The race is on to be the King of Collaboration.
Your runners and riders for the Tech Champion Hurdle are:
Salesforce Chatter
Slack
Microsoft Teams
Workplace by Facebook
All have good form, all have staying power and all have super-rich owners. The stakes are as high as they can get but this race isn’t about money, it’s about market share. That’s the real prize.
However, even before the race is run, there’s a clear bookie’s favourite.
While every online collaboration tool on the market has its positives, Workplace by Facebook is doing what Usain Bolt did in the last 20 metres of the 100m final at the Beijing Olympics – streaking so far ahead there’s time to look back and see everyone else fighting desperately for second place.
Has The Race Already Been Won?
This week, the FT reported that while Slack are readying a Q2 IPO with a potential $10bn valuation, long-time market dominator Microsoft are showing positive results with Teams, but have they got their focus wrong?
Both Microsoft and Slack are trying to win the race by focusing on their tech but this plays right into the hands of Facebook.
Yes, it’s fair to say that while Facebook as the social network has spent the last six months putting out PR fires that even Red Adair would have struggled with, they have been quietly building out their enterprise platform, Workplace.
We’ve read dozens of articles on workplace collaboration and chat tools and there’s one quote that sticks out – ‘Good internal social media can transform a company. It boosts freedom to experiment and sharing. [The Workplace deployment] will help with our goal to move quicker to turn good ideas into great products to meet fast-changing consumer demand.’
This came from a spokesman at Nestlé who has just announced that they’ve ditched Salesforce Chatter for Workplace by Facebook.
With more than 2,000 brands, a presence in over 190 countries and a third of a million employees, communication and collaboration is always going to be a tough ask but, according to IDC Research Director Wayne Kurtzman; ‘Nestlé is another major addition for the Facebook’s enterprise social network offering. This is significant because of Nestlé’s global presence, and underscores Workplace’s ease of use, strong video abilities and inline translation features allowing easy communications between regions.’
Very cleverly, Facebook have positioned themselves slap-bang in the middle of the collaboration market. They are competing with the new breed of chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams as well as the established enterprise social network vendors.
According to Raúl Castañón-Martínez, a senior analyst at 451 Research, ‘Workplace is shaping up to be an updated version for the legacy enterprise social networks or intranet [and it] combines the reach of the legacy enterprise social networks/intranet, covering 100% of the workforce – including everyone, and not just knowledge workers – with the ease of use of team collaboration tools like Slack. This is an important differentiation that sets Workplace apart.’
So while the other market players are trying to win the race by having the best technical offering, our very own Stephen Dorling says ‘Workplace are ruthlessly focussed on fostering culture and better communications. They don’t need to complete at a technology level as their tech is already one of (if not the) most widely used platforms globally.’
When People Are Connected…
…business gets better. Information speeds up. Barriers break down. New ideas flower and spread. Individuals become teams. Companies become communities.
‘Nestlé is a people-first environment. We rely on our talented teams to manage more than 2,000 brands worldwide. We help our employees develop and we give them the right tools, so Workplace is a perfect fit.’
Chris Johnson, Executive Vice President, Nestlé
But it’s not just the world’s biggest players who are seeing the benefits of Workplace by Facebook. Alongside Nestlé, Starbucks (240k employees) and Walmart (2.2m employees), Virgin Atlantic have replaced Microsoft Yammer with Workplace for 7,000 employees citing low end-user adoption of Yammer but smaller businesses and organisations who don’t have deep pockets are also discovering the value Workplace offers.
It’s available for free to non-profits and charities and Beth Murray, Director of Communications at Catch22, a UK-based non-profit focusing on social welfare is delighted.
‘As a non-profit with little to no money to spend on technology, Catch22 was used to working with second- and third-rate technology. Now with Workplace, it’s able to use the best out there.’
She continued; ‘One of our big strategic challenges is we have so many offices and people doing all these different jobs and we have to bring information together. We’ve used [Workplace] to bring our whole organization together, but also to share knowledge of what we’re seeing on the ground. This is the first rollout I’ve been involved in where people are genuinely excited.’
Why Workplace by Facebook?
The fundamental ethos of your business should be to seamlessly bring together employees from a wide range of brands, businesses, countries and cultures and at the same time removing the hierarchy and giving everyone a voice so they feel valued. That’s why.
If the fundamental ethos is to get your online collaboration tools for free but with the caveat that it limits what you can do, there’s plenty out there to choose from.
For more information on how Workplace by Facebook has the ability to revolutionise your business, email us today on info@koncisesolutions.com or call 020 7078 0789.
Koncise Solutions
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