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Huddle has stretched enterprise collaboration boundaries with the launch of its Connected Desktop, virtualising the desktop and running it in the cloud.
As CEO Alastair Mitchell explained, the release aims to break users away from local storage, corporate networks and VPN’s. With the ‘cloud as the computer’ all that’s needed is a web-capable client and a thin layer of productivity applications to connect to secure cloud storage. (Huddle meets government security requirements such as IL2 in the UK, which is one reason why it is widely used in government departments.) Integration between Huddle and desktop applications means users can collaborate, edit and save files via their desktop applications directly into Huddle’s cloud, where they can be accessed from anywhere and any device. Among a host of neat capabilities are: support for Mac and Windows, integration with Outlook, and a dashboard that handles documents as well as feeds and uses the Huddle recommendation engine to push relevant content onto the dashboard, as well as presenting the usual activity streams.
Cutting ties with a physical environment is bold (although there is still support for local storage if needed) but moves enterprise cloud collaboration forward, while playing to the fast moving mobile and BYOD trends and the search for the next generation productivity-boosting ‘desktop’. It also puts Huddle ahead in the enterprise cloud content collaboration stakes against Jive, Microsoft SharePoint and more consumer-oriented but rising competition such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
We are not convinced many end user organisations are ready for ‘cloud-only’ as yet but Huddle does bring enterprise-class capability to a cloud space dominated by consumer-based offerings. If it can develop the link between on-premise applications and cloud collaboration, that will help with the SaaS enterprise back office ‘make or break’ question we keep returning to (see here) and the social enterprise adoption problem (see here).