Huddle Package Now Extends To Customers’ Partners

Cloud collaboration and content management service Huddle has launched Unlimited Enterprise, which allows businesses to work with external organisations.

Enterprise collaboration firms have a problem – their customers may be really keen on the product, but most of them are inevitably working with people outside their company and unless those partners adopt the same product, its benefits stop there. Huddle’s answer is to let its customers’ partners use the product for free – and it also added a 99.9 perent uptime guarantee to underline its enterprise credentials and reassure cloud-wary IT managers.

Business Ecosystem

Huddle says that 93 percent of its customers work with at least one external organisation, with the average business working with 25 other companies. It claims that United Enterprise can cover this ecosystem, as it allows ‘lite’ users outside the company to join the Huddle service for free. They can then view or download content, comment on documents, tasks, whiteboards and discussions.

The Unlimited Enterprise package also includes unlimited workspaces and API access, advanced customisation options, full mobile access, data export, AD integration and global support.

“Huddle is inherently social, connecting all users – internal and external – on one secure cloud platform,” commented Alastair Mitchell, CEO of Huddle. “With our Unlimited Enterprise offering, CIOs don’t need to worry about costs spiraling out of control as lite users are added at no additional cost.”

“Traditional collaboration services, like SharePoint, lock information and people in silos. They were designed in a pre-internet era with the purpose of keeping content inside the firewall and the outside world, out,” he added. “This is true cloud collaboration and it’s hugely exciting.”

Huddle round

Huddle has also promised that users will experience zero downtime, even during the 13 product updates that happen each year. Huddle uptime over the last 90 days has been 99.995 percent and the company has promised financial compensation, not just service credits, if it fails to fulfil its promise.

“Many cloud providers offer uptime guarantees, but these agreements don’t cover scheduled downtime for maintenance so are in reality far lower than their headline number,” said Mitchell. “Downtime is downtime, regardless of whether it’s scheduled or not, and such guarantees are useless if your service is down for hours over the weekend and you need to access information.”

Finally, Huddle has widened the eligibility criteria for its donation programme, meaning that more non-profit organisations can get the service for free. Huddle says it has already donated to thousands of non-profit organisations to the tune of $3 million (£1.9m) and its users include Comic Relief, World Wildlife Fund and UNICEF.

Established in 2006, Huddle is used by over 100,000 businesses and organisations use its services, including more than 60 percent of central government departments, including the Cabinet Office and the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills. In July, Huddle claimed that it was the first ever software-as-a-service system to be cleared to handle restricted government information.