Huddle Plots American Invasion With US Government Push

London-based collaboration software provider Huddle has announced plans to supply into the US government, where it has promised to dethrone Microsoft’s rival SharePoint service.

It is also setting up a new office and data centre in the US, TechWeekEurope has learned.

Huddle, which is located on London’s Silicon Roundabout, has scored a partnership and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), a non-profit body that advises the US intelligence services on potentially useful technologies.

It has now started work on a version of its collaboration platform for use in US government, which will be used by the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Making a mockery of Microsoft?

Huddle has been aggressively targeting Microsoft’s market share in the UK, claiming to have converted vast portions of the Coalition government into moving over to its platform and away from SharePoint. It has been cleared as a safe place to work with restricted government information, and says it has secured 89 percent of all spend through the UK government’s G-Cloud framework within the first two months of its launch.

Huddle thinks that despite Microsoft’s grasp on the public sector in the US, it can still shift people over to the cloud-based Huddle platform.

Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell told TechWeekEurope that Huddle has also set up a new data centre, but could not say where, for security reasons. He also revealed the company is to open an office in the Washington DC area, adding to its other US bases in San Francisco and New York. By the end of the year, it will have 200 people working in America

“This is right on Microsoft’s home turf,”  Mitchell told us. “The current solution – SharePoint – was not doing it for [the US government]. It’s not collaborative, not cloud based, it’s designed for internal focus groups and is not mobile in any way.”

Microsoft had not responded to a request for comment on Mitchell’s criticisms at the time of publication.

Once Huddle has got its foot in the door of the US, where it can already count NASA as a customer, Mitchell believes his firm will continue to expand. “We’ve been talking to very large US banks. They want to use Huddle in a much bigger way. They will now have confidence with our security and that has huge implications,” he added.

Yet it will continue to be challenged by Microsoft in the collaboration space, especially now that the Redmond giant is the owner of Skype and business social network Yammer. Other players such as Salesforce.com, who have a cloud-only approach and a strong US base of customers, will also offer plenty of competition.

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