We provide content collaboration for the enterprise What does that mean? We help connect teams inside and outside businesses to get stuff done Share, work and discover valuable content across your business and with external teams Mobility, ubiquity, security
How qualified are we to talk about this? 100,000 businesses globally and we count more than 80% of UK central government as customers Huddle announced its inclusion on the G-Cloud Services Framework when it went live in February 2012 and is the most successful supplier on the Framework when measured by engagements In-Q-Tel participated in our C round to help bring secure cloud collaboration to the US government and defence agencies Last year, Huddle announced that it is developing a FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002) certified instance of its platform for US government agencies and organizations The technology is currently being developed for two IQT customer agencies, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). So how did we get here?
So how did we end up here? We spoke on the panel earlier today about how enterprise is sexy. Recurring revenues and big name clients are very cool. But we didn’t start targeting huge companies and governments. We started with small companies and teams in large businesses. We focused specifically on agencies and marketing functions – lots of file collaboration, lots of cross firewall action. Within a few months we were picked up by DCMS to sit alongside SharePoint for external collaboration (UEFA cup final) – went from there.
Networking. Old school networking, esp for gov. You need to build your network of contacts and gain an in-depth understanding of the pain points that the public sector experiences. Establish what causes public sector workers to stay awake at night – or at least troubles them on a daily basis. Can you help them solve that problem? For Huddle, we realised early on that numerous people within the public sector where frustrated with the fact that they couldn’t work effectively either cross-department or cross-firewalls. While there was pressure to move forward with shared services and effective joined-up government initiatives, making them a reality was a real challenge due to security restrictions and technology requirements. Huddle solves this problem. For enterprises and government, the old adage that people buy from people definitely holds true. Relationships – fostered with face to face contact - is key.
Once you have one public sector customer on board, ask them if they’d be happy to be a case study and provide you with a reference – that will provide prospects with the "comfort factor", proving that your product or service really does work in practice and results in tangible benefits. Once you have your foot in the door, your reputation will spread.
Trends. Government may not be trendy but even government buyers have trends they follow. Spend time researching the key topics, latest actions, policy documents and trends that are impacting public sector. For example, if a recent strategy has been set promoting cloud computing, with the aim of driving efficiencies and reducing costs, will your product or service help public sector organisations achieve these goals? How can you make sure you’re topical and responding to demand?
With government and enterprise, it simply isn’t a case of one size fits all. Your product or service should be tailored to meet government’s specific requirements. If you provide software, does your product o meet the appropriate security measures and standards? What about up time, redundancy, data security, encryption, MFA Can you provide the level of support that the users require? Accreditation? For example, Huddle is pan government accredited at IL2 and has ISO 27001 certification. Paperwork! There’s also integrating with existing IT stack – active directory / LDAP, single sign on, backup
Ultimately, regardless of all the research you do and the network that you build, if people don’t like using your product or service, it won’t be successful. Go back to your roots and make sure you're delivering the very best experience for your users. Give people something intuitive and enjoyable to use. Keep it simple – most workers in enterprises and governments don’t care about trnedy fads – they simply want tools that help them get their job done faster.