses every month? That is a lot but understandable given the high-price enterprise has to pay to setup their own collaboration and conferencing space.
I just don’t know how deep the feature set of this service compared to implementing Microsoft SharePoint, Office Communicator, infrastructure setup.
But nonetheless, in this economic crisis, Huddle’s service puts them at a very competitive position.
More details in our interview with Product Director and co-founder of Huddle carried out yesterday pre-announcement at http://thenextweb.com/2009/02/11/huddle-go-global-with-intercall-partnership/
The web collaboration arena is starting to get more promising for small start-ups. Microsoft is not actively promoting Live Meeting, just bundling it up and offering it for free if you buy any of their software. WebEx was adquired by Cisco, and now Cisco offers a stand-alone web conferencing (powered by WebEx) and an integrated phone/web meeting solution that is hardware based (MeetingPlace, with the web conferencing portion powered by Adobe)
So, the main 2 players are not focused enough. Perfect playground for small start-ups to capture market share…if they become agressive and creative.
Microsoft’s alternative will get destroyed by the service from Huddle
I was with huddle.net at the inception, helping with their sales and marketing. I knew something big was coming having spoken with Ali, but did not realise this big. Congrats Ali, Andy, Jon and the rest of the team at huddle. Looks like you guys are moving away from the startup space now, which is great news. Congrats.
Social networking aggregation and collaboration is (I presume) still limited to individual consumer arena… but I guess theres a lot to do on the corporate front.
Companies like LinkedIn, Yammer are pushing the crowd to that direction.
thanks you..
Go go hurdle. Beat all your competitors!