Huddle's Blog

Happy Birthday Huddle! How far we’ve come…

Posted on 23. May, 2011 by Alastair in Announcements, Huddle

This year, Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday, Facebook turned seven, and now Huddle is celebrating its fourth birthday. And we’ve certainly come a long way since the product launched in 2007!

The company has grown from a bedroom start-up to a global company with offices in London and San Francisco. Huddle is now the leader in cloud collaboration and content management in the enterprise, used by more than 85,000 organizations in 180+ countries to manage their projects, files and people effectively. We’re very proud of the fact that our customers include the likes of Kia Motors, AKQA, Disney, NASA, Discovery Chicago, Ogilvy, HTC, AKQA, Pearson, Merck Serono and Sodexo.

In April, we also announced that Huddle had jointly developed government-wide agreed terms with a working group led by Defra and the Cabinet Office in support of the Government Cloud Programme. With a single price and service level for the roll-out of Huddle across public sector organizations, government now has the opportunity to save more than £250 million by replacing SharePoint with Huddle. NHS East of England, Cheltenham Borough Council, NHS South West, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are just some of our public sector customers that have made the leap to the cloud with Huddle and experienced the benefits of increased flexibility, scalability and cost reductions.

When Andy and I launched Huddle in 2007 we had a clear vision: to make it easier for people to work together. Both of us were frustrated with how hard it was to work with people in business, when it was so easy to communicate with people in our social lives. Despite advances in technology, individuals, teams and businesses were still unable to work together efficiently and silos of communication had developed within and between organizations.

With 90 per cent of collaboration happening between teams, departments and companies across firewalls, it was also clear that the traditional tools deployed to support the sharing of information – such as SharePoint – are fundamentally broken. They are too inward looking, trapping content and ideas behind the firewall. And so Huddle was created. By combining an easy-to-use, cross-firewall, multi-platform application with dedicated customer support and engagement, we have an average user adoption of 90 per cent.

The good news is, it’s not just our customers and the Huddle team that think Huddle is awesome. Over the last four years, Huddle has been awarded numerous industry accolades including:

• Tech Start-up 100 Awards – Winner of Best Enterprise Tech Start Up in Europe 2011
• Startups 100 winner 2010
• Tech Media Invest 100 (ranked 4^th) 2010
• Huddle named Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace 2010
• Top prize at Microsoft SocialFest 2010
• Huddle sales team named 2010 Sales Team of the Year at the National Sales Awards
• Internet Product of the Year 2009 at the UK IT Industry Awards
• Red Herring 100 Europe winner 2009
• TechCrunch Europas 2009: Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA)

With our San Francisco office rapidly expanding and U.S. sales going from strength to strength, here’s to another great year for Huddle! This week, we’ll be sharing some Huddle facts on Twitter, so keep an eye out for #HuddleBirthday

Of course, no birthday celebration would be complete without some embarrassing photos. We’ve had a dig through the Huddle archives and all that can be said now is enjoy!

At Huddle, we really all get along...

A Huddle Christmas party...enough said

One of the joys of a start-up: You are the IT department

White fluffy hats and coffee are compulsory

Spilt water and missed train in the space of five minutes = CEO fail

Elmo loves working at Huddle

The Huddle team goes back in time

Tags: #HuddleBirthday, cloud, content management, customers, online collaboration