Cool Emerging Vendors from A to Z: Huddle

Channelweb.com in January launched its Emerging Vendors blog and has since profiled some 200 fresh young vendors that are eager to work with channel partners. Here's an A to Z look at some of the coolest companies we spotlighted this year, continuing with ... H is for Huddle.

Company: Huddle

Headquarters: London, England

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Huddle

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 5 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Huddle is capitalizing on the steady growth of Microsoft's Sharepoint platform by giving companies a quicker way to work collaboratively both inside and outside the firewall.

The Lowdown: U.K.-based startup Huddle has benefited from the rise of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server as a collaboration platform. But like many small companies in the Microsoft ecosystem, Huddle sees its relationship with Microsoft as a symbiotic one that offers opportunities to fill gaps in the platform.

Huddle's collaboration platform is built on .NET and SQL Server and includes secure workspaces for tasks such as project management, document management, workflow and teleconferencing. Huddle is designed for users inside and outside the firewall, and the company is in the process of building tighter integration between Huddle and Sharepoint to further its reach, according to Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and strategy director for Huddle.

Since its launch in 2006, Huddle has managed to pick up a broad range of customers, including many large enterprises and government agencies. "We're seeing more companies looking for a Sharepoint alternative, or something to sit alongside traditional Sharepoint deployments," McLoughlin said.

McLoughlin acknowledges Sharepoint's dominance as a collaboration tool but says the software requires a lot of time and effort to get up and running properly, while Huddle offers companies a much quicker option. "Some customers run SharePoint for big, ongoing projects that take several years to complete, but for those that only need a workspace for 40 or 50 people, Huddle is the perfect alternative," said McLoughlin.

In addition to marketing its flagship product through its Web site, Huddle has a direct sales team that focuses on government and educational sectors. The company also has partnerships with social networking Web sites LinkedIn and Ning, which have woven its technology into collaborative intranet applications. These deals give Huddle a potential audience of millions of users, most of which are outside the typical Microsoft demographic, McLoughlin said.

Huddle's goal is to eventually be as synonymous with collaboration and Google is with search, McLoughlin said. "If you want to search for something, you Google it, and in the future if you want to collaborate, you'll Huddle."