Microsoft Teams marked its first anniversary this week and to celebrate, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft added a number of new features, the most interesting being a Cortana integration and inline message translation. The update will also bring support for voice-interaction through Team-enabled devices like smartphones and conference devices.
The new addition is part of what Microsoft describes as its intelligent communications strategy, which will also see it bringing cloud recording, proximity detection for Team meetings, and mobile sharing for meetings. The additions build on the new capabilities introduced last year, including guest access, new ways to interact with apps, and new meeting and calling capabilities.
In a blog post about the upgrade, Microsoft offered some information on the progress of Teams since its launch. According to the figures provided — keeping in mind these are Microsoft’s own figures — 200,000 organizations in 181 markets and 39 languages are currently using Teams.
Teams is built on Office 365, which is underpinned by Microsoft Graph, Microsoft’s developer platform that uses APIs to connect all of the multiple services and devices. With Microsoft Graph, developers can integrate their services with Microsoft products, including Windows, Office 365 and Azure.
With this set of upgrades, Microsoft is pulling Teams deeper into the Microsoft collaborative environment, giving it muscle that will make it hard for competitors like Slack and G Suite to compete with. Slack may have six million daily users — again, its figures — but Microsoft has an extended and app-rich collaboration environment. Keep in mind too that Microsoft will likely release a free version of Teams sometime soon, which will really put the pressure on Slack to come back with something special.
However, just a year after Google first talked about Hangouts Chat — a totally redesigned messaging service that's more like Slack than the Hangouts most consumers previously knew, it finally made it generally available at the beginning of this month.
In an already very tight market, the regular upgrades to Teams, the release of Hangouts Chat and Slack’s ongoing efforts to gain traction in the enterprise are going to make for an interesting second half of 2018. All that remains to be seen is when and what the next addition will be in the digital collaboration space.
IBM Enables Voice for Watson-Driven Collaboration
It's been a while since we heard from IBM's collaboration team, but in the space of a week it made two different announcements worth looking at. The first was the addition of audio and video meetings powered by Zoom into Watson Workspace Plus, the first team collaboration application built with Watson’s Artificial Intelligence at its core.
If you haven’t come across it before, Watson is a question-answer computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project. Watson has, for a long time, been the standard against which supercomputing is measured. With this release, IBM is pushing it deep into the digital workplace.
In a blog post about the release, Ann-Marie Darrough, Director, Product Management, IBM Watson Work, wrote that the goal was to bring Watson into "everyday work processes." By integrating Zoom's unified communications capabilities with Watson, Darrough promised users will be able to avoid some of the problems which plague meetings.
But that’s not all. At the beginning of March, Armonk, New York-based IBM gave the Domino community a sneak peek into what’s next in the HCL labs. IBM entered a “strategic partnership” with HCL Technologies in late 2017 which handed over development of IBM's Notes, Domino, Sametime and Verse collaboration tools to HCL. Originally known as Lotus Domino, Domino was one of the early entrants to the collaboration software landscape. IBM designed the software to host critical applications, for messaging (including enterprise-grade email) and workflow and providing security for business critical information.
This is the first announcement since then and while it isn't entirely clear what's on the way, IBM said it will respond to user demand. The company ran a series of user jams starting in December 2017 to gauge this user demand. The jams took place in 23 cities, over four webcasts for hundreds of people and engaged over 2000 clients, partners and IBM specialists to find out what they wanted.
A look at just some of the requests provide insight into what might be next for Domino and Notes:
- Use of modern development tools and frameworks.
- Core performance and functionality of the platform.
- “Slimmer, faster and better-looking Notes client.”
- “Easy to use authentication and administration.”
- “Add-in the missing mail features.”
- “Better Microsoft integration for mail, and productivity applications.”
Dropbox Offers IPO Pricing Details
More news this week from San Francisco-based Drobox’s upcoming IPO. In a new S-1 filing this month, Dropbox said it expects to price its IPO at between $16 and $18 per share when it sells 36,000,000 shares to raise $648 million as “DBX” on the Nasdaq exchange. It also announced it will sell $100 million worth of shares to Salesforce.
Overall, the IPO pricing values the company at around $7 billion, or $8 billion when you take into account restricted stocks. While this is a substantial valuation, it is still off the estimated $10 billion valuation that Dropbox had after it raised $350 million in venture funding in early 2014.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Egnyte’s CEO Vineet Jain is "excited" for the Dropbox IPO but told CMSWire he is not entirely sure investors understand what is happening across the enterprise file, sync and share landscape. "While there is a healthy amount of excitement for the Dropbox IPO, the challenge for investors is that they are unable to make accurate financial projections or properly assess the potential risks involved because they do not understand the competitive landscape,” he said.
Keep in mind Mountain View, Calif.-based Egnyte provides software for enterprise file sync and sharing and, as such, is a competitor.
Dropbox, he added, has built a $1 billion revenue business by targeting consumers and pro-sumers, going after individuals and small organizations with double digit employee counts, while Box has experienced success targeting the enterprise, going after Fortune 5000 companies with tens of thousands of employees.
“With Dropbox currently earning $100 of revenue per customer compared to Box who is earning $6,100 of revenue per customer, it is abundantly clear that Dropbox should not be categorized as an enterprise company,” he added. “That being said, the dark horse that no one is talking about right now is Apple. Over 64 percent of Americans own at least one Apple device, with the majority having iCloud built in. Should Apple decide to turn up the heat and further develop the functionality of iCloud, that could put a tremendous amount of pressure on them.”
For now though, Dropbox is earning over one billion dollars in annual revenue and has shown the ability to generate cash while significantly improving its margins, putting it on a short path to profitability. I believe Dropbox will have a strong debut and fulfill its $10 billion private valuation in the first 30 days on the public market.
Jive Communications and Zoho CRM Partner
Also, this week, Jive Communications and Zoho CRM announced a new partnership to improve customer engagement and experience. The partnership aims to track sales activities and increase customer engagement.
Orem, Utah-based Jive Communications provides cloud-based phone system and unified communications systems. The partnership will see its communication system integrated with Chennai, India-based Zoho’s CRM.
As a result, users will be able to see who is calling before they answer, allowing for better call preparation, while the auto logging feature can track every call, click to call, take notes and schedule appointments directly from the pop-up within the CRM.
Flowfinity Releases New No-Code Features
Finally, this week, Vancouver, Canada based Flowfinity Wireless has released new software features that it claims will allow businesses to accelerate digital transformation through powerful enterprise applications and dashboards. Flowfinity's no code solution allows developers to speed the creation of business process applications.
The software includes a point-and-click application editor, web portal, native mobile device clients, and dashboards for data visualization. The latest features include the ability to edit records or execute business workflows directly from dashboards.
This new update centralizes the mobile applications, database, workflows and data visualizations, allowing for easier updates "with the click of a button."
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