MangoApps drives enterprise social for mid-market biz
Social networking has been the buzzword in the last decade across the world. India has been among the many countries to have adopted this aspect of technology faster than many of the emerging economies across the globe. Despite the relatively smaller Internet penetration as compared to the world, India has shown great adoption rates when it comes to collaboration and social networking technologies.
Due to which one of the things that's picking up more interest is collaboration and social networking among the enterprise. Yet that's where the country has still many a miles to reach. And considering the fact that the current set of collaboration tools (e.g. e-mail, SharePoint) are outdated, since they restrict information distribution, create silos and are the exact opposite of what is needed to effectively work together in this decade, enterprise social is the solution that many enterprises should be looking forward to adopting to meet many goals of bigger organizations, especially having offices in multiple geographical locations.
That's where this Pune-based startup MangoApps comes into picture.
"Our goal from the very beginning was to make work life easy, by providing a single tool employees could use throughout the day for all their communication and collaboration needs bringing about a profound change in how we collaborate, the way an e-mail did almost 20 years ago. We wanted MangoApps to be a place where employees could not only talk about work, but actually do the work," said Vipin Thomas, product manager for MangoApps.
And it does exactly that. I've myself used this product and found it to be quite comprehensive in terms of solving a lot of collaboration problems that many organizations would face, especially when there are a lot of silos created even in smaller startups that are geographically distributed across various places across the world.
MangoApps specializes in building business, critical communication and collaboration products. These collaboration products are delivered as the best of breed focused business applications or as an integrated collaboration suite.
In other words, MangoApps is a all-in-one social collaboration network where you don't simply talk about work, but also do real work. MangoApps uniquely combines an Enterprise Social Network, with a Social Intranet, and Team Workspaces including:
- Document Management
- Project Management
- Intranet
- Tasks
- IM & Video Conferencing
- Idea Management
- Events Management
- Wikis, Blogs, posts, etc.
- Microblogging
- Mobile Collaboration (Native apps available for iOS, Android, Windows & Blackberry)
It also has custom-fit social collaboration solutions, including the ability to perform custom integrations with existing business systems. Currently integrates out-of-box with 30+ third party applications such as Microsoft office, Salesforce, Zendesk, SugarCRM, LDAP/AD, Google Drive, and Sharepoint.
Of course, this is not the first tool in this space. Some of the known competitors include SharePoint, Yammer, Jive software, Box.net, Dropbox, and etc. But one of their major strengths compared to any other has been providing multiple deployment options (shared cloud, public cloud, on-premise), customizations per client requests not just on the web but also with Mobile apps, seamless integration of a wide variety of modules, monthly releases, availability on all major mobile operating systems has kept MangoApps stay ahead of the competition.
Also, MangoApps is the only collaboration software provider focusing specifically on the needs of midsize organizations. According to Vipin, their USP is that they provide advanced security options, customization options, and licensing flexibility which is normally reserved for fortune 100 companies and delivering the same options to mid-size customers.
Vipin believes that Enterprise Social Networks is a must have for all types of companies, since they can help simplify work to a large extent. Business applications today are all siloed & work as a stand-alone application which appears to be inadequate & inefficient. According to him social networks are better than emails for enterprise collaboration as it highlights on the following basic needs but are not limited to:
- Centralized data repository
- Thanking or recognizing a colleague
- Assigning a task to a team member
- Working on a collaborative document
- Brainstorming With Team Members
Great Debate
They currently have 7,500+ businessesworldwide who have adopted MangoApps primarily due to the viral/freemium model because of which they've never had to spend much on traditional marketing. They are also releasing an app next month called OfficeChat which is like WhatsApp for businesses available on Web, desktop and all mobile devices. They also recently launched a free app called TinyTake which makes it easy to capture screens, videos & share them as links & Huddle, a free online meetings solution which includes Presentation, White boarding, desktop sharing, video and audio conferencing.
"Social media within organizations is at an infant stage especially in India, however within in the next couple of years, we strongly believe, social media will be integrated with almost all business processes in the organization," said Vipin.
MangoApps was founded by Anup Kejriwal, CEO along with Vishwa Malhotra, CTO and Christina Kejriwal, vice president of finance in Jan 2008 with 5 employees and today they are a team of 80.
"We love building game-changing products. We don't just code, here ideas are valued and appreciated everyone has an opportunity to be part of the entire product life-cycle." he added.
What needs to be seen next is how the ecosystem and need for enterprise social in India picks up further.